As most of you probably already know the freshman 15 is when freshman in college gain weight in their first year because they are restricted to campus food and fast food all the time. With no healthy home cooked meals, many people do believe that the freshman 15 does exist. Personally I don’t think we have this problem at Penn State because of how much walking people do every day and how convenient the gyms are. But is the freshman 15 or just a never ending myth?

Although not exactly 15 pounds, the freshman 15 is indeed a really thing. Being in college is also be free from rules back home, so many students go to the quickest and cheapest meals they could find which is normally the fast food restaurants that their mother always warned them off. Just because you’re in college is no excuse to slack off and use studying as an excuse why you can’t go to the gym. The gym is a great way to prevent the freshman 15. By eating healthy and working out you will get into a routine and your body won’t gain weight. Another factor in gaining weight is as a freshman you crave the college experience of always going out and drinking. Drinking is a direct cause to why freshman tend to gain a few pounds throughout the semester.

There are studies that show that a lot of people are beginning to think that the freshman 15 is myth. It is true that you gain weight while in college, but most times it doesn’t just happen your freshman year it’s all the years you’re in college. The Ohio State University  study found that students were (on average) just a half-pound heavier than their non-collegiate peers. According to the researchers, this may be because many 17 or 18 -year-olds are simply not at their full adult size (both in height and weight) before heading off to college. So while some weight gain might be the result of late-night nachos and keg stands, a significant part of the “Freshman 15” can be attributed to plain old-fashioned growth.

Depending on how you see it the freshman 15 is either a myth or the truth but the way I see it is, take precautions of the stuff that goes into your body, your stress level, and your exercise schedule and the freshman 15 doesn’t matter any which way.

Think about your name for a second…is it common? is it easy to pronounce? These are questions that can ultimately predict your future. Parents spend months thinking of baby names for their unborn child. Do they do this to help them get a job 20 years later?

Studies show that your name is part of your success. Over the last 70 years, researchers have tried to gauge the effect on an individual of having an unusual name. It is thought that our identity is partly shaped by the way we are treated by other people – a concept psychologists call the “looking-glass self” – and our name has the potential to colour our interactions with society. Depending on the community you live in and the maturity level of your parents your name can sometimes fit with the status quo. Living in the “ghetto” many people think you will have a ratchet name like bosheda, bonquisha, yessica and other ridiculous names. This also plays into the role of the parents often times when a child is named bosheda it is because the parents were probably young and immature.

That isn’t the case for everyone, I was born in low income part of Brooklyn known has Bedstuy do or die. But my parents realized that 30 years down the line when I need a job and can’t get one because my name is shaquida it would be their fault. So they decided to play it safe a name me Kristen Lauren McKenzie, very common but I won’t have to worry about my future.

Aside from being from a different country and having different religions and views many people reading resumes will skip over your resume if it fits the category of ratchet. It’s sad that many of the names that are defined as ratchet are black, so it puts them a at a disadvantage at times when competing for a job. Sweeny found that searching for people with distinctively black names were 25% more likely to produce an ad suggesting the person had an arrest record. This statistic alone shows that the world is judgemental on a person’s skin color and name alone. Although Roland Fryer suggest that a name has nothing to do with your economic status most people will assume that “Mary” is from an affluent neighborhood while “Tyrone” is from the hood.

As black unemployment is twice as much as whites, researchers can make a correlation to the names of the black employers and the unemployment rate.

For starters let me begin by listing everything I’m allergic to. All types of nuts, chocolate, anything with citrus, shellfish, tomatoes, wheat and dairy. Now it is probably difficult to think what I possible eat and the answer is literally nothing. So I figured with all my allergies there has to be way to eventually grow out of your allergies.

Allergies occurs when your immune system tries to fight harmless substances. When functioning correctly, your body’s defenses attack foreign invaders, like viruses. With allergies, the immune system mistakenly targets pollen, pet dander or certain foods, for example, sending molecules called immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies to orchestrate a “defense says livescience. But in most cases doctors have yet to figure out how people outgrow their allergies. Many theories show that your body just got accustomed to the allergen eventually releasing its not as big of a threat as the immune system thought. Because doctors have yet to find a reason for why allergies “disappear” it is a mystery of science. Doctors strategies with food allergies by giving small doses at a time to increase the exposure to the immune system. This is a dangerous approach when people like me are deathly allergic to nuts or any other type of food. recent study by doctors at Johns Hopkins University showed that the majority of kids won’t outgrow allergies until much later, possibly as late as age 16. Doctors say many allergies are hit or miss, sometimes you will grow out of them but more times than not you’re stuck with it for life.

