Mostly every college student has done it. You’re about to go on a long drive, you just stopped to get some gas and you grab a red bull to keep you awake and alert. But did you know that drinking that Red Bull could of been highly beneficial for your driving ( I honestly didn’t)?Of course energy drinks are not the greatest thing for your health but scientific studies do indeed show results of Red Bull having a positive effect on the body when driving for a long duration  of time.

https://www.google.com/search?q=road+trip&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS710US710&espv=2&biw=1597&bih=870&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIuISIt-rPAhXm34MKHX58D8UQ_AUIBigB&dpr=0.75#imgrc=LKUv-Yis7qhkWM%3

Personally when I think of red bull, I think action sports, adrenaline, and wings. But after I read this study that consisted of a somewhat small sample but provided some interesting results. The scientific study consisted of a double-blind placebo experiment with 24 healthy individuals. The results were basted off an experiment that simulated driving four hours. Half the drivers were given Red Bull and the others were given Red Bull without most of the ingredients as in caffeine, B vitamins, etc.. Each individual would would drive for a short period, receive the Red Bull or the placebo drink then drive for four straight hours.

The results of the experiment were quiet interesting. You would think for over a long period of time the drink would make you groggy, but in fact, drinking the Red Bull brought positive effects to the individuals that received it. The results  indicate that the study shows  drinking Red Bull while driving long distances improved the quality of the driving of the individuals that drank it, there was a reduction of speed and finally, it provided the drivers metal benefits that helped preform the task of driving more efficiently. So the overall conclusion of the study was that drastically improves the performance of the driver as well as reduces the feeling of be tired during long driving periods.

So there is a few flaws that I would like to address and discuss. The first flaw is that the experiment was only done on 24 individuals which indicates a fairly small sample size. The second flaw is that they took out over six ingredients for the placebo group of the study. My question is what if just one of those ingredients was the overall factor of receiving positive effects. The study cannot provide and answer as to what is the main ingredients that do provide the positive benefits and if there is a way to indicate those specific ingredients, can we create a healthier alternative that provides the same effects?

Overall, I believe that drinking Red Bull does indeed bring positive effects on driving. Do you think it is? Do you think their is a healthier alternative beside Red Bull that will provide the same effects or is Red Bull the overall drink to consume when driving long distances?

Mets, M., Ketzer, S., Blom, C., van Gerven, M., van Willigenburg, G., Olivier, B., & Verster, J. (2010). Positive effects of Red Bull® Energy Drink on driving performance during prolonged driving. Psychopharmacology, 214(3), 737-745. doi:10.1007/s00213-010-2078-2

All through high school people told me I need to get eight hours of sleep. I always wondered why this was and if it really made a difference because for one, I never was able to get eight hours of sleep, and two, I seemed to feel better when I got less sleep. It seemed to me that my circadian rhythm had simply synced with my new sleeping patterns, and thus I didn’t need to get the full eight  hours of sleep. However, in college I have found that I am getting more sleep than ever before, but consists of me staying up much later and waking up much later. This, to me, does not seem to be a very healthy way to live, and I am curious what I can do to make things better. I want to know three very specific questions. 1) Does it matter what hours you sleep? 2) Do I as a college student need the full eight hours of sleep to function? 3) Can I make up for lost sleep by simply sleeping longer on the weekends?

This first question can be slightly difficult to answer because everybody’s bodies differ so greatly. However, according to an article from TIME, Dr. Matt Walker says it definitely makes a difference. Dr. Walker is the head of Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at UC Berkeley and he warns us that what times we sleep at night can actually affect the how well we sleep. When you sleep, you switch from non-REM sleep to heavy REM sleep. It does not matter what time you go to sleep, this cycle happens naturally form the early night, to the early morning. So, when you are falling asleep really late at night, you are skipping this lighter sleep, which in turn forces you to go into REM. Then when you are waking up later, you are coming out of this deeper sleep, which can cause you to be groggy and lethargic throughout the day.

So what is the perfect time for you to go to bed? Well it really depends on whether you as a person. If you are hardwired to stay up later, you shouldn’t try to force yourself to go to sleep earlier. However, the critical time for you to go to bed is anywhere from 8 P.M. to midnight. This is when your brain can get the non-REM sleep it needs for you to be functional the next day.

  Now we move onto the second question… Do I as a college student need the full eight hours of sleep? Research was done by the National Sleep Foundation that included eighteen highly qualified scientists that met and discussed over 300+ current studies on sleep quantity, and then voted on the new age groups and recommended hours. What they found was very interesting, but in particular the difference between college students and high schools student. For ages 14-17 it is recommended that they get between 8-10 hours of sleep. However, age 18-25 it goes down to 7-9 hours, with anywhere from 6 hours and as high as ten to 11 hours being acceptable. So this is still showing that as a college student I should be trying to get the full eight hours of sleep, but that my body can function with as little as 7.

Personally I find that when I oversleep, I wake up groggy. This is most likely due to waking up out of deep REM instead of letting my body finish the cycle. However, I found it interesting that high school students were recommended to get more sleep than college student. I mean in high school they are getting up much earlier, and usually have a full schedule, whereas in college you can control your classes and sleep ties. However, I would think with the extra workload, college students would need more sleep to be healthy and active.

The last question is can I catch up on sleep by sleeping longer on the weekends?

Well according to acn article on sleep.org, if you are constantly losing sleep during the week, you will have a hard time making up for lost time. If you are sleeping in on the weekends and staying up really late, it can throw off your usual sleep patterns which can make it harder to fall asleep during the week. This is not healthy and is not a great strategy for catching up on sleep. Instead, it suggests that you just start to adjust your sleeping times. You can do this by going to bed earlier, or just trying to get more sleep every night. Slowly getting more sleep is a better strategy than sleeping for long periods of times on your day off.

I know in college it can be very hard to get a good amount of sleep,but it is very important that we try. If you can regulate your sleeping patterns and try to get your 7-8 hours a night, you will feel better and more productive during the day. Sleep is crucial to our survival and our happiness and it is important that we take it very seriously.

Sources: http://time.com/3183183/best-time-to-sleep/

https://sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need/page/0/1

http://www.sleephealthjournal.org/article/S2352-7218%2815%2900015-7/fulltext

https://sleep.org/articles/get-rid-of-sleep-debt/

Picture Sources:

Picture one: http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/kstokes-284402-sleep-deprivation-college-students-deprivati-Education-ppt-powerpoint/

http://blog.boundless.com/2013/07/our-favorite-college-memes/

The other day I was trying to climb down my very steep bunk steps with my laptop in my hand when my foot slipped and I fell flat on my bottom. This was rather embarrassing, but it did bring a question to my mind. If I were a cat would I have landed on my feet? Yes I’m sure we have all heard the myth that cats always land flat footed, but I wanted to find out if this was actually true, and if it was, then why? How is it possible that you can throw a cat from anywhere, and watch as they somehow find a way to land on their feet? I decided to find out, in hopes that maybe I could take some tips from  these highly coordinated animals.

1)Do cats always land on their feet?

Now with this being such a myth, it was difficult to find the evidence backing up the claim that cats always land on their feet. However, according to an article written by Laura Moss, “Do Cats Always Land on Their Feet?” cats have something known as a rooting reflex, which allows them to quickly reorient their body in the air. The righting reflex doesn’t usually appear until the cat is around 3 weeks old, and it is then they are able to begin situating themselves midair. It is fully functionable by about 6-7 weeks of age. According to wikipedia, this is functional, due to the felines lack of a working clavicle and a very flexible backbone. According the Moser’s article, a study was done by a French scientist by the name of Etienne Jules Mary. Here is the video he used to analyze the cat. This man decided to test the theory by using a camera to take multiple shots in a one second frame, so he could watch the cat fall in slow motion. After playing the film back, he was able to see how the cats body repositioned itself in the air before safely landing on its feet. However this might not mean that a cat falls on their feet 100% of the time, which leads me to question two.

2) Why can cats land without death?

This was another question that came to mind. If cats have this innate ability to land on their feet, why are they able to fall from such tall heights without death? Yes, some cats might be injured, but even then they are still able to survive. Well according to this article, a study was done by the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, explaining this situation. IT basically has to do with the maximum terminal velocity the cat reaches while falling. Unlike a human, they don’t have quite of high as a velocity which allows them to withstand the impact of the fall. The study watched 132 cats who fell anywhere from 5.5-32 stories high. In this time period the cats would have been able to reach their terminal velocity, however, there was a 90% survival rate. While ⅔ of the cats needed medical treatment, they still survived long enough to receive it and live through the fall. The article goes on to argue that cats are actually reported to have a lower mortality rate for falling from the stories 7 or above. This may seem weird because as a human we would want to fall from a lower story. However, with cats it is theorized that falling from a taller height actually gives them more time to adjust to the situation and relax their bodies. This, in turn, reduces their velocity and allows them to prepare for the impact.

It was hard to find more studies on the subject because people can’t ethically throw cats around, but I do believe I have come to a conclusoin. After my research I would say that cats probably don’t ALWAYS land on thier feet, but that doesn’t mean it happens the majority of the time. I am fairly certain based off of experiemnts and my own personal experience that cats do have an inate ability to land on their feet! I guess with this superpower, they won’t be needing their nine lives after all!

