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?

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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.

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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!

I have never been much of a milk drinker because I unfortunately am lactose intolerant.  Aside from that though, I never really liked the taste anyways.  My cousin on the other hand would always have a glass of milk with every single meal and my Mimi would always say “You’re going to be so big and strong if you keep drinking all this milk!”  It is a commonly held believe among most humans that drinking milk is a good source of calcium and beneficial to your bone growth, and maybe that is true, but what if milk actually is causing you harm and you didn’t even realize it?

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Harvard College ran a study to try to find out if a high consumption of milk lead to increases in the likelihood of developing prostate cancer in males.  The null hypothesis would be that drinking milk has no affect on a male’s chances of contracting prostate cancer and the alternative hypothesis would be that an high consumption of milk can lead to an increase in the likelihood of contracting prostate cancer.  This study consisted of more than 20,000 men over a course of eleven years, making the results of this study very unlikely to be due to chance based on the sheer size of the observational study.  They ended up finding a link between the amount of calcium consumed, not just the amount of milk consumed.  Out of the group of male participants, the men who drank no milk were two times less likely to acquire prostate cancer than the men who drank around two or more glasses of milk each day. That surely is a staggering difference.  After what I assume to be a meta-analysis of their findings, Harvard College expanded their argument that the problem lies within the amount of calcium a man consumes.  A more shocking development in their study was that the man who had been reported to be consuming the most milk of all the men in the study which equated to around 2,000 milligrams of calcium daily was not only twice as likely of contracting prostate cancer, but actually was twice as likely to contract fatal prostate cancer rather than male milk-drinkers who were consuming less calcium than that.  Although these statistics are striking, Harvard College even agrees that more research needs to be conducted before reaching a final decision, but it is definitely wise to keep watch on your amount of calcium intake a day if you are a male.  Harvard was not the first institution to look into the idea that drinking too much milk can cause prostate cancer.  The World Cancer Research Fund published an extensive report on prostate cancer which included studies that were done exactly on this topic.  Although I could not understand most of the science talk they used in the journal I was able to pull out the essential information regarding the amount of studies and their results.  There were 15 in total that focused on the link between calcium intake via milk and prostate cancer, of those 15 studies 13 of them came back positive for a link between the two things.  These particular studies broke down the numbers into a chart and deduced that a male’s chances of developing prostate cancer increased per every 400mg of calcium that were consumed a day.  As of right now there is not a known mechanism for why drinking too much calcium can cause an increased chance of developing prostate cancer, but just because there is not a mechanism for something, does not mean it isn’t true.  Surely many more tests need to be done in order to say for certain if this is a concern every man should start thinking about, but this connection could be much like the affects of smoking as discussed in class in which we did not see that excessive tobacco use caused lung cancer until about 40 years down the road.  It could be that we will not see the affects of excessive milk drinking for males until way down the road.

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I am not saying these studies have enough evidence to prove that if you are a male you should go to your mini fridge and throw out every single bottle of milk or dairy product you have in your possession and go completely cold turkey, but I do think the evidence that is there is substantial enough to be able to role out the null hypothesis and conclude something is definitely going on here,  Every study has the possibility of being due to chance and that could very well be the case when it comes to this topic, but as a rational person I would the threat is present enough that I would say that if you are a male, lessening your intake of calcium, could not do any harm.

I am utterly obsessed with animals of all kinds, but especially dogs.  Loving dogs is something I believe a lot of us can relate to!  I always ask find myself wondering what the life of a dog would be like, specifically when I am stressed out of my mind running around doing a million things at once, while my sweet pups are snoozing away in their dog beds.  For as long as I can remember, I have always been fed the same fact time and time again that a day in the life of a dog would be much different than that of a human for obvious reasons, but also because they apparently only could see things in black and white or grey-scale.  Even as a child, I always had a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that animals could only see black and white and grey considering they are anatomically pretty similar to humans and other animals that see a whole color spectrum.  Needless to say, that idea never sat well with me and I never truly entirely believed it.