When people say “ You guys have such great chemistry” it is not just a play on words. There is a difference between romantic love and love, love is being extremely close with your partner to where you become selfless. But romantic love is where the science comes in play, where things don’t just happen for a reason. Unfortunately I have yet to be in love, but when I talk to my parents about they always describe it as a “feeling” that just makes them love so strong.
There are many factors that play a role in romantic love. Physical appearance is one of those factors alongside social status. In the aspect of chemistry there are four chemicals in your brain that play the largest roles in deciding compatibility: dopamine, estrogen, serotonin and testosterone. Dopamine is a chemical released by nerve cells to send signals to other nerve cells. The brain includes several distinct dopamine systems, one of which plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior. Estrogen and testosterone is what gives women and men a sexual appetite. Estrogen is sex hormone of childbearing women, it is responsible for female characteristics and sexual functioning. Testosterone is the principal sex hormone responsible for the development of reproductive function in male vertebrates. The hormone also promotes the development of sexual male characteristics during puberty such as voice deepening and the growth of armpit, chest and pubic hair. Serotonin is a type of chemical that helps give off signals from one section of the brain to another.

Studies show that these chemicals are released when spending time with your loved one or sharing an intimate moment. There has been no experiments to determine that this is a fact but the “feeling” you get when your with the person you love isn’t just butterflies; it’s your brain becoming active. When you fall in love many chemicals are released such as oxytocin which has to deal with intimacy, sexual reproduction of men and women and childbirth before and after. Vasopressin is another chemical that is released after sex and is a hormone for long time commitment. There is science to love, you feel a certain way when you’re with someone because your brain is sending signals to the rest of your body. So there you have it! There is some science to love!

Every noticed how women tend to mature faster than men. Often times girls will hit puberty before boys. We all know this to be true, but the real question is why girls mature faster.

Science Mic says that A 2013 study published in Cerebral Cortex offers a scientific explanation behind the common notion that men take longer to “act their age” than women do. According to the study, it’s rooted in the fact that the female brain establishes connections and “prunes” itself faster than the male brain.

Researchers found about 120 people between the ages of 4 and 40 to help their experiment. They used these people to how different regions of the brain communicates, they were trying to find fiber cells that connect brain cells to one another. When a baby is born, girl and boy have just amount the same amount of fiber. The fiber creates a chain that helps us learn and develop. As we get older, the brain finds a faster way to communicate messages from one region to another.

The experiment was very incomplete and didn’t come forth we a specific answer. The 120 people that were picked for the experiment could not be random because in certain cases some boys do mature faster. So in order for the experiment to work, the older people had to be hand selected. Choosing some that matured rather quickly and some that took longer to mature.

There is no hard core evidence that women mature faster then men aside from the fact the women’s brains get pruned faster. But truthfully there really is no science in this. Men have the ability to be mature they just choose not to, it’s really as simple as that.

Many times when I go out with a group of my friends there is always that one friend that feels embarrassed because they can’t dance. So they sit on the side and look at everyone else having a great time. But science says that it’s not your fault you don’t have rhythm.

Studies show that people can actually be “beat deaf” where they are incapable of dancing to the rhyme of a song. Seems crazy to me how such thing actually, but then I think about how many people are tone deaf( unable to perceive differences of musical pitch accurately) and it essentially is the same thing.

McGill University and University of Montreal went into deeper research and created an experiment to test if people are actually beat deaf. They took  potential beat deaf candidates and 32 controlled participants and told them just to tap their feet to no music just to make sure there was no motor deficits. After that task the music came on and they were still to continue to tap their feet,the  candidates could not complete this task. Beat deafness is in fact a disorder that affects the body’s internal rhyme with the external cues, making it very difficult to walk at the same speed as someone or follow simple dance moves. “While most people can adapt their rhythms in response to an external cue, some people are less able to do that”, said Caroline Palmer, psychologist.

This experiment seem weak to me because they only picked 2 potential beat deaf participants and 32 controlled participants making the ratio uneven. By adding more potential beat deaf participants the studies might have been different. Just because someone doesn’t have rhythm isn’t necessarily because they are beat deaf.

Other studies show a correlation between a child’s ability to access a musical rhythm with exceeding in various grammar exercises. In many cases a child that succeeded in one always succeeded in another. Many parents can be able to tell at a early stage whether their child will suffer from beat deaf.

To lighten the situation for people who feel that they don’t have any rhythm knowing that their is a scientific explanation should make you feel better.

