Metamorphosis

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could guarantee yourself that you would remember everything for the next test from that last minute, right before class cramming session?

With exams just around the corner, that sounds like a wish come true, and maybe some day it can be possible to boost your memory with a single pill. However, do not get your hopes up, the use for this memory boosting pill will be mainly for Alzheimer patients, and not for students who forgot to study.

Currently, the “scientific community may be on step closer” (Scientificdaily.com) to developing just such a memory boosting drug. On May 7^th 2010, J. David Sweatt, University of Alabama, published an editorial in the Universities Science journal, announcing that the drug, histone deacetylase inhibitor, was showing “great promise in stopping memory loss” (Scientificdaily.com), it has also demonstrated in animal models the boosting of formation of memory.

So what is this drug? Histone deacetylase are defined as enzymes, which remove an acetyl group from the histones, which in turn allows the histones to bind DNA and prevent gene transcriptions. For anyone who is just as lost as I was, histones are the major structural proteins of chromosomes, and are closely associated with DNA molecules. So far, histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDI) have been used in cancer treatment and therapy. This is because the HDIs are able to block angiogenesis and arrest cell growth, basically stopping the development of the tumor.

Scientists in laboratories have studied the drug and its potential therapeutic effect for Alzheimer disease for around 10 years. However, the drugs affect on memory has only been successful and studied in experiments with mice so far. Further research is required by scientists in order to understand the full potential of this drug, and also this research could go further for scientists in enabling them to comprehend the complexity of the human memory better. Knowing the long process and time it takes for a drug to enter the market, it may take several years before this drug will be ready. Its main use will be to aid Alzheimer patients with memory boosting, so I doubt there will ever be any easy way out of studying for high school exams.

Sources:http://www.web-books.com/MoBio/Free/Ch3D1.htm

http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Histone_Protein_Structure.html

http://www.biochem.northwestern.edu/holmgren/Glossary/Definitions/Def-H/histone_deacetylase.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6606315.stm

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11914636

http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=24242

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20100507/Closer-to-understanding-age-related-memory-loss-and-drug-to-boost-memory.aspx

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100506141557.htm

Life is full of choices. From minor choice of “Should I get Cold Stone or Dairy Queen for ice cream?” to important choice of “Should I do IB Diploma or AP in high school year?” (which was quite an important choice for me…). Likewise, various choices are made in everyday life. In fact, there are hundreds and millions of choices that have to be made during life time. But how about when you are left with this kind of choice: Should I eat egg tart or chocolate muffin or carrot cake or chocolate chip cookie or ice cream or drink tea latte or ice coffee or lemonade for dessert? 

There is a famous jam study conducted by Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University and the author of “The Art of Choosing,” in 1995.

In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.

Here’s the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.

Let’s back off and think about the fundamental problem these customers faced: difficulty of choice. Why is making a choice extremely hard? Even Edison had to make a choice when he was inventing a light bulb after few times of failure: Should I continue trying? It is because of the fear that whatever is selected, the other option would have been better. This is what economists call opportunity cost, which is defined as the next best choice forgone. Problem of opportunity cost rises from choice. Without choice, there will be no opportunity cost. Nevertheless, opportunity cost doesn’t only apply to economics; it applies to every choice one makes. In other words, one will have to consider opportunity cost because one wants to make the best choice. You don’t want to intentionally pick D even though you know that A is the answer for the number 16 of chemistry multiple question, right? This will be definitely going against one’s own best interest.

Yet, an overload of options may actually paralyze people or push them into decisions that are against their own best interest. Consequently, more is less. That is, more choice leads to less satisfaction or fulfillment or happiness. The optimal amount of choice lies somewhere in between infinity and very little, and that optimum depends on context and culture.

Let’s think about this: under what circumstances can one make the best choice? As professor Iyengar states, the culture is one of the factors. I found this very interesting, as a Korean who is going to American School in China.

When I went to restaurants in elementary school, my parents usually ‘told’ me where to sit down, next to mom or dad. Only when I was a middle school student, my parents asked me where I wanted to sit. If I had to choose where to sit down when I was in elementary school, I would have been somehow pressured by the following consequences. However, I found out that American parents actually give their children choices regarding the seating place. One day afternoon, I was eating lunch with my friend. I saw a girl, who looked like about 10 years old, coming into the restaurant with her parents. They ‘chose’ the table that was next to mine, and then her parents asked their child, “where do you want to sit?” I found that surprising because I wasn’t offered the same thing when I was about that age. It seemed that the girl was used to making those kinds of choices.