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Apparently I was right to not believe that because scientist Jay Neitz and a handful of Russian Scientists have proved otherwise.  Jay Neitz carried out a variety of simple studies to see if dogs could actually see in color or not.  It turns out there do have a much wider array of colors that they are capable of seeing, but they still cannot see the entire color spectrum that humans do.  The Russian scientists took the reigns shortly after that, using a test involving eight dogs and four differently colored pieces of paper that were placed in front of a locked boxes with food in them.  The null hypothesis in this case would be that dogs strictly only see in grey-scale and nothing more.  Whereas, the alternative hypothesis would be that dogs have a much large color spectrum than we ever knew before. They wanted the animal to make a connection between a color and a reward for picking that color, therefore they continuously put the dark yellow colored piece of paper in front of the box containing not normal dog food, but a piece of meat.  By doing so repeatedly, the dog was able to mentally comprehend that dark yellow paper meant meat and any other color meant regular food. After all, what pup wouldn’t want the meat over the normal dog food?  I found the study even more well conducted when I noticed they checked for a very important confounding third variable of it the dog was choosing that paper due to the actual association with seeing the dark yellow color or because of the brightness of the colored paper itself.  This factor could have really skewed their data which is why it was crucial for them to test it.  The Russian Scientists decided to put a very contrasting color of dark blue as a choice and a light yellow color as a choice to prove if the dogs choices were color based or light based.  The dogs still picked the yellow paper which meant that it’s choices were most definitely colored based.  Their results proved that the dogs most definitely could differentiate between certain colors because they made color based decisions more than 70 percent of the time.  Along with the experiments of the Russian Scientists, an experiment by the University of Santa Barbara in 1989 ran an experiment regarding dogs vision.  Through the tests run on the three dogs, they discovered that dogs have two color-sensitive cones in dogs’ eyes that actually allow them to see in color and not strictly black and white.  There is a chance that this conclusion could be false positive or be due to chance but since there has a been a variety of studies on this topic that all deduce the same results as well as an electroretinography test that proved the cones existence, it is unlikely that these results are due to chance and thus the null hypothesis can be ruled out.  This certain article even expressed the idea that dogs could most likely be given a full sighted color spectrum like humans, but no one has tried it at this point in time.

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I am not sure why, but something about knowing dogs can see the world in a colorful and vibrant way makes me a little happier inside because dog’s bring so much happiness and color the world on their own, I’d hate if they could not see it for themselves.  I’m starting to think living a dog’s life is sounding better and better.

I have always been a huge fan of the show Spongebob Squarepants. I mean after all who couldn’t love this adorable little sponge?

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My aunt despises the show and would not let her kids watch it for the life of her.  She proclaimed that the show “gives kids ADHD” and I nearly laughed in her face because in my mind there was no mechanism or causation for thinking that, after-all, my sister and I had been watching the show since we were babies.  Heck, we literally told time via SpongeBbob episodes, and we turned out fine and neither of us suffer from ADHD. As I was deciding what to write about, I thought this would be an interesting question to investigate because my aunt had to of heard this accusation from somewhere.  It turns out there actually was a study done by a psychologist at the University of Virginia.  The head and author of this study, psychologist Angeline Lillard, randomly allocated sixty 4 year old and or preschool aged children to three different groups to perform three different tasks.  Each group had the children doing a different task than the other group, the first group had to watch a program of SpongeBob Squarepants, the second group was to watch the educational program Caillou, and the last group was just told to draw. In my opinion,there is no need for the third grouping of children whom are drawing because to me this experiment only calls for a control group and an experimental group.  Directly after the activities the children were assigned, they were told to perform four different tasks there were put in place to measure their impulsiveness and ability to recall information to see if watching a faster paced television program really would have an affect or not on a child.  The test to measure their impulsiveness was how long they were able to resist a snack and they were also told to solve some puzzles.  The results were immediately recognizable to Angeline Lillard where the children who had watched SpongeBob did significantly worse on the assessment.  I think this experiment was done rather well, but it is obvious there are some confounding third variables that are playing a huge role in the outcome of this experiment which Angeline Lillard even explicitly mentions in her results.  The frantic pace of many children cartoons, specifically SpongeBob, cause the childrens’ minds to go a little haywire trying to make connections to real world life events they have experienced, but the events in SpongeBob are typically unrealistic or not something they have experienced before which makes it hard to comprehend.