We have all done it before, sometimes it feels like lying is just a natural thing. Whether it is as small as “Are you okay” and you replying “I’m fine” when you know you’re not. Or something as big as “ Did you lie the victim” and you replying “No, I didn’t” when you know you did. All lies arelies regardless of if it was to protect someone or even yourself. Before reading the rest of my blog, take a moment and think of all the times you have ever lied then think about why you decided to lie? Is there one answer all different answers for every time you lied.

There are 5 types of liars-sociopath liar, compulsive liar, occasional liar, careless liar and white liar. Sociopaths are defined as someone who lies continuously in an attempt to get their own way, without showing care or concern for others. Compulsive liars are defined as someone who continually lies from sheer habit. Occasional liars are those who seldom tell a lie. When they do, they are so blown away by what they said that their guilt overcomes them. Careless liars will go about their normal lives and lie every way they can. People who tell white lies don’t usually think of themselves as true “liars”. They justify their white lies as harmless, or even beneficial, in the long term. Now that you are familiar with the type of liars there are, let’s look into what actually makes people lie.

You would think why people lie would be some sort of big scientific philosophy but in actuality the reason people lie is because they can. It’s just a way to get away with certain things or to please someone else. Bella DePaulo, Ph.D explains that we lie about 10-200 times a day. That is an outrageous number that a person can lie about 200 times in one day, it doesn’t even seem possible but with Bella Depaulo research there’s evidence that its true.

I think it’s hard to design an experiment about how many people lie?, who lies more women or men? or what race lies the most? This experiment would be hard because getting people to tell the 100% truth is almost impossible and on top of that even with a lie detector no machine will be able to tell exactly when someone lies. I was hoping that this topic would discuss a little more science to it, but as it turns out their hasn’t been much research about this but my theory is that people evolve to lie in order to protect themselves or other people. The world basically revolves around people telling the truth because the truth is everything so when people lie almost 200 times a day what will the world be when people start lying 500 times a day or more.

I know almost everyone has done this before…studying right before an exam, also known as cramming or procrastinating. But do you find studying a few hours before the test actually helpful? My mom always tells me I have to prepare for the test by studying for a few days or even weeks. But as many times that she has told me that, I still manage to wait to the last minute and study hoping that I could retain some information before the test. But now that I’m in college it has me thinking about people that stay up until 3am or pull all-nighters for an exam, do they really even retain any sort of information while studying this late. There has to be a point during the night when you realize that you can no longer focus because your body has been working to memorize all the material you just studied in addition to running on little sleep. So then the question at hand is does studying hours before the exam really help?

There is nothing wrong with a little bit of review before your exam but the first time you study should not be hours before your exam. Many students make mistakes when studying right before an exam. Trying to study you’re normally nauseated, dehydrated, unfocused, unconfident especially at night. Just think about it how does your body feel after you have pulled an all nighter the next before? Do you even do well on the exam? And if your body does feel fine the next  day that’s because you have trained your body, but you once didn’t feel normal after pulling an all nighter.

I believe the easiest way to figure out whether it is smart to study hours before the test would be to create an experiment. You would get about 100 students, half of them would study for a week for a specific same for at least 5 hours a day the other half of students would study for at least 8 hours the day before he same exam. Based on those results you could determine if studying hours before the exam helps. There will most likely be a third variable because it would be hard to get the same people with the same intelligence. UCLA researchers suggest against cramming for an exam. They stress the importance of studying but they believe that sleep is something you should not sacrifice.

The best way to do the great on an exam is to study in advance, that’s not to say you can’t get good grades with studying hours before. It just not smart to pull all nighters because sleep is very important when aiming for good grades. How do you consider yourself, do you study in advance or pull all nighters
before the test?

Why cry…we do it when we’re sad, laughing, in pain, we even cry during our favorite tv show or movie. But why? what’s the point of crying?

Everyone has had that one time when you have shed a few tears maybe you were sad over a breakup or death, or maybe something was just so funny you couldn’t help it. Have you ever thought about why though?

“Crying is a natural emotional response to certain feelings, usually sadness and hurt. But then people cry under other circumstances and occasions,” says Stephen Sideroff, PhD, a staff psychologist at Santa Monica–University of California Los Angeles. Humans expel various compounds in body fluids that give off subtle messages to other members.