Sources: http://www.mnn.com/family/pets/stories/do-cats-always-land-on-their-feet\

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_righting_reflex

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/11/domestic-cats-can-fall-from-any-height-with-a-remarkable-survival-rate/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqL9siGDeBA

Picture Sources:

http://www.wilmslowguardian.co.uk/news/13332845.Cat_survives_fall_from_Handforth_block_of_flats/  

http://thehigherlearning.com/2014/09/02/the-physics-behind-why-cats-always-land-on-their-feet-video/

My high school had some pretty strict rules, one of them pertaining to gum. We were never allowed to chew gum in class and if we were caught chewing gum teachers would call us out on it. If you were constantly getting caught, then you might even be given a detention. I never understood though why the rule was so strictly applied. Yes, gum is a choking hazard and some people can be irresponsible as to how they dispose of their gum, but there are benefits to chewing gum! Chewing gum might not be the best for your dental health, but I’ve always heard that gum helps focusing. If that’s true, then why is such a helpful thing turned down in many schools?

There have been claims that chewing gum during class/tests leads to better academic performance. That being said, we have four possible situations:

1. Chewing gum directly increases your academic performance (direct causation).
2. Increasing your academic performance causes you to chew gum (reverse causation).
3. There is a third variable that’s causing you to chew gum in class and increase your academic performance.
4. The correlation between gum chewing and increased academic performance is due to chance alone.

According to the article, Chew on this: Gum may be good for body, mind, a study was conducted at the Baylor College of Medicine. Researchers selected 108 8^th graders at a Houston school. From there, the researchers took the 108 students are randomly allocated them into two groups. For the next 14 weeks, the students in the experimental group would chew gum during tests and while doing homework. On the other hand though, the control group would continue on with their studies, minus the gum of course (Gajilan 2009). Note that allocating the students was not random at first, but when they were split into groups, that process was totally random. In this experiment, we can see that the null hypothesis is that chewing gum has no effect on a student’s performance in school. According to the CNN writer of the article, Gajilan states that the results were quite shocking. The researchers found that the students who chewed gum did 3% better on their math tests than those who didn’t. They also had better final grades as well (Gajilan 2009). Going off what we learned in class, 3% is less than 5% so we can conclude that something is truly going on. That being said, we can reject the null hypothesis that gum chewing doesn’t cause an increase in academic performance.  Although reverse causation and confounding variables are unlikely, there is still a chance they can have an effect. We also must take into consideration that some students are just naturally smarter. It’s extremely hard to measure someone’s intelligence, so we wouldn’t be able to know definitely if it was the gum alone that gave those students a slight edge over the control group.

Chewing Gum

Another study was conducted in 2009 that had to do with the correlation between chewing gum and one’s academic performance according to Marc Abrahams, writer of the article Does chewing gum improve our mind and our productivity? According to the article, Uwe Tänzer and two friends conducted a study with 8 and 9 year olds through the University of Oldenburg. They randomly allocated the students into two groups, testing their concentration by giving one group gum to chew and none to the other group. The other group is considered the control group of the experiment. The one’s who chewed the gum chewed Wrigley’s Extra Fruit sugar-free gum. After conducting the 16-minute experiment, the researchers found that the students who chewed gum did much better with concentrating (Marc 2014). I still think that more studies need to be conducted to make any conclusions.

In a more recent study, another experiment was conducted at St. Lawrence University according to Livescience’s article Gum-Chewing Improves Test Performance, Study Suggests. In the 2011 study mentioned in the article, 224 students were selected to participate in the study. They were then randomly allocated into three groups. One group was advised to chew gum before and during the tests, another was advised to chew before and the third did not chew gum at all. The third group is considered our control group. Researchers found some pretty surprising results. They found that a student’s performance did increase when chewing gum before the test, but only for a certain time. The effect only lasted for about the first 20 minutes. After that the students in the second group (chewing beforehand) performed as well as the two other groups. How much better the second group performed in those first 20 minutes was not significantly higher than the two other groups though (Welsh 2011). That being said, the small difference makes it harder to say that gum chewing plays a significant role in increasing academic performance in students. This is why more studies are necessary in order to collect more data.

Focusing in Class

According to Jennifer Welsh’s article Gum-Chewing Improves Test Performance, Study Suggests, the researchers in the St. Lawrence University study have a theory for why chewing gum only had an effect for a short period of time. Researchers at the school believe to claim that chewing stimulates the brain by pumping more blood to the heart. That stimulation gets your heart rate pumping. All that but the researchers did not see any improvement in the students who chewed before and during the test. The article mentions that the researchers actually believe this stimulation took the focus away from the task at hand: taking the test. That being said, any effect of chewing gum before, did not show in the grades because those students in the first group were continuing to ”distract” their brains with the continual chewing (Welsh 2011). I think that based off of just this study alone, I would still choose to chew gum beforehand. The cost of chewing the gum beforehand is very small and although the benefits don’t last extremely long, it’s better than nothing!

Mint Gum

Take home message: From this research, I would conclude that although many studies have shown some improvement in grades when chewing gum, the causation is not definite. There needs to be more studies done in the future to make any solid assumptions about whether the correlation between the two is causal. If I were to research more into this topic though, I would want to know whether the type of gum or flavor has any more of an effect on one’s academic performance. In the end though, I’d say that it wouldn’t hurt to chew some gum before a test, even if the benefits are minimal, it’s still better than no benefits at all!

Sources:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/22/chewing.gum.benefits/

http://www.livescience.com/17520-chewing-gum-test-performance.html

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/aug/19/chewing-gum-effects-mind-productivity

Photo Sources:

Photo 1: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/02/03/6-chewing-gum-side-effects.aspx

Photo 2: http://behindthebadgeoc.com/cities/ggpd/pds-partnership-boys-girls-clubs-garden-grove-keeps-risk-kids-right-path

Photo 3: http://www.livestrong.com/article/111248-benefits-mint-chewing-gum/

Just a couple of weeks ago, we learnt that scientific breakthroughs don’t occur as frequently as we may perceive. However, new progress in stem cell research may just have made it to the outliers. A recent experimental research has shown hopes of mobility in people after a stroke. The experiment injected stem cells into the brain in hopes of rejuvenating blood vessels and other cells. This in some ways will repair damaged parts of the brain and enable movement in stroke victims. Stem cells are cells which can break out and grow into numerous more cells including ones that are different from the origin. Stem cell injections have been used multiple times to help joint treatments and other diseases which require rebuilding of cells, tissue etc. However, not until recent times have scientists begun using these types of treatment in brains. A recent experiment conducted by a neurosurgeon at Stanford University showed improvement in the movements stroke patients. The injections worked well in rats, the stem cell dissolved and helped join brain cells and repaired blood vessels. These injections were later given to 18 participants, each receiving up to three amounts of stem cells. Depending on their conditions, each participant got injected with 2, 5 or 10 million cells. There are numerous types of stem cells, for the purposes of this experiment, Gary Steinberg made use of mesenchymal stem cells. These cells are special because they have the ability to branch out into other types of cells like bone cells, cartilage cells, muscle cells and fat cells. These cells were taken from bone marrows of healthy humans and put into the mobility controlling part of the brain. For additional aid, these strums were modified and included a gene type present in infants. The scientists expected that this gene will help with the development of the brain and improve problems of slurred speech in the patients. The ingredients to create this gene type was taken from aborted infants and showed certain levels of improvements in the patients. Seeing the detailed and risks of this experiment, there have been several debates on it’s ethicality. Hence, research like this one are not conducted often and when they are, they are usually held under highly controlled circumstances. However, the researchers believe that this breakthrough can lead to more time being spent on the topic and will further improve the practice.

As for the results of the study, the researchers noticed that the victims responded positively to the experiment. One exceptional recovery was seen in the case of an elderly woman who increased mobility from just a thumb to her legs, arm and head. Of course not everyone showed such drastic improvements, however on average most patients saw some improvement in their mobility. Seeing that the experiment involved only 18 patients, it’s hard to conclude that this new form of treatment definitely works, but it has opened up a door to a new experiment which is looking to involve 156 new patients.

The image above shows only some of the potential deficiencies that can be cured by this treatment. A scientific breakthrough in this field would change many lives and can also further deepen our understanding of the human body.  

Citations

1. @newscientist. “Stem Cell Brain Injections Let People Walk Again after Stroke.” New Scientist. N.p., 2 June 2016. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.
2. “Stem Cell Basics I. | Stemcells.nih.gov.” U.S National Library of Medicine. U.S. National Library of Medicine, n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.
3. “Mesenchymal Stem Cell.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.

As little children we’ve all heard that carrots improve your eyes, but is that true? In this vlog I will be going over the science behind carrots and eye sight.Eat your carrots?

If you wear glasses I would not start eating a lot of carrots. The truth is, eating carrots really don’t improve your eye sight. Carrots have a nutrient called beta carotene. Beta carotene is what gives carrots and many other fruits and vegetables an orange color to them. When you consume beta carotene it doesn’t stay in that state for long. Whenever beta carotene is consumed your body turns into vitamin A.

