Have you ever imagine to live forever and stay in this world for the future? Have you ever why couldn’t human beings to live forever? In my opinion, except the using technology such as change you to a robot or cloning. But do you know that there is a specie is able to live forever and considered a kind of animal able to live in the space without any support and may not die ideally. And this kind of animal I am talking about is called tardigrade, which is commonly called water bear, because of the shape of it is like a bear. It is called as the toughest animal in this world.

Water bear is a tiny creature that lives almost everywhere in this world. No matter inside the volcanoes, under the sea, or in the ice, they are able to survive. The first reason that they are able to live under different extreme environments is because of the ability of changing forms of water in to a compound called trehalose. According to the National institution of health, “trehalose is visualized as a storage molecule, aiding the release of glucose for carrying out cellular functions”. And this compound only exist inside the living creatures that is lower but higher life forms. This allows them to obtain the water bears in a good situation that may survive in extreme places without water.

The second advantage of a water bear is the minimum size of them. A single adult water bear is about only 1.5 mm. Additionally, they live under the sea or in extreme environments, that cause them hard to be found by the predators. For an animal that is able to survive, a weapon is a necessity for animals to attack other species. Even the water bears are very small, but the can’t look down by their ability of attacking. The one weapon is their sharp teeth, according observations, they are able to use their teeth to attack small animals and stab into them.

The one reason that tardigrade is very tough and no other animal may even imagine is the survival under the environment in the space. A experiment is conducted by Swedish researcher K. Ingemar Jonsson, he launched an space craft on to the space with the dry water bears, after they are back to the earth, after living under the open space condition facing the harsh environment with no oxygen and UV-radiations, they still survived.

By having these awesome abilities, they don’t really need to worry about the death and they will ideally live “forever”. Many may think how long have they lived on this world, or is it living longer than human. According to an article in New York Times, the scientist are trying to do researches on the evolution and trying to find the fossil of this creature, but it is hard to discover the fossil of this tiny animals and hard to determine the truth of this species. In general, there are still little to be known about this small creature. But in my opinions, this small animals that have such strong abilities to survive may evolve for longer period of time than human, or they may be the master of this world since along time ago. And because of this tiny creature’s survival abilities, it may be hard for them to even form a fossil and if there are, the tiny fossil may already be hide under ground and hard to be discovered by human beings. Human beings are researching about how to live in the space for a long period of time. After we found out the ability of a creature is able to survive in the space, I think it is possible to have inventions that help humans to survive in more harsh environments by conducting more research.

In China, there is a traditional saying about a “supernatural” phenomenon talking about when people wake up in late night, they see a “ghost” floating somewhere and even they wanted to shout out loud, they are not able to do so because of the unable of opening their mouth or move their body. In China, older generations called it “Gui Ya Chuang”, literally means ghost is pushing you on your bed. And people usually consider this as a supernatural event in past time because of this feeling of trapped by other things invisible and feel like dead but alive. By remembering what Andrew said about that there are actually a scientific reasoning on supernatural events. And in fact, in this case it is called sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is when people are awaking or sleeping, they temporally not able to move their body or speak.  When people are asleep, the body is cycling between phases of sleeping, which are REM(Rapid Eye Movement) sleeping and non-REM sleeping. REM sleeping repeats about every 90 minutes when sleeping. During the deep sleeping of REM stage, the brain is ordering the body to goes into a situation called atonia. During atonia, the voluntary muscles are ordered to stop their movements and be relaxing, it prevents the action of day dreaming or hurt ones’ selves without knowing. And if you are awake during this state of sleeping, it is when sleep paralysis happens. During sleep paralysis, people are awake, but could not use their voluntary muscles, however their involuntary muscles will not be affected, such as breathing. This will last about 20 seconds or couple minutes. And this is why many older generations called it a ghost pushing you; it is horrified when you are awake but you can not move your body. 