There is a study about how much the children enjoy themselves playing with card when they were given the choice of picking cards and or when they were told by their moms which card to choose. The result came out to be that Japanese kids were happier when their mom told them what to choose, but American kids were more satisfied when they had the choice to pick the cards.

From these examples, it does seem that culture shapes the nature of choices. In other words, for firms that are operating in different countries, they would have to consider the culture of different countries when marketing a certain product. However, firms have to be aware that although optimal amount of choices are affected by cultures, the amount of choices that is offered cannot be too much: having too much is same as having too little.

Works Cited

Postrel, Virginia. “Book Review – The Art of Choosing – By Sheena Iyengar – Review – NYTimes.com.” The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 25 May 2010. Web. 25 May 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/books/review/Postrel-t.html?pagewanted=1.

Tugend, Alina. “Shortcuts – The Paralyzing Problem of Too Many Choices – NYTimes.com.” The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 26 Feb. 2010. Web. 25 May 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/your-money/27shortcuts.html>.

Have you ever heard a song and gone, “Oh it’s got to be by (insert name of artist here)”? I know I have. This is because every artist has something that distinguishes them for who they are, whether it be their voice, vocal style, musical style, or some other personal quirk. Now what would you say if someone then told you, “No, it was written by a computer program.”?

http://www.carlmussmannpianist.com/computer%20music%20photo%20test%2001.JPG

Enter Emily Howell.

Emily Howell, who released “her” debut album through Centaur Records in February, is a computer program written by Professor David Cope of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The creation of this particular program was the result of almost three decades of work by Professor Cope in musical artificial intelligence.

Emily Howell’s predecessor, the “Experiments in Musical Intelligence” or EMI (prounounced “Emmy”), was a data-driven composition program which was capable of analyzing a database of musical works and replicating the styles represented there in its own creations. If the input selection were of music of a similar style or by a similar artist, the computer would pick up on the distinctions which defined this particular selection of music and create new pieces which resembled those used as input. The result was a system which could essentially analyze almost any composer, whether it be their creator Cope himself or one of the classical greats like Bach or Beethoven, and compose a piece that sounded just like that composer had written it himself.

Professor David Cope of UCSC

From EMI arose Emily Howell. Instead of feeding Emily Howell old compositions, Cope took EMI’s compositions and inputted them into Emily Howell, creating her own distinct style. Cope also made Howell one notch more advanced than EMI by creating a system which would allow her to take feedback from the audience and alter her compositions accordingly in order to create pieces which suited Cope’s taste (or those of anyone else who responded).

Needless to say, EMI and Howell created quite a stir in both the scientific community as well as the musical community. On one hand, the academic community greatly embraced Cope’s work. “Extremely positive feedback came from the science community,” Cope said. “They really seemed to feel that my work has had great potential in many areas other than just music.” The musical community, however, had a completely different reaction. According to Cope, “Most musicians, academic or composers, have always held this idea that the creation of music is innately human, and somehow this computer program was a threat in some way to that unique human aspect of creation.” According to a Times Report, come composers and orchestras have even refused to play her works, and even those who were interested were help back by their agents due to the controversy surrounding Cope’s programs.

Personally, I can understand the outrage EMI and Emily Howell were met with on the musical side. As a musician myself, I find it rather ridiculous that the works of the greats can be simply be analyzed by a computer and similar compositions can be created just like that. However at the same time, I think that Cope’s work has opened up huge potential in both science and music.

The cover of Emily Howell's debut album, From Darkness, Light.

On the science side, this is a great advancement in both computer programming and artificial intelligence. Creating a system which can analyze specific input and utilize patterns found in creating new forms of output is a huge step towards creating working systems capable of learning and functioning without specifically pre-programmed parameters.

On the music side, the possibility of creating whole new classical works resembling those of the greatest composers of all time actually excites me to some level, although it is a strange and somewhat disturbing concept. After all, many of history’s greatest composers are no longer with us, therefore we are essentially limited to the works that they have left us in their lifetime. With a system like EMI, the unique styles of the greats would be able to live on in new compositions.

The controversy, however, lives on. Whether you choose to be a fan of Emily Howell or not, there is no denying the great contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence that Cope’s three decades of work have made. So, what’s your take?