Vitamin A is retinol. Doesn’t retinol sound a lot like retina? That’s because you can find Vitamin A in the rods of your eyes. Rods are the part of your eyes that have task of helping you see at low light levels. Without vitamin A the photoreceptors in your eyes will eventually start to deteriorate over time. So anything with vitamin A in it will help your eyes, but why did we think it was carrots all these years? In World War Two the British pilots had a radar system that helped them defeat their enemies from the air. When interviewed the British piolets said it was carrots the British army was giving them that made them see so well. That’s how the myth about carrots improving your eyes started.

Exercising can be a great and healthy way to release stress and ensure you don’t gain that dreaded freshman 15. While running outside can give you all the cardio you need for the day and can give you a break from all the pressures of school and work, this may soon not be an option. If the weather continues to get colder, then we will soon be having to find alternative ways to exercise. While heading to the gym is great, and lifting weights is very beneficial, I have wondered what my alternative to outdoor running will be. This has led me to one question: Is running on a treadmill helpful or harmful? Now while I don’t mind running on a treadmill, I am curious as to whether it is as beneficial as running outdoor, or even on the indoor tracks. If it indeed does more harm than good, I will have to switch my training, so I need to know.

I thought the best way to answer this burning question would be to do a cost benefit analysis and decide which form of exercise is truly going to be the best.

The Benefits:

Running on a treadmill can be useful because of the technology. An obvious benefit to using a treadmill is the ability to control the speed at which you run. When you run on a treadmill, you don’t face the obstacles that running outside can bring. There is no need to fight the wind current, or worry about the sturdiness of the ground. When running on a treadmill you have the luxury of the belt tracking your mileage, and being a constant surface. Also, if the weather is bad, it is safer and easier to go for a nice, paced run on the treadmill. Also if we compare the effect on the body, it may actually b better to run on the treadmill. A study was done by the University of Delaware that came to this conclusion. The study was published on the Huffington Post and after having the participants run at a speed of 3.5 m/s while they measured the knees, hips, and ankles, they found that there was very little difference between running on a treadmill and running outside. Meaning there is really no negative effect to running on a treadmill, as opposed to outside. Another study shows that running outside can put more strain on your knees, which can cause people to lean towards running on a treadmill. This was helpful for me because I have struggled with knee problems, due to a heavy gait, in the past and being able to run on a treadmill is very beneficial.

Harms:

However, another article makes the claim that running on a treadmill can be harmful to your knees because unless you move the dial, you are forced to run at a constant speed. They argue this puts an increased amount of strain on your knees. Also, many people tend to hold the bars while running on a treadmill which can hurt your form and thus make you more susceptible to injury. Another struggle people face, at least I know I do, is boredom. This can make it difficult for people who aren’t the greatest runners to lose interest and thus run a shorter distance, or even worse, look at their phones. A study done by Kent State that showed a negative correlation between those who used cell phones and those who were the most fit. More than 300 students were tested and 49 of them were tested for fitness, which showed that those who used their cell phones for around 14 hours a day, were less fit than those who only used it for around 90 minutes.

So, as you can see, there are many varying opinions on whether or not running on a treadmill is beneficial or not. When looking at the effects on joints, like the contradicting knee studies, it was very difficult to find sufficient evidence backing either claim. The studies were not done as well as they could have been, which made it hard to really decide if it is better to run outside or on the treadmill. However, personally I am going to continue with the training I have now, and will continue running on the treadmill. With the weather starting to get colder, I think that is the best decision. I do hope this question is tested better in the future and that we can start to understand the best way to train our bodies.

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18460996

http://www2.kent.edu/news/newsdetail.cfm?newsitem=c90163c8-f606-b92f-d974440fe8028272

http://livehealthy.chron.com/exercising-treadmill-damage-knees-6031.html

http://www.runaddicts.net/tips-tricks/ten-common-treadmill-running-problems

https://runnersconnect.net/running-training-articles/treadmill-vs-running-outside/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rami-hashish/to-run-outside-or-on-a-treadmill_b_2553448.html

Picture One :http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2015/05/08/treadmill-workout-pros-cons.aspx

Picture two source: http://www.cybexintl.com/products/treadmills.aspx

Every year on the last weekend in April the most profitable sports industry holds their draft, the National Football League. It’s a three-day event which the order is organized based on the success of each team from the previous season, if you were awful you get the first pick and if you won the super bowl you get the last unless you cheated then you get nothing. NFL scouts are in charge of scouting colleges players to see who is the best and which players fits the teams scheme. The draft is a trickle-down effect and each team has their “big board” so when a player that is number one on that board gets picked fifth overall and that team has the thirteenth pick, they cross that player off their board.

May 8, 2014; New York, NY, USA; A general view of a helmet, NFL shield, stage, and podium before the start of the 2014 NFL Draft at Radio City Music Hall. Mandatory Credit: Adam Hunger-USA TODAY Sports

Each team is awarded seven picks in the draft, one for every round, it is up to them on what they want to do with those picks. Teams are allowed to trade picks to get higher up on the draft board, teams can trade back to get more picks in the draft, teams can trade players to get a certain pick, it’s all been done in the past. So what makes the 1st overall pick in the draft better than the 115^th pick in the fourth round: size, speed, athletic ability, college performance, maybe that player just wasn’t a fit for that team’s system. What happens when that fourth round draft pick is outperforming the top pick in his draft class?

Chart of the every team in the league who has been the best at drafting in the late rounds.

It happens every single year, there is nothing you can do about it, some teams predict it, others get lucky. The late round “steal”, considered to be a player selected in the late 3^rd round to early fourth round range or later. This player flew under every team’s radar and he’s now playing with a chip on his shoulder because he watched all those other players at his position get picked ahead of him.

Everyone is sitting at the game or watching it at home and they’re all thinking the same thing about the guy who just torched their team for a sixty-yard touchdown with :37 seconds left in the game to take the lead, “He was drafted in what round? where even is that college?”. Although that is not always the case with late-round picks its common, they just play the game with a different attitude than everyone else because they got their opportunity and they want to show the world that they deserved the recognition from the beginning.

I know who you already have in mind: Donald Driver, Kam Chancellor, and Geno Atkins, right? That’s just a wakeup call to show you how insane this league really is, those three guy were or still are superstars on their teams and they 4^th, 5^th, and 7^th round picks. Torry Holt was the first wide receiver taken in the 1999 draft, the same draft as Donald Driver, they both had fantastic careers with a ridiculous amount of receiving yards and touchdowns. So why wasn’t Driver the second receiver taken in that draft, Holt was the only guy who had more impressive numbers… Ohhhh maybe because Holt went to North Carolina State, a power five school in the ACC, and Driver went to Alcorn State, a D1-AA school, that makes sense, draft all the players that went to big school and then focus on smaller school, domination effect. 

The steal of all steals, he’s won a few super bowls, MVP’s, you name he’s won it. With the 199^th pick (6^th round) in the 2000 NFL draft, the New England Patriots selected, Quarterback Tom Brady, University of Michigan. Well that just totally blows up my last theory of the domination effect, everyone knows how big of a school Michigan is, so how’s a guy like that get drafted so late and become the face of the league. He’s 6’4 which is an ideal size for an NFL quarterback, he had an excellent college career at Michigan, he did only play two years though. I mean the teams that drafted quarterbacks ahead of him probably don’t even know those guy’s names anymore. Sometimes it’s just luck that he falls in your lap when you’re on the clock, sometimes it’s chance and it was meant to be, and then sometimes it’s whatever Bill Belichick keeps doing.

The draft is just another way to keep the league even more entertaining, teams look back and wish they would’ve taken that guy with their pick, but there is nothing you can do about, actually maybe you could try and trade some picks and players. It’s all a numbers game, in the end it’s all about who is holding the trophy.

Sources

http://www.complex.com/sports/2016/04/best-late-round-draft-picks-nfl/tom-brady-2000-6th-round-1999

http://www.nfl.com/draft/history/fulldraft?season=1999

http://www.nfl.com/draft/history/fulldraft?season=2000&round=round1#round1

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I will admit that this may not pertain to everyone, but I was born in a time before technology was seen as a necessity. I remember when I was younger that I would have to remember important phone numbers, and when I had to write a paper I had to learn how to correctly spell a word. And if you didn’t know how to spell it, then you had to use  a dictionary to make sure that you did spell the word.  But now with advancements that we have in technology today,  we never have to worry about how to spell certain word or remember a person’s birthday.

     According to a survey that was performed by Kapersky Labs, out of the 6000 people that were included in the study, 49 percent could not remember their parents phone number, 57 percent could not remember the number to their workplace. What is worse is that about 71 percent of the surveyed group were parents that could not remember their children’s phone numbers from memory. (SOTT.net ,How modern technology can negatively impact human memory skills)    With the acceptance of smart technology, it can be said that we have pushed off memorizing certain things and having our cellphones and computers to details.

Another study that performed by the the Daniel Wegner, Betsy Sparrow, and Jenny Lui found out that while time spent trying to find correct information may be shortened because of the use of internet explorer’s, however when subjects were asked to recall certain facts about the information, those that used internet explorer’s/browsers were not able to recall as much information those that didn’t use browsers (Harvard Magazine, How the Web Affects our Memory). Wegner first based his hypothesis off of  his original view of transitive memory, where we look at another form or medium to store information. Usually transitive memory occurs with groups of people, like when a child asks a mother when a certain person’s birthday is, or when you ask a classmate when a paper is due. However, since the addition of smart technology and the expanded capabilities of the internet, we are now more reliant on these digital forms of memory, and ultimately affecting our own memory retention capabilities. Hopefully this study shows us how important it is to naturally memorize important details, as well as not to become so dependent on technology.