But besides the fact of not able to move their body, they may also claim about they saw ghosts flowing around. It is possible that people claim that because of the fear that appear to a person when they discover that they cannot move their body, but 10 percent of the whole population may experience in the other situation. And it is called the hallucinations that happens between you are asleep and awake. Unlike dreaming or some kind of illusion, it occurs when there are lack of external stimuli. According to an article on Health Line, there are several different kinds of hallucinations includes visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, tactile hallucinations and temporary hallucinations. During the process of “Gui Ya Chuang” that people saw a ghost belongs to the visual hallucination when people see a thing that is not real during the sleep paralysis, such as saw a person that no other people can see. And this is the “ghost” that people are afraid of. And this situation appears with a higher possibilities between the people around the age os 20 and thirty.

On the other hand, people may be also concerned about the reason that sleep paralysis happens. Is it really due to chance or based on the healthiness of a person? Many scientist tried to link this problem with the psychological stage,such as depression or stress, or the lack of sleeping due to some of the research. But all of the evidences are not strong enough to support their ideas. Even many scientists suggests people to take more sleeps and relief more stress in day time, but the appearance of this problem of sleep paralysis still exist. But one fact can be determined, that sleep paralysis will not harm people or damage a person’s body. Dr. Michael J. Breus, a Psychologist and a Diplomate of the American Board of Sleep Medicine, suggested that it is necessary to educate people not to be afraid about this harmless and don’t be worry about it. So, don’t be afraid of the “ghost”, just be happy and relax, and keep sleeping!

Kimchi is a very popular food that may represent the daily food in Korea. It is a side made by cabbage and always appear in meals for Korean. Me personally also enjoy this food a lot, and it is one of the food that helped me a lot when losing weight. However, this food not only have benefits, but it may also cause harm to human body.

First of all, let us look into the benefits. Kimchee is a food that is low-calorie and low-fat. According to Calories King, 100 grams of kimchee only contains 27 calories. This low-calorie and delicious food helps people to be taking less calories that support weight losing. Additionally, besides the reason of low-calories, the use of kimchee to boost a person’s metabolism may also helps to lose weight by burning more energy. And this is caused by the capsaicin found in side the chili used to make kimchee. According to an article on Natural Society, capsaicin  is found as helpful to boost thermogenesis, which is the rate that human burns their body fat. Scientist also conducted an experiment by separating rats into three groups, with one control group. One of the groups is treated with high-fat diet with the capsaicin and one is not. The results turns out that even all three groups gain more weight in the future, but the group with capsaicin gained 8 percent less than the others.

The second benefit of having kimchee is that it will improve the immune system of a human. Due to the research of Professor Rina Yu, eating kimchee helps the body to increase the antibodies and makes the immune cells more active. By using rats as experiment again, the Research Institute at Pusan National University conducted an experiment on the activity of the immune cells after having High Cholesterol Diet, High Cholesterol Diet plus Red Hot Pepper powder, Normal Diet and High Cholesterol Diet plus Kimchi. The result turns out to be that there are approximately 75 percent of immune cells are active after having the High Cholesterol Diet plus Kimchi, comparing to 55 percent with the High Cholesterol Diet. This 20 percent higher on the activity of the immune cells improves the immune system by a lot and will make a very huge difference.

Nowadays, phones are things that people can not live without, but at the same time it may cause damage to people’s eyes. And that leads to the third benefit that I want to talk about is the eating of kimchee make help to keep the healthy eye-sight with the large amount of vitamin A. Vitamin A plays very important roles in human body in bone growth, reproduction and immune system health. And it is also useful on keeping the vision of a person healthy. Inside 100 grams of kimchee, it contains about 18 percent of vitamin A that a person should have. This large amount of vitamin A helps people to be healthier , but no excess amount of vitamin A is suggested since by taking excess amount of vitamin A, it is going to be toxic. However, one great bacteria that is contained in Kimchee also plays a important role on making human body healthier which is the lactobacilli. It is a bacteria that can help human body to obtain a right amount of bacteria inside the body that is a very step to keep human body healthy, or minerals and vitamins will never help. Besides the benefit I talked about, there are also other benefits due to the article in Organic Facts  which are help to improve cardiovascular health and digestive system.