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As far as SpongeBob giving kids ADHD, it is pretty safe to say that is not accurate.  I think these results could very well be a false positive due to the fact that there are little other studies purely directed towards such a specific analysis.  Also, it is obvious that educational programming would present a better outcome educationally for children rather than cartoon.  Also this particular article sheds light on the fact that the program SpongeBob is not intended for a four year old audience but more of a six to eleven year old audience therefore it makes sense why the show would have a negative/confusing affect on children below that age range. I do not think it matters what program the child is watching, it is more so the fact of how much television the child is watching that can wreak havoc on their intelligence level or susceptibility to ADHD or any other disorder.

Time and time again there are always a plethora of TV commercials, magazine ads, radio station ads, etc constantly promoting the next best thing.  This is especially true when it comes to toothbrushes or toothpastes.  I for one am a normal toothbrush kind of gal, but I have seen a lot of people who use electric toothbrushes.  It always seemed like the electric toothbrush would be more detrimental to your oral health because it is essentially grinding off all your enamel, at least that is what thought pops into my head when I think about it, but what if using an electric toothbrush actually proves to increase your oral health more than a regular toothbrush?  I am all about oral hygiene therefore I wanted to do some research.

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The initial post I found was from consumerreports.org which is basically consumer reports and opinions of a wide array of products.  This website itself provided some information, but ultimately led me to my most factual and engaging article from cochrane.org  where a study was conducted to compare the two.  The Cochrane Oral Health Group was the organization to run all these studies which in total included not one study, but over 50 studies, generating a total involvement of around 5,000 participants which is a pretty substantial amount of people thus insinuating that whatever the outcome they deduce from their experiments always could be do to chance, but is it very unlikely considering the amount of people involved and the fact that this is a randomized control trial.  The Cochrane Oral Health Group gave half of the participants a normal toothbrush and the other half an electric toothbrush which successfully creates a control group (participants using the normal toothbrushes) and an experimental group (participants using the electric toothbrush).  The null hypothesis proposed here would be that neither the electric or the normal toothbrush has more of an advantage than the other when it comes to oral hygiene and health.  On the other hand, the alternative hypothesis would be that the electric toothbrush does have an edge over the normal tooth brush.  Ultimately, through their multitude of studies, The Cochrane Oral Health Group seemed to side with the alternative hypothesis due to their results exclaiming a 21% decline in the amount of plaque present on teeth and gums when using an electric toothbrush rather than a normal one for a few months.  Although this may seem like substantial evidence to ditch your normal average joe toothbrush for a brand spanking new electric one, you may want to think twice before doing so.  There are a variety of confounding third variables that could be playing a part in the results The Cochrane Oral Health Group found.  For instance, they clearly state that more than half of the experiments were done with adults and with a very specific electric toothbrush.  These results remind me a lot of the example Andrew talked about in class regarding if sugary drinks, like soda, cause weight gain.  The study for that hypothesis was done exceptionally well and involved a high volume of participants, but the results were extremely specific to dutch children.  Just because it made dutch children gain weight does not mean it makes everyone gain weight much like here.  Just because this specific electric toothbrush reduces plaque buildup for adults after a few months does not mean it reduce plaque for everybody.  Electric toothbrushes as well as normal toothbrushes, like I thought as one of my first statements in this blog, can cause an immense amount of damage to the enamel of your teeth when to aggressively or excessively brushing.