According to Psychology and Health, everyone has their own set amount of willpower. Basically, just like the title says, use up some willpower, and you’ll only have a set amount left.

Professor Kathleen Martin Ginis at the Mc Master University lead a research regarding how “Cognitive tasks, as well as emotional tasks such as regulating your emotions, can deplete your self-regulatory capacity to exercise,” as stated by the professor herself. Her and another professor managed to test this claim by giving volunteers a “Stroop Test”, which is where the person is instructed to say the color of a word, instead of the word itself. For example, is the word shown was “red”, the volunteer was to say “black”, instead of “red”. After this cognitive task depleted the volunteer’s capacity, just as in their claim, the volunteers were instructed to exercise. These volunteers who were put under the cognitive task were not able to exercise as much as those who weren’t. Their experiment successfully showed the truth behind her claim.

However, according to Professor Martin Ginis, using up your willpower is not the end of your day. there are ways to “rejuvenate” your willpower. One of the best ways is to listen to music. Now I know why so many students listen to music while doing homework. My parents always thought that music was distracting and would make me work slower, but now there actually is a scientific explanation for it.

Also, just like working out to strengthen your muscles, you can also “work out” your willpower! Muscles can be strengthened by lifting weights, running, and doing sports. Willpower on the other hand, can be strengthened by doing things that would go agaisnt what you would normally do. For example, when watching a funny movie, try not to laugh, or when watching a sad movie, try not to cry. Basically, training your willpower requires practice of self-control.

Come to think of it, this quantitative willpower theory also goes with the blog posts that Shao Yan and Min made about multitasking. Multitasking requires our willpower to be split among many jobs, thus allowing for lesser willpower for each job, making the overall quality of the job much lower.

An overall increase in willpowerwill require training, but that training also uses up your willpower. In order to replenish your willpower, you have to spend time listening to music and other relaxing activities. Once you have more overall willpower, you will have the ability to tackle more and more difficult tasks. Its kinda like a game. Never thought that willpower could be quantified and viewed in this way before.

Works Cited:

AAMODT, SANDRA, and SAM WANG. “Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind – New York Times.” The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.

“Rough Day At Work? You Won’t Feel Like Exercising.” Science Daily: News & Articles in Science, Health, Environment & Technology. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2010. <http://www.sciencedaily.com/relea

SAT is coming up. Final Exam is right around the corner. Both of this need us to memorize TONES and TONES of stuff…vocabs….formula……how things work and etc etc….

http://davidputmanlive.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/stressed-out1.jpg

Whenever I know I need to memorize something I just spaz out. For some reason I have a really bad memory and I just can’t remember a thing if I force myself to memorize it. With that thought in mind I wanted to find out how does the brain work when we do memorization.

Princeton’s researcher Kenneth Norman, an assistant psychology professor and by Sean Polyn, who earned his Ph.D in psychology from Princeton in 2005 suggest that memory doesn’t work like a file keeper.  The way memory function can be describe more as remembering the emotion that something occured to you.

“When we are in a certain situation, certain things attract our attention and generate emotions, thoughts etc. When we are recalling something we revisit in our imagination that certain situation and the brain generates the same emotions, thoughts etc. once again” (http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-Does-Memory-Work-15561.shtml)

This article suggest that when we try to remember something that happend in that past our brain often take us back to that moment and that is how we remember it. Put in the TOK aspect of it this shows how emotional is a strong way of knowing. Our brain processes and memorize stuff the fastest through generate our emotion.

Norman. “If you can get yourself into the mindset that you were in during the event you’re trying to remember, that will allow you to remember specific details.

http://news.softpedia.com/images/news2/Cum-functioneaza-memoria-2.jpg

This image suggest the part of our brain that has the most oxygen flowing during memorzation. Therefore it might suggest why people memorize the best through oral and visual because it activate our brain more. This also got me thinking…Will drinking a lot of water help? LOL….

After understanding more of how our brain function I think it is easier to understand why is it so hard to remember all the SAT vocabs…or all these IB terms… Because we occur almost no emotion during it. If any, they are usually negavtive emotion and perhaps that doesn’t help us much. That also explain why we usually remember funny jokes even from long time ago becasue those thing provoke our emotion.

Then it get me to think again… If one day the ETS or the collegeboard can somehow make memorization into something fun, something people can enjoy. Will the whole memorize vocab thing be more efficient and enjoyable?

I think so.