On the other hand, some people may argues that eating kimchee will actually cause cancer. According to an experiment conducted by Lee JK et al at Hanyang University, Korea, they found out that the heavy salted food and using cooking methods such as broiling and salting can be tied with the consequence of having stomach cancer.
However, even kimchee may cause people to have cancer, but this does not mean to move it off from the table and never eat it. In my opinion, if people eat any of the food in a large amount, it may cause danger to a human body. Such as the blog I saw that mentioned even drinking large amount of water may cause people to be sick. By preventing stomach cancer, according to the American Cancer Society, they suggested people to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables in order to prevent it. Therefore, it may benefit people a lot by eating kimchee once in a while, but it still may harm you if you eat too much everyday.

Whenever there is a pile of dung, most likely there are a dung beetle that is trying to roll a dung into a ball and roll it away, and buries it for the future use as a place for laying eggs. And this is also a source of food for them. Dung beetles are able to use the Milky way in the universe, witch is the galaxy we are located in that contains at least two hundred billions stars, in order to roll the dung in a very straight line. Dung beetles have an great authority on this ability, but sometimes they also mistaken this most important factor in their living habit, the dung. As many of the people know that plants are living creatures that can’t move that much and usually they need the help from wind or animals to reproduce. And sometimes, plants may use their appearance to attract the animals or insects to do the job.

(The seed)                                                         (The seed)                                 (herbivore faeces)

One of the most interesting case to me is a plant called Ceratocaryum argenteum, and it is the one fooled the dung beetle. it is a plant that’s discovered in De Hoop Nature Reserve in South Africa. And a research is conducted by Professor Jeremy Midgley and his team. The interesting part of this plant is that its seeds looks really like the dung that is brown, round, strongly scented. According to the article on Nature Plants that Jeremy wrote, “To the human nose the tuberculate layer has a pungent scent similar to herbivore faeces.” And it is used to attract the appearance of dung beetles for spreading and burying the seed in to other places for reproduce. By experiment of Jeremy and his team, they observe the truth that dung beetles sees these seeds as dungs and treats them the same way. Among 195 seeds they put on a specific spot, about 44 percent of the the seeds are moved within 24 hours, and about 87 percent of the seeds are later found buried under the ground for 2 centimeters. But there are no eggs laid or damage on the seeds shows how dung beetles found out the lie later on. However, the purpose of the plant is reached, and the offspring of the plant is now spread to other places.

However, dung beetles are not always involving in the progress of spreading the seeds, and in this case, it is only fooled by the plant. And different plants in different environment will have their own strategy. Because if there are too many herbivores in an area, the faeces will be enough for the dung beetles and the Ceratocaryum argenteum won’t be able to spread the seed as efficient as it can. “The vast majority of seed-dispersal strategies involve wind, water, hitchhiking, or luring animals with an honest reward,” Thor Hanson, the author of The Triumph of Seeds wrote. In the other places, some similar plants may use the smell of the flower just like female bees to attract the male bees to help the plant on the seed-dispersal strategy. But why and how plants are involved that way. In order to survive and spread more offsprings to more places, the plants evolved the skills of attracting animals or other skills such as using water or wind according to the environment and living creatures. According to the Biology of the seeds, besides using wind, water or animal, there are even special ways for plants to spread the seeds by shooting out the seeds just like the video below.

http://https://youtu.be/0A3__tuxlio

On the other hand, the shape and the smell of the seeds being similar to the faeces also benefit and protects the seed and the plant. In fact, the areas that Ceratocaryum argenteum located is full of small animals such as rats, and due to research continuously by Jeremy and his colleagues, because of the smell of this seed, it prevents itself to be eaten by other animals, which the rats will choose to eat other seeds and never even take a bite on the seeds of Ceratocaryum argenteum. This ability is evolved throughout billions of years, and it is similar to animals such as skunks preventing to be attacked or getting other dangers out of his ways. 