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Sure there are some benefits when it comes to using an electric toothbrush rather than a normal toothbrush, but when put in perspective with the shared cons electric toothbrushes and normal toothbrushes produce, in my opinion their effectiveness becomes equal. There is not enough evidence to say for sure which exceeds the other, but it is safe to say there is definitely something going on here.  Although there are some confound third variables to take into account when focusing on the results of the study, the numbers are pretty substantial. Therefore,if you are someone who is extremely focused on oral health and hygiene, it may not be a bad idea to go out and get yourself an electric toothbrush, the worst it can do is work just as well as a normal toothbrush.

Once upon a time, my family bought my dad a mini potbelly pig for Christmas because he had always wanted one and we found an adorable little black potbelly piggy who was in need of a new home so we thought what the hell let’s do it!  Our house has a lot of land for the pig to graze and roam and we had a lot of love to give so we adopted her. Her name was Bacon (Name credits to my dad not me). We originally had her pet set up in the corner of our living room because she was so tiny. Well, turns out there’s no such thing a teacup pig, so she grew to be rather large so we ended up having to move her bed to our basement in order for her to have more room to roam around when she had to be inside.  The basement had to be cleaned regularly to ensure her area was not filthy and was an enjoyable area for her to be in.  My mom would use bleach to clean the concrete because nothing else seemed to be cleaning it effectively enough.  I started to notice that everytime once we would be done cleaning the pig’s living area and let her back in, she would start charging at people and running around frantically and simply acting strange.  My family and I were so puzzled but we just attributed it to her having a lot of energy since she was young and her charging was probably to play.   I started noticing her behavior more and more as we kept cleaning the room and I started thinking she was not being playful afterall, but that the cleaning products, specifically the bleach was making her go crazy. I was not sure how to explain why, but I just noticed when I was around the scent of bleach too long I actually started getting lightheaded and feeling weird myself so I thought maybe the bleach was having an affect on our little piggy as well.  I told my mom to stop using the bleach and try something else, and she stopped acting weird after us cleaning her habitat.  This whole thing had me thinking, okay so maybe the bleach is causing this, but why? How?

Turns out I am not crazy and that it actually was possible the bleach was the cause of her strange behavior.  As stated in this article by Georgianna Lowery, bleach can severely affect animals and a lot of caring pet owners do not even realize it because it is a common household cleaning object.  She states that it can cause animals to face a lot of side effects such as vomiting and in my opinion their strange behavior can probably be attributed to feeling ill.  Most sites and articles I have found just simply say bleach is harmful to use to clean your animals things and that it can cause them to become very ill.  It is possible that this hypothesis is simply due to chance or some confounding third variable such as other cleaning products being used, the type of animal, or how small the room is.  There is not enough evidence to prove that bleach does indeed affect animals when you use it to clean but I think if there is any chance that is could be harming your animal it is best to just do away with using it completely and be aware of if bleach is contained in any other cleaning products you are using for your animals area or for your home in general.  It is a simple thing to do in order to ensure your animals are safe and healthy.

If someone wanted to test this hypothesis that using bleach can cause harm for your animals even if they do not ingest it, one could take a group of animals and randomly allocated them into two separate groups.  They could clean a habitat with bleach and place one group of animals in there and place the other group of animals in a normal room and study how they react or any health issues they begin to show.  Obviously though that is extremely unethical and there is no way someone would volunteer their pet to undergo such tests because if it might be dangerous I personally would not want to put my pet at risk.  I think for that reason not many, if any experiments will ever come into play regarding this issue, I think it is safe to say just to avoid using bleach to clean your pets areas just in case it is causing health issues.

On a happier note, enjoy these pictures of how cute she is.

Ever been in a new relationship and you actually feel yourself craving to be around that person and when you’re not you feel like you’re going through some kind of withdrawl? Well, you just might be.  According to this CNN article, by Sheril Kirshenbaum, you brain produces the hormone dopamine and excretes it during a passionate kiss.  Dopamine is the same hormone that is directly linked to narcotic use and to your brains reward system causing you to feel full of happiness and like you are on cloud nine when secreted.  Aside from the actual secretion of hormones produced by kissing, their are electrical signals that are sent throughout your body when engaged in a kiss with someone you find attractive.  For instance according to Kirshenbaum, the lips are one of the most sensitive organs on your body with more than a handful of nerve endings much like how the tips of your fingers contain a bushel of nerve endings which is why they are so sensitive.  Since the lips are so sensitive, they send off a lot of signals when touched or in this case kissed which throws your body into a whirlwind of electrical impulses and emotions that in turn create a feeling of a natural high as stated in the article, much like the feeling you obtain after a rigorous exercise.