References:

During my freshman year of high school, students in my school would eat a certain flavor gum while studying and then eat it again when taking a test because it was said to help recall or learn things easily. It was typically gum because it was easier to hide than a bag of chips and it was easily accessible. It’s common knowledge that we have strong ties and associations to specific scents or sounds. For example, if you had a childhood blanket with a particular smell, it wouldn’t be hard to associate it with a specific memory if you smelled it now. Certain stimuli bring back certain memories or images. Does this work when we don’t have emotional ties to something? In other words, information that isn’t easily retained in the brain, such as concepts learned in class?

Taste is actually a combination of smell and flavor (salty, sweet, umami, bitter, sour). As a matter of fact, our brain and taste receptors are directly linked. When our taste buds are stimulated, their nerve endings activate and send signals to the brain stem, which then relay the information accumulated to the brain- specifically the thalamus and the cerebral cortex- and make us conscious of taste. Not only are nerve endings in your mouth being stimulated, but your brain is as well once it receives this information. In the same manner, taking into account the proximity of a person’s olfactory bulb to the amygdala and hippocampus, it’s not hard to see why certain smells can trigger certain emotions or memories.

It’s been shown that there’s an association between the sense of taste and memory. One of the early symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease is loss of taste. In an experiment conducted published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, scientists found a slight connection between people with Parkinson’s and altered senses of taste. Scientists accounted for third variables such as subjects’ levels of cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and caffeine intake, among other things. In this experiment specifically, although the results were overall slight, we can say that there is an association between sense of smell and memory– whether it be due to correlations or third variables.

In a study conducted in 2006, scientists asked a group of ninety-three adults to recollect memories with one of three cues: a word, picture, or odor. Their study revealed that these people had a strong association to childhood memories with odors, whereas they attributed early adulthood memories to sights and sounds. Given that there is a link between the senses of smell and taste, we can correlate these with memories. However, this experiment shows us that the memories associated with taste and smell were childhood ones, which doesn’t really contribute to the statement that eating a particular food will help you retain memory better when studying for tests.

Ultimately, even though there is a strong relation between scents and memories, I don’t think that trying to temporarily memorize something with a certain taste works. This link between tastes, scents, and memories only works with either childhood memories or life-changing events. There are also a lot of third variables involved in this experiment. A person’s ability to retain information, how strong the flavors are, or any other underlying factors could easily influence it. However, if you’re someone that has tried this method before and succeeded, you’re probably an anomaly. If you’re someone who’s interested in this and would like to try it out, go ahead! Maybe you could write a blog post about it and publish your findings. Next time you have a test, chew a certain flavor of gum during studying and when you actually take the test. Make your own controlled experiment!

Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4

Every time I go to the dentist I get badgered on how I need to floss more. Floss, floss, floss and every time I leave the dentist I tell myself I’m going to floss every single day. That usually lasts for about eh… a week. I’m horrible at staying on top of my flossing habits. From a person who has never had any cavities though (jinx, knock on wood!), I wonder if there is truly any correlation between flossing and getting cavities. My mom always tells me to floss so I don’t get cavities but so far, for 18 years I’ve been doing pretty well with minimal flossing.

Here we have four possibilities:

1. Lack of flossing causes cavities (Direct Causation).
2. Cavities cause a lack of flossing (Reverse Causation).
3. A third variable like poverty causes both cavities and a lack of flossing.
4. The correlation between flossing and cavities is due to chance alone.

Flossing

First let me explain to you why dentists insist on flossing. According to bbs’s article titled Should you floss or not? Study says benefits unproven, dentists claim that flossing between your teeth removes plaque and food build up. They believe that the removal of plaque will decrease the chances of getting cavities or gum disease. According to the bbc article though, the Associated Press says that the American Dental Association’s claims about flossing are old.

So where did flossing come from? According the bbs’s article Should you floss or not? Study says benefits unproven, flossing began being promoted in 1908. Way back in the 1800’s though is when Levi Spear Parmly invented flossing. So as you can see, flossing has been around for a very long time.

Levi Spear Parmly

In a recent Washington Post article by Timothy Levine, he mentions that the ADA (American Dental Associate) and the American Academy of Periodontology admitted that there is a lack of knowledge when it comes to the history behind flossing, but they still recommend it. Sounds a little weird right? Even though flossing was invented a long time ago, there is still no scientific reasoning behind it. It’s based on an anecdote alone (Levine 2016). Keep in mind that Andrew mentioned in class how anecdotes tend to be weak inferences and lack a lot of certainty.

In 2006, there was a study conducted to test the correlation between flossing and the chances of a cavity according to a Forbes article titled Dentists Say You Need to Floss. Science Says You Don’t. According to the author, Steven Ross Pomeroy, the study was conducted with children ages four to thirteen. Half of the students got their teeth flossed professionally for 5 days of the week for 1.7 years. Those kids had a 40% decrease in the chance of getting cavities in contrast to the kids who were taught to floss and did it on their own. Those kids had no reduction. This shows that letting kids go off and floss on their own is as beneficial as having them not floss at all. The problem they found with this study though was that they could not trust that everyone was brushing correctly with fluoride. That made it hard for them to determine if flossing did anything as an addition to brushing well with fluoride (Pomeroy 2013).

Cavity

In 2012 an experiment was published, seeing the effects of flossing in addition to brushing on gingivitis and plaque buildup (Levine 2016). In the scientific study, mentioned in the Forbes article by Steven Ross Pomeroy, there were 582 participants who were flossing and brushing in opposition to the 502 (the control group) who were just brushing. Of the 12 trials that were conducted, only 7 of them had no big bias. From the results, the study in the Forbes article showed that flossing and brushing was better in prevention of gingivitis (but very minimal). When it came to plaque reduction, there wasn’t really much evidence to support that flossing in addition to brushing helped with plaque reduction according to the study mentioned in the Forbes article by Pomeroy.

In the end though, although the studies are unreliable, you should still floss. For the sake of avoiding gingivitis and for precautionary measures just floss because there’s really no cost and a few low risk to flossing, according the bbc’s article. In a way, the reasoning behind why you should still floss is similar to the pop quiz we had on the mice and if exposure to dim light at night caused depression. It’s extremely easy to just close the blinds, just like it is extremely easy to floss to avoid a possible future issue. Again, we should keep in mind that flossing has been proven to cause gingivitis according to The evidence for flossing’s benefits is not good enough. But it’s all we’ve got by Timothy Levine. Beyond that, it has been said that gingivitis leads to periodontitis, an intense gum disease, that can easily be avoided with flossing (Levine 2016). Floss your teeth as a precautionary measure, but don’t freak out if you haven’t been flossing all along!

Sources:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rosspomeroy/2013/10/17/dentists-say-you-need-to-floss-science-says-you-dont/#4ecc80b677d5

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-evidence-for-flossings-benefits-is-not-good-enough-but-its-all-weve-got/2016/08/12/fbded8e6-5e6f-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html?utm_term=.b92ccfb24489

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36962667

Photo Sources:

Photo 1: http://myteethforever.com/floss-like-boss-making-flossing-habit/

Photo 2: http://canyongatedental.com/the-father-of-preventive-dentistry-levi-spear-parmly-2/

Photo 3: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/reverse-dental-cavities/

If you’re anything like me, you’re mind is a music library and you constantly have a song stuck in your head.  Sometimes I can never remember when I first heard the song, or how it ended up on replay in my head.  I figured since this was such a relevant occurrence for me, that I’d do a little more research on the topic and perhaps find out if this type of memory might be more of a phenomenon than I originally thought.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I was taking AP World History.  At the same time my younger sister was being home-schooled.  She was 12 at the time, and had an extremely intense curriculum for a 6th grader.  Part of her curriculum was learning the timeline of the world. This might sound overwhelming to people, as it was to me, but she was given a recording of a song that covered the entire history of the world.  The song was about 13 minutes in length and covered all major events from every time period.  Being my stubborn, 10th-grade self, I told my mom that I was fine every time she suggested that I learn the song.  It was incredibly corny, as most of these songs are.  May rolled around, which meant that my AP exam was coming up.  After almost an entire year of hearing this song in the background (my sister had to have it memorized by the end of the year) I finally gave in and decided to actually learn it.  To my shock, it helped me to retain much of the material I had to know for my AP exam.

Amazingly, this isn’t the only time this has happened to me.  If you asked me to, I could sing you the US presidents, the 50 states, and all the countries around the world by continent and region.  This isn’t something I ever planned to be able to do, but for some reason this information has stuck with me for years.  The question I’m asking now is– why?

In a study that I found, researchers focused on several English classes to find out how accurate this method of learning actually was.  Vocabulary words were presented to two separate groups; the experimental group to rhymes and melodies that the researchers invented while the control group was taught vocabulary words in a traditional manner.  A month after students were presented with this first set of words, they were tested on their retention of an entirely new set of words.  Both groups were taught the second set of words in the same manner as they were for the first set of words.

What the researchers found was fascinating in the sense that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group when tested on their retention of vocabulary words.  Not only did the experimental group of English students retain vocabulary words better when music was involved, but this group also had a better outlook on their English course, and an overall higher performance rate in the English class.