There are 3 different types of tears that all have different purposes. The first tears are basil tears, basil tears are what keeps your eyes from getting dry. We produce about 10 ounces of basil tears a day. This is also a reason why many people suffer from a stuffy nose after they been crying for a while. The second type is reflex tears, these tears help protect the eye from irritations like onions, smoking and dust. The final type of tear is the emotional tear, the emotional tear is when you are genuinely sad or happy, the endocrine system is triggered to release hormones that eventually form tears. Tears produced during emotional crying have a chemical composition which differs from other types of tears. They contain significantly greater quantities of the hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, Leu-enkephalin, and the elements potassium and manganese.

Tears are produced by the lacrimal glands that are just above the outer corner of each eye. The film of tears on the eye is a complex system, consisting of three layers: oil, water and mucus. The water layer is the thickest and contains electrolytes, proteins, glucose and other substances.

After a long day of school  are bodies are exhausted from all the work we have done, but have you ever stopped and ask yourself why we need sleep?

Everyone assumes that sleeping is a time for your body to shut down but that is not the actual reason why we sleep. Sleeping is a time when processing, restoration and strengthening occurs. Exactly how this happens and why our bodies are programmed for such a long period of slumber is still somewhat of a mystery. But scientists do understand some of sleep’s critical functions, and the reasons we need it for optimal health and wellbeing.

Scientists have explored the question of why we sleep from many different angles. They have examined, for example, what happens when humans are deprived of sleep. In other studies, they have looked at sleep patterns in a variety of organisms to see if similarities or differences among species might reveal something about sleep’s functions. Yet, years of research and many discoveries about other aspects of sleep, the question of why we sleep yet to be determined.

The amount of sleep you need depends on your age. Adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night, 1 year olds need roughly 11 to 14 hours, children between 9 and 11 years old, and teenagers need between 8 and 10 hours of sleep a night.

Scientist understand that we need sleep they just haven’t figured out exactly why. We know after we sleep we feel more alert, more energetic, happier, and better able to function. But there is no science exactly prove why or how we feel this way. It’s interesting to understand because maybe “sleep” is just one way our bodies feel fresh and energized. We’ll never know until scientist can prove the reason we sleep.

A lot of people take energy drinks to stay awake at work or to stay awake while you pull an all nighter studying. But so many experts have stressed that energy drinks are bad. I never knew why, so I did some research.
From mountain dew in high school, to 5 hour energies in college and the to the big can of monster during work our bodies might be consuming too much energy. 5 hour energy and monster are getting a lot more popular their market is worth $12.5 billion and is said to grow $21 billion by 2017. So I guess the question lies how bad is it, if so many people are buying it on a daily basis.

Energy drinks  have been connected to heart and neurological problems. It brings down the mental health of a teenage and it increases their risk for headaches as well as boost blood pressure and heart rate. On the caffeine informer website they list 13 dangers of drinking energy drinks. Such as cardiac arrest, headaches, increased anxiety, insomnia, type 2 diabetes, drug interaction, addiction, risky addiction, allergic reaction, high blood pressure and niacin overdose. I a lot of people aren’t aware of the series problems energy drinks can cause especially if you drink more than one can. People should what how much they drink because they are very powerful.

Teens that drink energy drinks are more likely to get head injured. There is a relation with the amount of energy drinks you drink and getting a brain traumatic injury. However, there might be another reason why some people get TBI when they get TBI, for instance if they take more risk. Future studies are needed to better understand the reason for the link between energy drink consumption and TBI, and to examine exactly why teens are drinking these beverages, the researchers said.

“Energy drinks, such a Redbull and Rockstar, contain high levels of caffeine and change the chemical state of the body, which can prevent people from getting back on track after a TBI,” study co-author Dr. Michael Cusimano, a neurosurgeon at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, said.

The bad thing is that all these energy drinks have been approved by the US food and drug administration so the companies have the right to promote their product any way they would like.

Believe it or not, it’s actually chemistry to how we choose someone to love. So when people say “ You guys have such great chemistry” I guess that’s not a play on words. There is a difference between romantic love and love, love is being extremely close with your partner to where you become selfless. But romantic love is where the science comes in play, where things don’t just happen for a reason.

There are many factors that play a role in romantic love. Physical appearance is one of those factors alongside social status. In the aspect of chemistry there are four chemicals in your brain that play the largest roles in deciding compatibility: dopamine, estrogen, serotonin and testosterone. Dapamine is a chemical released by nerve cells to send signals to other nerve cells. The brain includes several distinct dopamine systems, one of which plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior. Estrogen and testosterone is what gives women and men a sexual appetite. Estrogen is sex hormone of childbearing women, it is responsible for female characteristics and sexual functioning. Testosterone is the principal sex hormone responsible for the development of reproductive function in male vertebrates. The hormone also promotes the development of sexual male characteristics during puberty such as voice deepening and the growth of armpit, chest and pubic hair. Serotonin is a type of chemical that helps give off signals from one section of the brain to another.