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Why is this relevant do you ask? Well, because if a kiss reeks that much havoc on your body alone it must have some kind of significance in how you portray people or your amount of attraction to someone else.  Kissing is like our own little defense mechanism against deciding if someone is predator or a friend.  Okay, maybe that is a little extreme, but according to the article, a passionate kiss, no matter the outcomes, proves as an indicator of if we as a human being are attracted to the other person and view them in a romantic sense worth pursing or if we simply are entirely turned off and need to run while we can.  Most of the studies in this particular article are based upon the attractive of one person to another based off of scents and pheromones which could be the foundation for why you would want to engage in a passionate kiss with someone in the first place.  With that being said, I do not think there is enough evidence to say undoubtedly that kissing is addictive but the evidence is consistent with this theory.  I think an effective experiment would be to test the dopamine measurements of someone normally, and then when they are being rewarded with some kind of stimuli other than a kiss, and finally when they are being rewarded with a passionate kiss.  There are some confounding third variables such as amount of attraction, emotional and mental connection, mood, etc that can all lead to disrupting the study therefore there is always a possibility that this may all be due to chance.

Logically if there is a chance kissing leads to excessive dopamine secretion which can cause a feeling of elation, then kiss on Penn State!

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Greetings All,

My name is Melanie Weltner and I am a freshman here at Penn State and am currently undecided.  I am very open minded but also extremely indecisive.  Additionally, I have this really bad habit of trying to convince myself I like things that I just do not like simply because well, I want to like them. For instance I LOVE onions, I mean I love those bad boys and I LOVE cheese so naturally when I came to realize that French Onion Soup existed I wanted to like it.  I ordered my first cup of french onion soup from Panera Bread because I had worked there and was on break.  To my surprise I completely despised the taste and was immediately frustrated because I thought “Well I like onions and I like cheese I NEED TO LIKE FRENCH ONION SOUP RIGHT??!?!!”

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I ended up continually trying to eat it and eventually one day I started to enjoy it.  Obviously I was thrilled and have tried to make myself like many things that I desired to like since then, but unfortunately there are some thing I cannot even force myself to enjoy.  Turns out science is one of those things. I literally signed up for this class for two reasons the first reason is because my adviser on orientation day saying “This is a science class for people who do not like science.” Automatically I thought dang this class will be right on the money for me then and even if it is not I can just suffer through for the semester. The other reasoning was when I was reading the course description I was curious if this class would challenge me intellectually and provide me with the answer of why which I always wanted when it came to science.  To my surprise, this class has actually made me hate science less already and we’ve only had a few classes.  I think what caused my dislike for science was how clear cut all my science classes were through middle school and high school.  There was never any critical thinking involved just constant note taking and quizzes about things I did not even retain or sometimes even understand completely.  There was never any reasoning on why or how or what led up to the discovery in science, it was more so this is the answer because this is the answer which does not compute well with me.  My whole science career,whether it was chemistry or earth science, I never felt it was fully explained and I was not able to grasp the concepts and when I would ask for assistance or more explanation, I’d get a more detailed but ultimately similar response of the answer is this because it just is.  Basically I do not plan on going into any kind of science field, not only cause of past experiences, but mostly because at the end of the day I am much stronger when it comes to English or the arts.  I actually took a test in high school that tells you if you’re right brained or left brained or maybe in between.  I for one tended to be more right brained which means I am more inclined to excel in areas like the arts or English and tend to be more creative and intuitive.  Whereas left brained people are more logical and calculated, not to mention better at math and science. There is more information and banter between if this theory is a myth or not, either way it helps me justify more to myself on why science and I may not have any chemistry.