So is it a bad idea to try and use music to improve retention of information?  I think not.  There is obviously a reason I can still rattle off all of the presidents in order from Washington to Obama.  Music is powerful, and I definitely think that if we can better utilize our ability to learn the lyrics to the latest hits on the radio, we might be much better off in the realm of long term memory.

Photo 1 Link

Photo 2 Link

Back when I was in seventh grade, my English teacher at the time was a mother of two girls, one in which was autistic.  I remember her telling us that she could have been on the Ellen show, but as a 7th grade I did not even watch Ellen or know what they even talked about on that show.  As I got older, my friend absolutely loved Ellen and ended up sharing with me that our mutual 7th grade teacher almost was on the show because she truly believed that her daughter’s autism was caused by a vaccination, but she did not end up attending the show for reasons unknown to us.  I am not a doctor, but I have gotten my fair share of vaccines, as most if not all of us have, and I always thought that was a really intriguing question because she was the first person to raise that question in my mind.  Could vaccines really be a cause of autism in children?

image

Since that time, thousands of studies have been conducted in order to disprove this stigma that vaccines can cause autism.  I can imagine why the medical force was so quick to try to disprove this because it definitely was causing an uproar in the world and a distrust in the system.  When I first started doing research for this topic, I started to think maybe this was a time when doctors got it wrong so many times before, like all those examples Andrew showed up in class.  I thought wow what if this certain ingredient in this vaccine was actually giving kids autism, but doctors did not make the connect because they were choosing experience over facts similarly like they did when it came to blood letting or thalidomide. The null hypothesis would be that vaccines do not cause autism while the alternative hypothesis would be that vaccines do indeed cause autism.  It was not vaccinations themselves as a whole that people were raising doubts about, it was more a certain ingredient within the shots which was thimerosal.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ran a substantial amount of tests on their own to get to the bottom of this controversy.  The first study was a test of very young children whom they again revisited 7-10 years old and tested to see if exposure to thimerosal in the vaccine as infants caused any outcomes such as a child developing autism.  This study proved there to be no link between vaccinations and autism.  They ran eight other studies accounting for as many confounding third variables as I could think of.  For example, they did not focus just on american children, they ran the same experiment with children, infants, babies still in the womb, long-term studies of children as they grew up, and even children in other countries. One of the most convincing studies was also done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in which Denmark and Sweden actually removed the ingredient thimerosal, which was the ingredient said to be causing the autism, from their shots completely.  If this ingredient were to be causing autism then it would be logical to see an obvious decline in the amount of children developing autism once the ingredient was removed, but their studies found the exact opposite. Statistically, when looking at the number of people and studies involved in these nine separate studies, it is extremely unlikely that these results were due merely to chance alone.  These studies seem very convincing and have strong evidence to deduce that there is nothing going on when it comes to a link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines, but then again the tobacco industries had really convincing evidence that smoking did not give you lung cancer, and look where we are now.  The evidence provided by these studies shows as of now vaccinations are in no way causing autism in children, but I think it is something to keep an eye on as time goes by.

image Girl Getting a Flu Shot Clipart

I am sure there are some cases in which mishaps have occurred or someone’s body’s and or minds rejected the vaccination and caused negative side affects or even could have caused some form of autism, but overall I think it is safe to say that the null hypothesis actually rings true when it comes to this topic.  Although this particular correlation was not actually causal, it is a good idea to not get vaccinations right away until you know in detail what exactly they are for, what is in them, and their success rate.  Better safe than sorry!

When someone hears the word cheerleading I’m sure the mental image that follows is one of a preppy girl with pom-pom on the side of a football game yelling for her team.  While this is all cheerleading is to most people, today I am going to be talking about the dangerous side of the sport that is not mentioned nearly enough.  I have been a competitive cheerleader for more than ten years of my life. While I enjoyed the sideline chants and football games my true passion was in competitive cheerleading.  This means that inside of cheering for another team, the sole purpose of the squad is to perform at competitions throughout a competitive season.  No pom-poms just a lot of blood, sweat and hard work.  

If I were to ask you to name the sport that causes the largest number of catastrophic injuries among girls and young women what would your answer be? For the majority of the population they answer soccer, lacrosse, gymnastics, etc, but in fact the answer is competitive cheerleading.

Some of you may be thinking to yourself that cheerleading is not actually classified as a sport and there in fact lies one of the main problems.  Without the official recognition from the NCAA and most states, almost every aspect including coaches, squads, competitions, training, safety, etc are not held to the same standard as most sports.  The lack of governement regulation within the cheerleading world creates a threat for the greatest risk of catastrophic injuries to female athletes.  According to a study conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics, this “non-sport” was responsible for more than 65% of female athletes’ direct catastrphic injuries competing at the high school level, while that number increased to 70.8% for the college level.

While poor regulation may be one of the possible causal variables relating to the disproportional amount of severe injuries a more direct and likely variable that could be causing these results are the components that make up the sport.  Unlike other sports cheerleaders where no padding or protection from hits or injuries while practicing, other than the occasional ankle or wrist brace for those who have been injured in the past.  For those of you that do not know two of the main components that make up cheerleading are stunting and tumbling. Stunting is the act of lifting another person called a flyer into the air with usually three people underneath holding her up.  As you progress in difficulty the flyer and bases are put in positions that could lead to greater injury.  For example a basket toss is when the bases throw the flyer as hard as they can in the air and catch her as she comes back down.  When first trying these dangerous stunts the probability of something going wrong is great, so as a precaution we place other teammates around the stunt in attempt to catch the flyer is she goes in a the wrong direction.  Speaking from experience I have gotten black eyes,  countless bruises and many more injuries just from this one aspect of cheerleading alone.  Next we have tumbling.  This is when athletes run full force at the ground to flip their bodies through the air in an attempt to land with both feet on the ground.  Some of the worst injuries I have seen have been a result of this due to the strain is put on one’s body as they tumble.  Repeated stress and trauma caused by throwing our bodies in the air can lead to long term spine, wrist, elbow, knee and ankle pain.  Some of which if not properly healed will stick with you your entire life.

While some may refuse to acknowledge cheerleading as a sport it has been my life for the past ten years.  There are many variables that could be the cause of the increased amount of long-term injuries that accompany the sport such as the lack of regulation, the continuous stress put on our bodies and the danger of the elements we preform.  Cheerleading deserves to be recognized for the dangerous and outstanding sport it is.

Everyone’s heard the question, “why is the sky blue?” asked before. I being one of them never thought to actually research why the sky is blue. Why blue? Why not any other color? I wondered what the science behind the sky being blue was or if the sky really was blue or we just perceive it as that color.

(link to picture above)

Why Blue?

The reason we see the sky as blue is because of how sunlight and our atmosphere interact with one another. According to the article I read, when sunlight combines with different types of matter it can result in causing light to scatter. There are different types of scattering and according to the article I read the type that makes the sky look blue is called, Rayleigh Scattering. This type of scattering depends on the different wavelengths of light and the lower wavelength is the one that is scattered most and the light that goes along with this is blue as opposed to longer wavelengths that go with red light. Put in simpler terms, there is more blue light scattered than there is red light. Due to this scattering of light we see the sky as blue. While researching this question I started thinking about how during a sunset the sky changes colors. The sky will turn orange and and red sometimes with no trace of blue. Why is this? According to another article I read, Sunsets aren’t blue because when the sun is setting it is low on the horizon. Blue light gets separated away and this light doesn’t get to our eyes. The colors red and orange are the ones that don’t get scattered away and they reach our eyes causing us to see the sky as these colors.

(link to picture above)

sources:

http://images.wisegeek.com/sky.jpg

http://www.livescience.com/32511-why-is-the-sky-

blue.htmlhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Sunset_2007-1.jpg

Eating disorders, psychological disorders shown through abnormal eating habits, is a common and grievous problem that appears more and more on college students. Another usual problem that most college students tends to have is chronic stress. So are these two problems happen randomly or relatively? Does one cause another or they do not affect each other at all?

After doing some researches ｏnline and relating to my own experiences, I came up with the conclusion that chronic stress do cause eating disorders. Lots of studies showed that stressful things and works such as ｓｃｈｏｏｌ　ｗｏｒｋｓ and relationships, bad illness or excessive use of drugs will all have huge influences on eating disorders. I find that most of my stress come from three main parts: difficulty in school, difficulty in relationships and homesickness.

When school first started, and you just moved into your dorm, this is usually the time when we all started to feel alone and to get homesickness because we were all unfamiliar with the new environment and had no new friends. I had a really difficult time during the beginning of the school year under the pressure of dealing with things independently and making new friends. While feeling alone, eating a lot seems to be a good method of releasing the stress because it gives us that satisfaction and stopping us from thinking about unhappy things.