I don’t know about others of you, but this is my second post of this period and I believe that
there are more people who is now still working on the first one. In the past few weeks, I have always set a goal for myself to finish two posts this week to make myself taking a rest
in the future. But the reality is that, it becomes hard and almost impossible for me, because of the laziness. And this is always the case for me when I am facing the choice of going to the gym or not. And sometimes, I will find a excuse for myself such as, “I will go tomorrow” or “My muscles are sour, I and I cant work out.” Laziness is playing a very big role on my life and I am now trying to figure out if laziness is actually a diseases and how it will affect other people.

The first cause I believe and Professor Frank Booth and post-doctoral fellow Michael Roberts from the University of Missouri have found out about laziness is that it is a genetic trait passed from the older generations. And it may cause some groups of people be lazier than others. They used the rats to conduct an experiment by letting the most active rat bred with the most active rat, and at the same time, let the laziest ones bred with each other. They found out the level of laziness by letting the rats to sun on the wheel. And after ten generations of breeding, the result is still “the line of noble Olympian runner-rats chose to run on their wheels 10 times more than the lounger-rats did.” They compared the muscle structure and the genetic characteristics in the rats body to conduct the conclusion of laziness may be cause genetically. Even the genetic traits partially affect the laziness in some way, but when I saw the people working in the gym and staying on the coach, I considered it more as a choice one makes. Being healthy or not is a personally choice, and laziness should not affect a person if the resolution of one is strong.

However this may lead to a question of if laziness can be spread and “infect” other people or their friends. I found out an observation that Blakemore, a professor who conducts study in UCL in London. She claims that when some teenage girls knows about the harm of smoking cigarettes, they will still start to smoke with people already smoked because of the idea  of “adaptive behavior” because of the idea that a person will willing to be involved or belong to a group. And one of the way to be involved is to do the same thing as them. And in my opinion, it also relates to the spreading of the laziness to others. I always found out, when four people are in the same dorm with a good relationship, there are higher possibilities for the people going to gym everyday be assimilated by the other three who plays video games everyday. And it may also be the opposite when three of them goes to gym everyday. It may also conclude in the laziness of a person is also connected to the people around and the environment.

According to an article from Psychology Today, claims that laziness can be a result of fear and hopeless. It mentions that “Some people fear success, or do not have enough self-esteem to feel comfortable with success, and laziness is a way of sabotaging themselves.” In other words, in order to be not lazy, one of the requirement is to have confidence and to think things in a positive way and motivates one to do what they wants to do.

This is an advertisement presented by the company of Coca Cola long time ago. When I saw this on the internet and read the description of the lab result, the description of  Coka Cola benefiting the young people even kids makes me confused. Since I was a kid, my parents always warn me about not to drink to drink too many soft drinks including Coke because they are harmful to your health! Thus, I start researching about the truth of the Coke, and the result turns out to be shocking, and proved my opinions of the badness of drinking soft drinks.

The first reason of avoiding drinking coke is because of the excess amount of sugar a can of Coke may contain. Due to the presentation of Sugar Stacks, within a regular bottle of Coke, it have about 65 g of sugars. And this large amount of sugar may harm your brain. According to an article of “What eating too much sugar do to your Brain?”, “Without BDNF, our brains can’t form new memories and we can’t learn (or remember) much of anything.” BDNF is called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, the access of large amount of sugar may result in the reducing of the amount of BDNF in your brain. The loss of this substance will not only result in the memory problems, but will also leads to problems such as depression and also affect the functioning of the brain due to some actions. Many people may ask if the diet coke may be better than regular Coke. Due to a research from Northern Manhattan on the problems of vascular events, “There was no increased risk of vascular events associated with regular soft drinks or light diet soft drink consumption.” and they have the same higher chances of getting vascular diseases than people do not drink soft drinks. And also due to an research of Harvard, the soft drink is directly connected with the change of getting obesity.