When you fall in love many chemicals are released such as oxytocin which has to deal with intimacy, sexual reproduction of men and women and childbirth before and after. Vasopressin is another chemical that is released after sex and is a hormone for long time commitment 

It’s crazy to think that while we sleep our body creates a series of images that only occurs while we sleep. They can be entertaining, fun, romantic, disturbing, frightening and sometimes even  bizarre. When I was little I use to imagine the weirdest things; I would be living as the princess in my favorite fairytale or falling from the empire state building. Whatever it might have been, something would always trigger me to roll over and open my eyes, ending my dream and on occasion not remembering what happened. But why? Why must our body create “dreams” while we sleep and why do we not always remember.

Medical News today describes dreams as a universal human experience that can be described as a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, cognitive and emotional occurrences during sleep. The dreamer has reduced control over the content, visual images and activation of the memory.

But believe it or not everyone dreams, even when you don’t remember your dream everyone dreams for at least 30 minutes a night. Dreams happen for physical, mental, emotional and even spiritual reasons, and there is widespread agreement that dreams can present opportunities for creativity, growth, health and wholeness. Dreams help us know ourselves better.

Studies say we forget most of our dreams soon after waking up. Our forgetfulness is generally attributed to neurochemical conditions in the brain that occur during sleep.”The best way to remember your dreams is to simply stay put when you wake up,” says Loewenberg.

There are several types of dreams, 9 to be exact as said by Kim Quindlen in the Thought Catalog. The first dream is “A dream about your teeth” a dream like this may involve your teeth falling out, breaking apart, coming out from a slight tap. “The naked dream” most experts say that this represents deep feelings of vulnerability and shamefulness within you. You’re worried about being exposed, noticed, or ridiculed by others. “The falling dream” is a red flag that something in your life is heading in the wrong direction. Job, finances, relationships, it’s also a sign of depression. “The dream where you can’t walk”, when you feel like as much as you try you can’t move this occurs because you have low self-esteem and lack confidence in a situation going on in your life. “The flying dream” are pleasant, happy, and exhilarating. Flying dreams are often lucid dreams, which means that you’re aware of the fact that you’re dreaming. When people have lucid dreams, they start controlling the plot of their dream. “The dream where you think you woke up but you didnt” aka false alarming. Most of the time the dream occurs when you’re avoiding something in the day to come but you never intend to wake up late. Many times people are sleeping but their dream entails them walking up, checking their phone, getting dressed etc. “Having to pee dream”, in actuality there is no science behind this. Its best to just get up and go to the bathroom.

The question of whether dreams actually have a physiological or psychological function has not been answered yet.  But that hasn’t stopped scientists from researching and speculating. Some scientist believe that we dream in order to exercise some neutral connections that affect certain types of learning. It’s not said for sure that that’s why we dream but many scientist have done experiments to try and connect the two. . Some researchers think dreaming might have evolved for physiological reasons. There is a great deal of neuronal activity occurring while we sleep, especially in rapid eye movement, and it has been suggested that dreams may just be meaningless.  

Hi my name is Kristen McKenzie, I am a Freshman and I am majoring in Communication and I plan to double major next semester in business. I am from Long Island, New York in a town called Dix Hills about an hour away from New York City. It took me forever to finally decide to come to Penn State, I got a scholarship to play basketball at Ithaca College but with several discussions with my parents we all agreed that Penn State was the school for me! Its been a week and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here.

I honestly do not like science, I personally feel like my teachers never made it interesting it was always notes and test, never any discussions. So my advisor told me that this class was required as a Natural Science(GN) for my major and it had the least amount of hands on science, that was perfect for me so I enrolled in this class. I am not planning on majoring in science because I find it boring and mathematical at times and I am not good at math at all. But from the first day, this science class seemed nothing like my other classes so I am very interested in learning what Andrew has to say!

Moving away from science, I am a huge sports fan. I am a strong supporter of Lebron James, a lot of people call me a band wagoner but I was there when he was on the Cavs the first year. Sadly I am a Giants fan, and for all those who actually watch football you would understand why I said “sadly”.

Below is a picture of my basketball team when I was a Junior in high school. This was right before we played our last home game where we were crowned league champs! One of the greatest days.

Just a little more about me, I listen to music..a lot, when I’m not studying of course. I listen to alot of Hip-Hop R&B and Pop, as of right now my favorite song is 679 by Fetty Way because my best friends and I made a dance before we all parted ways for college!