  Once school started and everything got back in track, we started to feel the pressure and stress from school such as grades, homework and exams. The first few weeks were actually fine, but once midterm week came, this is the time when my stress started to appear. I　ｕｓｕａｌｌｙ　ｅｘｐｒｅｓｓ　ｍｙ　ｃｈｒｏｎｉｃ　ｓｔｒｅｓｓ　ｔｈｒｏｕｇｈ　ｄｅｐｒｅｓｓｉｏｎ，　ａｎｘｉｅｔｙ　ａｎｄ　ｓｉｃｋｎｅｓｓ．　Ｉ started not showing up to class and feeling sad and lazy, and I　ｆｉｎｄ　ｔｈｅ　ｅａｓｉｅｓｔ　ａｎｄ　ｆａｓｔｅｓｔ　ｗａｙ　ｔｏ　ｒｅｌｅａｓｅ　ｍｙ　ｓｔｒｅｓｓ　ｉｓ　ｔｈｒｏｕｇｈ　ｅａｔｉｎｇ．　Ｓｏ　Ｉ started to eat a lot of junk food instead of healthy meals.

  When I　ｓａｙ　ｄｉｆｆｉｃｕｌｔｙ　ｉｎ　Ｒｅｌａｔｉｏｎｓｈｉｐｓ，　Ｉ　ｄｏ　ｎｏｔ　ｍｅａｎ　ｄｉｆｆｉｃｕｌｔｙ　ｗｉｔｈ　ｍｙ　ｂｏｙｆｒｉｅｎｄ　ｂｕｔ　Ｉ　ｄｏ　ｎｏｔ　ｅｖｅｎ　ｈａｖｅ　ｏｎｅ．　Ｗｈａｔ　Ｉ　ａｍ　ｓａｙｉｎｇ　ｉｓ　ｔｈｅ　ｐｒｅｓｓｕｒｅ　ｔｈａｔ　ｃｏｍｅｓ　ｆｒｏｍ　ｃｏｕｐｌｅｓ　ａｒｏｕｎｄ　ｍｅ．　Ｉ　ｆｉｎｄ　ｔｈａｔ　ｍｏｓｔ　ｃｏｌｌｅｇｅ　ｓｔｕｄｅｎｔｓ　ａｒｅ　ｃｏｕｐｌｅｓ　ｗｈｉｃｈ　ｄｅｐｒｅｓｓｅｄ　ｍｅ　ａ　ｌｏｔ．　Ｉｎ　ｔｈｉｓ　ｃａｓｅ，　ｄｅｐｒｅｓｓｉｏｎ　ｄｏ　ｃａｕｓｅ　ｅａｔｉｎｇ　ｄｉｓｏｒｄｅｒ．

Ｈｏｗｅｖｅｒ，　ｔｈｅｒｅ　ａｒｅ　ａｌｌ　ｋｉｎｄｓ　ｏｆ　ｃｏｎｎｅｃｔｉｏｎｓ　ｂｅｔｗｅｅｎ　ｃｈｒｏｎｉｃ　ｓｔｒｅｓｓ　ａｎｄ　ｅａｔｉｎｇ　ｄｉｓｏｒｄｅｒｓ．

Ｓｏｕｒｃｅｓ：

１.　　https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1WLXB_enUS526US526&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=eating%20disorder%20definition

２.　http://www.mirasol.net/mood-disorders/chronic-stress.php

I have heard people say this many times, and at first I thought it was ridiculous, but after a while it seemed like their was a fair amount to truth to it so I decided to check it out. To be honest, I was hoping that I would find out that it was false because it is a scary though to think that spiders are crawling into my mouth while I sleep and I eat them.

According to an article written by Annie Snead she seems to believe that this theory is false. She has quotes from scientists that show that based on common sense alone, this idea must be false. From a spiders point of view they are much smarter than that. There is no reason for them to go into a humans bed, and if they did crawl into our bed they would not head into a humans mouth which would be giving off vibrations that scare them away. From a human perspective, most people would be awoken if they feel a spider on them, especially if it is going down their throat. Based on these thoughts it seems unlikely that humans eat spiders in their sleep.

Although these are just opinions and not facts, these still do make a lot of sense, and I think it provides strong evidence against this theory. Just based on this common sense, it doesn’t seem likely that a spider would be crawling into somebody’s mouth. This was definitely a relief to me because I know I do not want to go to sleep knowing that a spider may end up crawling down my throat.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-people-swallow-8-spiders-a-year-while-they-sleep1/

A big problem in the world today is the ever growing population.  A question that is often asked is how are we going to feed everyone?  I personally believe that we need GMOs in order to feed the 7 billion plus people.  GMOs stands for genetically modified organisms.  What this means is that genes of plants or animals are modified for a specific reason.  GMOs can help produce more yield per unit.  This means more tomatoes per plant or more meat per pig.  GMOs don’t just produce more food per unit it can also make crops more resistant to weather and pests.

PROs

                The obvious benefit of GMOs is we can produce more food as a society.  This is a big solution to the problem of an ever growing population.  Not only does GMOs increase a crops yield, it also makes it so that crops can be grown in harsher conditions.  This increases the places that crops can be grown and ultimately increase our food supply (Source).  One of the uses of GMOs, that a lot of people are not familiar with, is that it can actually make food taste better.  According to JR Minkel in a blind taste test of 37 people about 60 percent preferred genetically modified tomatoes compared to regular ones.  Another benefit of GMOs is that plants can be modified to need less water.  This can be beneficial to areas that receive less rain fall such as the desert or California which is experiencing a drought.  GMOs can be compared to inventions with a lot of research and money going into them; here is a video that explains how they are made.  As seen in the video using GMOs can benefit a plant when fighting disease.  This is nothing new, farmers have done cross breading for many years in order to have a plant that is more resistant to disease.  The only problem with the method of cross breading is that it can take many years, however, with GMOs it takes substantially less time with better results.  As seen in the video when treating a plant for a disease it works that same way as getting a flu shot.  The plants genes are modified, often times giving it a gene from the disease, in order for it to build up a resistance.

Cons

With all the great that GMOs offer there are some negatives as well.  With GMOs we are able to make plants more resistant to disease, however; when we do this we aren’t just making the crops more resistant.  Due to cross pollination weeds can become more resistant to being killed thanks to GMOs.  This increases the use of pesticides which are harmful to the environment.  When rain causes runoff from farms this washes away the pesticides into lakes and rivers.  The added pesticides in the water causes what is known as algae bloom which is harmful to the aquatic ecosystem.  The ecosystem is all connected and by changing one part it can have a bigger effect than people think.  Another common argument against GMOs is that it causes allergies.  According to Andrew Porterfield there has been an increase in the percentage of kids with allergies but this is not caused by GMOs.  This is a topic we have talked about in class where correlation does not equal causation.  People have seen an increase in the use of GMOs and an increase in allergies so they put the two together.  GMOs provides an opportunity to be able to produce more food in less time.  GMOs does what farmers have been doing for years in cross pollination in a faster more efficient time.

Picture Sources

http://engl105062.web.unc.edu/2015/09/23/310/

http://www.article-3.com/genetically-modified-ignorance-914581.1.html

I am person that values fitness and working out. I value fitness and working out very highly because I strongly believe that they are essential components to a happy and healthy lifestyle. With that being said, I am always looking for new and exciting workouts to try because falling into a boring routine can be lethal to success. Recently, I have stumbled upon yoga because they offer classes at the White building, which is one of the fitness facilities on campus for those of you who many not know. I found the yoga classes to be not only a workout but very calming, so this had me thinking if yoga has the ability to relax people can it help treat diseases like depression as well? I decided to research that specific topic and luckily there were many studies done on how yoga affects people with depression.

Science unrelated, my major is Recreation Park Tourism Management so I love hearing of therapeutic recreation activities that can beneficial to a person’s health, like help lowering depression rates. Depression can be caused by various reasons, but the main factor is stress. Every person experiences a wide variety of stressors throughout their life. For example, losing a family member, failing a test, spilling you coffee and many more. Stress to the point of causing depression can drastically affect the normality of a person’s life. It is more than likely that every person at least in their lifetime will unfortunately experience stress to a certain level that they are considered depressed.

An article by PubMed Central titled “How Might Yoga Help Depression? A Neurobiological Perspective” examined yoga in conjunction with depression. PubMed Central acknowledged through their findings that yoga can help a person through depression in many different aspects. For example, while engaging in yoga the participant reaches a point of relaxation where they only focus on the present and forget about the issues that may be going on in their daily lives. The ability to release is important and this is a technique that is heavily taught within any type of yoga class. Also, the article by PubMed Central suggests that yoga assists in depression by improving a person’s mood because it recognized that everyone has the power over how they feel.

A randomized control trial(s) study was done by the Official Journal of ADAA that also examined yoga in conjunction to depression levels. This study took a total of 619 participants with various levels of depression and had them participate in yoga exercises. During the yoga that the participants participated in, their depression levels would sink. Depression levels would sink because yoga was providing a momentary escape. The study conducted by the Official Journal of ADAA concluded in their results that yoga does indeed help with depression, even if it is only for a short period of time.

There are many more studies that examine yoga in conjunction to depression, so if this blog post interested you I suggest you check them out. Overall, I am very pleased to see a simple activity, that anyone can participate in, being able to affect a life in such a positive way. Even if you are not depressed, you should try yoga! As mentioned above, yoga can have many beneficial aspects and most importantly it can help out with the daily stressors we experience on a day to day basis.