The second reason of not drinking coke is the phosphoric acid. As many people know, it is possible to use Coke to clean your toilet and it will make it clean. The thing that helps to kill the bacteria is the phosphoric acid. It’s usually used in some products such as soaps and polishes. But you may not know that the acid is strong enough to dissolve a nail within four days. As an article from the Livestrong mentions, the acid may damage your kidney, bones and teeth, and “according to a study published in 2007 in “General Dentistry,” phosphoric acid in soda causes tooth enamel erosion, even at low levels.” Within all kinds o f soda, one of the safest drink that does not contain the phosphoric acid is root beer. Comparing to root beer and other fruit juice, “The erosive potential of colas is 10 times that of fruit juices in just the first three minutes of drinking”, an article from Live Science writes about. The danger of drinking coke will always harm the body in a very negative way, and it is people’s own responsibility to take care of their own body. But babies do not know about the truth and parents should not mislead the young people.

That leads to the third reason, which is the caffeine inside the Coke. In tea, coffee and coke, caffeine always exist. The appearance of caffeine helps people to be awake and excited mentally, but it is also easy to be addicted just like smoking. And caffeine is considered as a kind of drug since it will stimulate the central nervous system when using it. According to an article from KidsHealth, the addiction of using caffeine a lot may result in:

• “jitteriness and nervousness
• upset stomach
• headaches
• difficulty concentrating
• difficulty sleeping
• increased heart rate
• increased blood pressure”

Since young kids is not well developed physically and mentally, with a misleading of parents, they are easier to be at risk by drinking the drink without any nutrient.

Else than the three main reasons of drinking Cokes or other soft drinks may cause harsh diseases to human bodies, due to the article “Ten reasons to avoid drinking Soda”, it may also because of the uncleanness of the water used to make coke and the lack of nutrient inside a can of coke. As a result, in order to pursue a better habit of life and keep a kid or a person’s health, the best drink is always water. And hope that everyone is able to understand and be cautious about the bad consequences of keep drinking soft drinks.

I am a students from High School of California, the climates there remain sunshine for most of the times. When I announced my friends and my family about coming to Penn State, the first impression they have here is the extremely cold winter. And when I first arrived to Pennsylvania, the continuous rain that I experienced surprised me, and it is even raining when I am writing. The climate varies a lot depends on the location: east, north, west and south. It brought up my attention of this question about why climates differs that much even we are in the same country.

One of the most important factor of the climate change is the latitude of the location, which is north-to-south of the earth. Since California is located in the south of the US, and Pennsylvania located in the north, the climates may be different. The hottest places on Earth are mostly on the line that has the equal distance to the north pole and south pole, the equator. The places that’s closer to the equator usually turns out to be warmer, and that’s why California is warmer than Pennsylvania. One the other hand, according to the University Cooperation for atmospheric Research, there are lots of other factors affecting the different weather else than latitude, such as people, clouds, the amount of sunshine and ocean.

Ocean as one of the big part of the Earth, it absorbs the most of the sunshine radiation and act as a body of remaining the most of the heat. It causes the change of the climates and at the same time stable the climate of places. “Ocean water is constantly evaporating, increasing the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air to form rain and storms that are then carried by trade winds, often vast distances.(NOAA 2013)” As the water in ocean evaporated to the sky, and with the support of the wind, the rain may drop in to places which is far from the ocean. This is also a reason why that California has less rain fall than Pennsylvania.