IMAGE 1 / IMAGE 2 / IMAGE 3

Introduction:

A couple of years ago when Netflix started to move its way into the entertainment spotlight, I have to say I never got sucked into the whole craze. Until now. All people talk about now  is binge watching TV shows and watching shows they never even would if there wasn’t such a convenient way to stream shows like Netflix does.  I honestly never thought I would get involved either but of course I did. My friend gave me his Netflix account about a month ago and I have never been this unproductive before. Of course this new obsession is timed perfectly at a point where blogs are due, tests are posted, and assignments are at there peak. I figured that even though everyone writes about this topic, there is still information that intrigues us and data that proves why we are all so addicted to the same thing. So here is a breakdown of why Netflix is such a monster to our daily lives due to its addicting traits, as described by urbandictionary.com.

Why is it so addicting?:

You may have thought that Netflix uses color schemes, show watching convenience, or variety of shows to increase how addictive their concept is, as described in a recent huffingtonpost.com article concerning Netflix’s addictiveness.  Those may be somewhat true but there is an even bigger reason why. Netflix has cracked one of the biggest marketing breakthroughs in entertainment history. The company has honed in sorting through the shows that are the most watchable and has figured out the exact moment people get addicted to a certain program. By figuring out the exact moment viewers are addicted to the show, the company can focus on which shows and moments they present to the user. Netflix uses data taken from users account information and viewing history to build a sort of viewer resume that effects when they get addicted that specific show.  Smithsonianmag.com discusses this breakthrough as a sort of phenomenon is such an industry. For years people have wondered why they are addicted to this TV watching method, but know that they know they are addicted at exactly a certain moment, there is no stopping the addiction besides from not watching at all.  Another hypothesis for why people are so addicted to Netflix is the theory that people are consumed in reaching a goal when they are engaged in that certain activity. In terms of TV, people generally become very consumed in that such activity, therefore becoming totally committed to that goal. This proves to be a source of addiction through data in the numbers of viewers being engaged in their program, which again was collected when looking at user data that is explained on lifehacker.co.uk. The Null Hypothesis of this situation is that when people are engaged in a certain activity, in this situation their TV program, they are more likely to finish that show and becoming addicted and watch the next, so on and so forth. The Alternate Hypothesis is that when someone loses interest in something, or doesn’t get involved, AKA not having Netflix, they will not become engaged in a goal, or become addicted to that activity.

Conclusion: 

Netflix is something that most of us view as a problem. This problem is generated due to our addiction to the process of watching TV over and over as a result of factors such as accessibility, goal-commitment, and timing.

Sources:

lifehacker.co.uk

huffingtonpost.com

smithsonianmag.com

dailymail.co.uk

alternet.org

As someone who tans in a tanning bed every once in a while, I’m not exactly proud of the fact that I do it. In addition to the fact that my mom lectures me on the dangers every time she sees me go, I’m very well aware that I’m putting myself at risk for basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma, the deadliest type of skin cancer. I wanted to find out if there are any known benefits of indoor tanning and to my surprise, there are quite a lot.

According to this article, indoor tanning is actually extremely beneficial to those who tan for a small amount of time (ten minutes) each day. It states that the tanning booths UV rays help your body produce Vitamin D, which has attributed to preventing diseases such as colon cancer, depression, high blood pressure, breast cancer, fibromyalgia, prostate cancer, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), PMS, arthritis, psoriasis, diabetes and osteoporosis (Health Guidance). This was extremely surprising to me because I would have never thought that there was a correlation between Vitamin D and prevention of a disease like arthritis; the two seem incredibly unrelated. The article also states that indoor tanning reduces eczema flare ups and can color darken stretch marks to better match the color of your skin.

Although this all sounds great, I’m not buying it.

I decided to look up Vitamin D and how it prevents all of these serious diseases. Every single article that came up said something along the lines of “Vitamin D may lower the risk…”, and “Researchers have found that there may be a link between Vitamin D and…”. Even the American Diabetes Association states that most of the research on prevention of diabetes with Vitamin D is based on observational, epidemiological studies, which are important for generating hypotheses but do not prove causality (Diabetes Spectrum).

We know that indoor tanning causes cancer. We know that it is extremely dangerous to our health. We know that it can give us third degree burns. It’s a federal law that all tanning salons in the United States list all the warnings in every single room with a tanning bed because these risks are that serious. The research that the Vitamin D we get from indoor tanning ‘may’ prevent this, and it’s linked to ‘possibly’ reduce that is not enough to publish and reassure the public that baking in these machines is safe for us.

The information that I found on the Skin Cancer Foundation website is enough to scare anyone into no longer indoor tanning. The fact that more people develop skin cancer from using tanning beds than lung cancer because of smoking is extremely concerning (Skin Cancer Foundation). The general public should be extremely wary of the information that they read and where it’s coming from. Much of this “research”, which isn’t actually even research since I failed to find even one positive connection between indoor tanning and our health on a science database, could be coming from someone who indoor tans themselves and is trying to justify it, or they could be receiving funding from the indoor tanning industry to convince us to believe this information. Just like we learned in class about the paper towel industry funding the research that claimed that air hand dryers were detrimental to our health due to the bacteria that was being blown onto our hands, this could be happening with articles that list the benefits of indoor tanning that seem too good to be true.

Even though aesthetics are extremely important to so many of us, it’s not worth our health in the long run to look good now. No amount of stretch marks or inconvenient eczema is worth the high risk of cancer that comes along with unnecessary indoor tanning. After doing this research, I’m definitely going to cancel my tanning membership for good.

Sources –

1. Source 1 – Indoor tanning is beneficial
2. Source 2 – American Diabetes Association
3. Source 3 – Skin Cancer Foundation

Picture Sources –

1. Picture 1
2. Picture 2
3. Picture 3

While reading the news, I found an article from CNN that said that Ecuador (the country where I was born and raised in) is the country that has the most empathy. I found this very interesting and wanted to find some sort of explanation about why some countries (people) can have more empathy than others. I actually found a study that explained it and was also mentioned in the article.

Image 1

According to a study published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, there is a correlation between culture and empathy. They discuss how social and psychological behaviors may make alterations to the empathy of a person, or in this case, of a nation. Scientists recruited 104, 365 participants between the ages of 18 to 90 from 63 different countries via internet. 955 participants had to be excluded from the study because there were not many participants from the same country. Ratios had to be equal from people of the countries that were evaluated so that the results are not altered. The amount of people from a certain country would be a controlled confounding variable.

All participants were asked to complete a survey that measured their level of empathy. Scientists used Empathetic Concern sub-scales that gathered data for collectivism, pro-sociality, and psychological variables. The null hypothesis in this case was that collectivism does not have any effect of the empathy of a nation. The alternative hypothesis was that collectivism alters the empathy a nation has. The results are below:

Table 1

Table 1  showed an existent correlation between collectivism, pro-sociality, and psychological variables with empathy. The people from nations who scored high on their empathy scores demonstrated high levels of empathy from the survey. The countries that were categorized as the ones who had the most empathy were Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, and Peru due to their scores.

I believe that this study proves that there is a correlation between psychological and social behavior of the inhabitants of a nation with the amount of empathy they have. Still, there are several exogenous factors that they should have taken in consideration. For instance, Ecuador suffered from many small tremors this past years and had a huge earthquake in 2016 which was the year of publication of the study. The entire coastal zone of our country was destroyed and many people showed acts of empathy through collectivism and volunteering that would suggest that the experiment is right, but I think that empathy is a soft endpoint. I think it is hard to say whether a country has more or less empathy than others since it depends on the unfortunate events that each country goes through.

To conclude, the study shows that collectivism is causal for empathetic behaviors but there is the need for replication and metanalyses since participants were gathered through internet ( it may not be a reliable source to depend on) and did not control certain factors or confounding variables that could alter the results such as the unfortunate events that those nations suffered.

Caffeine helps many people get through their day. How many people do you see that need to have coffee everyday? Caffeine is also considered a drug, and it is used more than any other drug in the world. People hear the word drug and get scared, but different people have different definitions of the word drug. Just because it is considered a drug doesn’t mean caffeine is bad for you.

This photo is from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com

One of the main sources of caffeine is coffee. Coffee has many positive effects on our body. Some studies found that coffee helps in the prevention of strokes and some cancers. This is very important considering how prevalent cancer is these days. It also can lessen our chances of getting Parkinson’s or dementia. Many people worry about cancer, so maybe coffee will help. The issue is most of the positive effects of coffee are because it is made from beans. Actual caffeine though has been thought to lower someone’s chances of having Alzheimer’s.  I found this interesting since Alzheimer’s is the most prevalent type of dementia, so maybe caffeine is a part of the reason why coffee can lessen our chances of getting dementia.

Caffeine isn’t all good news though. Caffeine is always safe in moderation, but too much can be a problem. Caffeine is also addictive which isn’t very good because if you go without caffeine you can have symptoms such as headaches. Caffeine can also lead to insomnia if too much is consumed. This is a big issue especially in college where sleep is very important. For women, caffeine can be especially dangerous. An excess of caffeine can cause a miscarriage.

Caffeine like many things has its good and bad. I personally think the bad outweighs the good. A person should watch their caffeine intake. I think that the addictive part of caffeine is the worst. I don’t want my body to become dependent on caffeine. My roommate suffers from headaches on days that he doesn’t have at least 3 sodas because he is dependent on caffeine. This is something I don’t want to have to deal with, so I’m gonna watch my caffeine.