Besides the natural effects, human cause the most climate change throughout some activities. California is now continuously suffering from the drought. As assistant research professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Park Williams said, “The probability of a severe drought year has approximately doubled. So even though it may be argued that the human-induced part of the drought sounds small at 20 percent, it seems worse when you consider the probability of extreme drought has increased by 100 percent.” (Katie 2015) This situation of causing the climate change in an area did not only happened in CA, another significant one also happened in China. In Shanghai and Beijing, because of the pollution caused by the factories and cars, the air turns out to be dirty and cause diseases. The climate there become a little foggy for years. This is also a consequence of human actions. As a member of the Earth it should be a responsibility to protect the climate of places, or the unusual climates may even ruin the world.

Have you ever being bitten by a mosquito and you seemed that you have a higher possibilities to be bitten than others? As a member of those people, I have always been concerned and hate about those tiny creatures that may cause my skin to turn red and itchy. As I am concerning and scratching about those small red “hills”, i wondered why those mosquitoes might bite me more than some of my friends.

Due to a study conducted by Nature (Wood and Dore, 1972), mosquitoes are more favored to target the people with type O blood more often than other blood types, and type A the fewest. Same result is shown by the experiment conducted by Japanese scientist that 64 volunteers are sent into a room with hungry female mosquitoes without the proboscis. The final result is depend on the time mosquitoes land on the person, which turns out that the people with type O blood got the most landing.

Besides the affect of blood types, there are also other factors that may attract mosquitoes but the reality is that there are almost over 400 chemical compounds that may attract mosquitoes on the human skin. Due to a research by Birgit M. Steib, Martin Geier and Jürgen Boeckh on yellow fever mosquitoes, one of the most important factor attracted them are lactic acid. Lactic acid is a compound produced by human and animal body in order to support energy production. They founds out that “Addition of lactic acid markedly increased the degree of attractiveness of formerly less attractive human odour samples and they were preferred over those which were originally the most attractive.(Birgit 2001)” Second factor may also be the amount of sugar inside the blood. Since the main purpose of mosquitoes for blood are collecting the protein and iron for laying eggs and their own food are mostly from some food with sugar, which may have the assumption of mosquitoes may choose the blood with more sugar in order to provide their own food as the basics for their offspring.

Comparing to the mosquitoes, I hate the itchy, pink bump more than the mosquitoes itself, since the bump last for a period of time that may cause me to be uncomfortable. And the reason that happens is because of the saliva that female mosquitoes left behind which are used to help them suck the blood. The remaining saliva inside the skin causes the immune system to react. It leads to a chemical compound, histamine being released to swell up the blood vessels that caused the formation of the pink bump (Hiskey 2010).

After the pink bump is formed, many people may try to scratch it to stop the feeling of itchy, but it is actually a bad idea, and it may cause even longer period of the bump. In order to reduce the feeling of itchiness and the period of the bump. There are some suggestions provided by Daven Hiskey which includes: treating the bump with the mixture of baking soda and water, taking a hot bath, or rubbing the soap on it in order to calm the itchiness (Hiskey 2010).

Hi, I am Wayson Wu from Shanghai China and now a freshman in Penn State. I spent my 4 years of high school in California. Since in California, the weather is usually hot and sunny, the rain that I experienced when I first arrived actually brought me the unaccustomedness, and I wish that I am able to suffer from the coldness here in winter. My intended major is Economics, since I am considering about helping out may family business and I am more into the business world.

Same as many people the reason why that I am taking this course is to fulfill the general education requirement, that an science class is mandatory. Since I was little, I usually have good grades in Science, but that does not brings me a interest into it. But after I was enrolled in to this class, the class schedule and syllabus takes brought up my attention to this class and the science around our lives. And I think that I may fall in love with this class because of the topics and also an awesome “story teller”, Andrew. (I love the accent by the way.) Unfortunately, comparing to spend more time on science field, I am more preferring to become a business person that may earn more money for the family business to support the family. And I want to focus in the study of economics and business more at this time.

You may click here for the lesson of learning basic Chinese greetings, and maybe say hello to me in Chinese when you see me!