This photo is from https://upload.wikimedia.org

My friend was on Instagram and saw a picture of a celebrity, which then prompted her to start complaining and obsessing over how perfect she was. As she kept complaining, I thought about how she is not the only one to have done that. It seems everyone envies what they see on social media and become less confident with themselves. This causes negative insecurity throughout the social media’s population, as it suggests an unrealistic model of everything someone should be. This report gives information on a study conducted:

Participants: This present study consisted of participants from a university in Rocky Mountain. These 323(ranged from 18-55 years old) participants were not randomly selected, as they had to be enrolled in a psychology course at the university. The subjects were engaged in an online survey that asked questions on how they ate and their exercise habits. Their data had a good spread, with 294 completing the whole survey, and 172 as female and 122 being male. The results could end with direct causality(Social media–> low self esteem), reverse causation (low self-esteem–>social media), a third confounding variable that somehow affects both variables, or change (which is always an option).

Method: The objective was to measure self-esteem, as well as media influence. To start with self-esteem, the subjects were measured under The Texas Social Behavior Inventory (TSBI). The study worked with the subjects replying about their comfort level in social settings. The way that the TSBI scale works is a 5 point scale with 1 being the least like the person and 5 identifying the most like the person. Based on that, the higher the score, the better the self-esteem; when the scores were summed up, they got a range of 0-80. In order to determine the influence from social media, the subjects were engaged in the SATAQ3 (Sociocultural Attitudes towards Appearance Scale Questionnaire 3). To explain how it works, it measures athletic pictures, overall media beliefs/stereotypes, social encounters/issues, and unrealistic goals media has placed upon society (being model-thin). It works as a 5-point scale like the TSBI did, only a scoring of 1 represented that the participants completely disagreed (contrary to that, 5 was definitely agree). However, the higher the score, the less happy and more insecure the participant was with their body.

Results: The variable of gender was considered and was taken into account; with that being said, the article report claims that they tested separate regression for male and female for self-esteem. The data indicated that females had greater results in wanting to be thin, as there was a significant correlation of their self-esteem and media influence levels. Self-esteem had significant impact in the overall women’s desire to become thinner. However, the report states that the influence of self-esteem did not stay significant when the social media came into play; it only became fully significant for males and their body-type desire.

From this study, we can see that social media has made an impact on the population of males and females, in the sense that it causes lower self-esteem and anxiety amongst its audience.

An additional source offers more data on the subject matter. A study was conducted to determine the relationship between low self-esteem and people with more exposure to higher social interactions.

Participants: College kids were the source of the subjects

Experiment: The report explained that the participants went through questions that asked about their habits on Facebook, their positive vs negative comparisons on Facebook, as well as their reflection on self-esteem. To measure self-esteem, the experimenters engaged in the Rosenburg Self-Esteem Scale. To explain that, it looks at someone’s self-reflection. In order to determine the subject social comparison, they were asked about their limits on if they pay more attention to people on Facebook who seem to be doing better, or worse. The data was collected on a 5 point scale with 1 answering no to the question of if people looked more at people who were doing worse (5 was that they did a lot).

Results: The results indicate the Facebook usage was negatively impacted with self-esteem, as the p value came to .02. As the source gave a variance table with more statistical values, we can see that social media has negatively shown the participants with worse self-esteem.

This goes to show that social media is not just for likes, but underlying it sadly effects its population. Males and females are losing self-esteem, as they feel like they need to look like that model on the cover of the magazine; otherwise they will not be seen as what a woman/man should be seen as. The sad truth is that everyone gets impacted by social media, because we set unrealistic expectations that everyone should look a certain way since society says so. I am glad that I researched this topic because I was curious as to how much social media affected people.

Here is another article I found insightful on the topic of social media and its negative factors:

Photo Sources:

http://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/buildingselfesteem/2015/07/how-social-media-messes-with-your-confidence/

http://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/speakingoutaboutselfinjury/2013/07/22/struggling-with-self-harm-and-low-self-esteem/

Cancer is the word you never want to hear come out of a doctor’s mouth after getting tests done. It is one of the top things that kills people each year and unfortunately, we all know someone who has cancer. Despite how healthy you are, there’s no way to avoid cancer in its entirety. For example, one would think that the only people who get lung cancer are those who smoke. That’s not true at all. A past teacher at my high school was one of the healthiest people around. She exercised and ate right, yet she was diagnosed and lost the battle to lung cancer! There are so many other cases like this with different types of cancer around the world. We’re always hearing about a new food or action that may cause cancer. It’s so hard to figure out what’s actually a possible cause of cancer and what’s just a fluke. In recent news though, a very shocking claim came out: meat causes cancer. A common American food causes cancer?! That’s the first thought that popped into my head when I read those headlines. So it is really true???

Before going into the headline itself, let’s look at the possibilities:

1. Meat eating could be directly causing cancer (direct causality)
2. Cancer could be causing meat eating (reverse causality)
3. A third variable like obesity could cause cancer and continued consumption of meat.
4. The correlation between meat consumption and cancer could be due to chance alone.

According to Cancer.org, on October 26, 2015, the World Health Organization announced their finding that meat consumption causes cancer. Now I know what you’re thinking when you see another discovery like this… all meat causes all types of cancer?! No, not exactly. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared that processed and red meat can cause cancer according to Stacy Simon’s article called World Health Organization Says Processed Meat Causes Cancer. To clarify, the International Agency for Research on Cancer is a group of highly claimed experts who are well known, according to Casey Dunlop’s article Processed meat and cancer- what you need to know. In the Cancer.org’s article by Stacy Simon, it further explains that processed meat has been declared as a carcinogen and that red meat is a possible carcinogen. For those of you who don’t know, a carcinogen is a substance that can likely cause cancer, according to dictionary.com.

Colon Cancer

Now let me explain to you what actually makes up the categories of processed and red meats. According to The International Agency for Research on Cancer study on THE LANCET Oncology, red meat refers to beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton, horse or goat meat. On the other hand, processed meats include pork or beef (2015). The scary part about this is that that’s a significant amount of meat! The study published by the IARC claims that the meat consumption is linked with colorectal cancer. According to Cancer.com, colorectal cancer is cancer developed in the colon or rectum.

According to THE LANCET Oncology, the study done by the IARC found that 7 of the 14 cohort studies found a positive correlation between red meat and colorectal cancer. They also found that 7 of the 15 informative cases saw a positive correlation between cancer and red meat again. When it came to processed meat, 12 of the 18 cohort studies and 6 of the 9 informative studies had a positive correlation between processed meat consumption and cancer. According to the article by Annette Gerritsen, titled Cohort and Case-Control Studies: Pro’s and Con’s, cohort studies start with a random group of people. Gerritsen explains that this group has no disease, so in this case, no cancer. After the group is selected, they are separated into groups who have been exposed to the cause and those who haven’t. They then watch the results unfold. Gerritsen then explains that a case-control study is one that selects people already with cancer and those without cancer. The group who doesn’t have cancer though has still been exposed to meat, they just haven’t gotten the disease (Gerritsen). We need to take into consideration that these studies found by the IARC were all observational. That being said, reserve causation and third variables should be taken into consideration. Since it is observational, you can’t definitely conclude that direct causation is the correlation between red meats/processed meats and cancer. The problem with this correlation is that it’s pretty unethical to have an experiment be conducted. Forcing certain people to eat a lot of meat just to see if they’ll get cancer is cruel and nothing anyone would want to be involved in. That’s one of the reasons why finding a cure to cancer is so hard.

Processed Meat

After this report was announced in late 2015, there was a misunderstanding as to if people should stop meat consumption. A few days following the announcement, the World Health Organization (WHO) put a statement out titled Links between processed meat and colorectal cancer. In the statement, it clarified that the report is encouraging people to decrease processed and red meat consumption, not stop it in its entirety. In that statement they also mentioned that they were experts in their field.

Red Meat

After the report was released, the meat industry lashed back in annoyance at the WHO for stating the correlation according to Forbes article by Geoff Williams. The article titled WHO’s Report On Processed Meat And Cancer Not Likely To Hurt Meat Industry explained that the companies (specifically, Personal Trainer Food) in the meat industry fired back claiming that they always make known to their customers there can be correlation to cancer, so don’t consume too much. The day after the announcement came out, Personal Trainer Food claimed they got no phone calls in relation to WHO’s announcement (Williams 2015).

In the end, the report announced by the IARC rejects the null hypothesis stating that nothing is going on, when in fact researchers say there is. We can’t fully say though that this statement is true, but we can say that there is definitely a small effect when it comes to meat consumption and colorectal cancer. Even with all that being said, it’s very hard to convince people to stop eating meat, especially when the correlation being causal can’t be determined 100% true. It’s a year later and people are still consuming meat!

Sources:

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/carcinogen

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/world-health-organization-says-processed-meat-causes-cancer

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms?cdrid

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470204515004441

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/10/26/processed-meat-and-cancer-what-you-need-to-know/

http://www.theanalysisfactor.com/cohort-and-case-control-studies-pros-and-cons/

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2015/processed-meat-cancer/en/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwilliams/2015/10/29/the-whos-report-on-processed-meat-and-cancer-not-likely-to-hurt-the-meat-industry/#3ce3ba9f4072

Photo Sources:

Photo 1: http://www.medicinenet.com/colon_cancer/page2.htm

Photo 2: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/processed-meat-bad/

Photo 3: https://www.mvppt.com/red-meat-is-not-the-enemy/