Citation:

“Brain Imaging Identifies Best Memorization Strategies.” Science Daily: News & Articles in Science, Health, Environment & Technology. 10 Aug. 2006. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060809082610.htm>.

“How Does Memory Work? – What Does the Brain Do When We Recall Something? – Softpedia.” Latest News – Softpedia. Vlad Tarko, 27 Dec. 2005. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. <http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-Does-Memory-Work-15561.shtml>.

“Strategies to Improve Memorization.” Suite101.com: Online Magazine and Writers’ Network. 12 Apr. 2008. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. <http://www.suite101.com/blog/joni188/strategies_to_improve_memorization>.

Everyone has heard the saying that “money can’t buy happiness”, and therefore stop getting caught up in the material things of the world. But what if it wasn’t true? What if you can buy happiness with the wads of cash in your pocket at the very moment? Well, let’s find out!

Serotonin is a monoamine neurotransmitter that is usually located in the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system in humans. It is an organic compound with the chemical formula: C10H12N2O. About eighty percent of serotonin is in the gut and it is used to regulate intestinal movements. The other twenty percent is in serotonergic neurons in the Central Nervous System, regulating mood, appetite, sleep, muscle contraction and some cognitive functions like memory and learning.

When Serotonin levels are decreased in a person’s brain, the person might become depressed or gloomy. Serotonin travels through different regions of the brain through “pathways”. Different regions of the brain react with serotonin neurons differently. Serotonin neurons affect mood when it is in the hippocampus and other limbic areas like the amygdala. Electrical impulses from the Raphe nucleus causes the release of serotonin receptors. These are located on a neigbouring neuron. The serotonin released will then bind to the serotonin receptors, causing a change in the electrical properties.

Serotonin do not bind to the serotonin receptors forever. They are only bound for a limited amount of time before special proteins called Transporters transports Serotonin back to the neurons. This is why nobody is happy all the time. Some ways in which a person can reduce his/her serotonin level would be exhaustion, stress, sleep-deprivation, alcohol, caffeine, lack of exercise, etc. All these could lead to a decrease in moods and emotions.

Serotonin can be increased naturally by more exposure to sunlight, exercise and getting a healthy and balanced diet. When Serotonin levels are increased, it can increase our tolerance of pain, helps us fall asleep, increase mental alertness, and most of all, gives us a sense of well-being. In other words, makes us happy!

Now to the point of this article:

There are ways in which a person can increase serotonin levels artificially. Protein is very effective in increasing serotonin production. Foods like bread, rice, crackers that are considered carbohydrates are important for serotonin production. This is because they trigger the release of insulin into the blood stream, and insulin all the amino acids in the blood except for tryptophan. Because there are no competing amino acids left, Tryptophan will flood the brain and then converted into serotonin.

Folic acid, B vitamins and vitamin C are all participants in the process of serotonin production. Supplements you can buy that contain these nutrients can help increase serotonin levels. Also, fruits like oranges, lemons, strawberries, raspberries, etc, all contain vitamin C and B.

Drugs like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil are all part of the antidepressant family. What they do is increase the amount of time in which serotonin is bound to the serotonin receptors. This way, the affect of serotonin on a person’s mood is prolonged.

Some drugs not only increase the level of serotonin production or slow the process in which Transporters unbind serotonin from the serotonin receptors, it can produce artificial serotonin that can bind directly to the natural serotonin receptors! Morphine and Heroine are examples of these drugs. They are strong analgesics meant to ease pain. Because drugs like morphine and heroine create an artificial sense of “happiness”, it is very easy for the person taking them to be addicted.

So the next time someone tells you money can’t buy happiness, send them out for some fruits and carbohydrates with money.

Bibliography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin

http://hubpages.com/hub/What-Lowers-Serotonin-Levels

http://www.integrativepsychiatry.net/serotonin.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/serotonin

http://www.eskimo.com/~tla/Serotonin.htm

“Alcohol makes people stupid!”

“Alcohol damages your liver!”

“Alcohol doesn’t fix your problems!”

I think in my life, I’ve heard that alcohol is VERY damaging in general to people’s health about a million times already, it causes severe liver damages and more accidents tend to happen when people drink and drive, blah blah blah. But is that REALLY true?

So I decided to do some research of my own, to find out about the truth of alcohol. I typed, “Alcohol and Health” on google.com and slowly scrolled down the page. SUDDENLY! I see that one of the headings is “Alcohol’s Good for you? Some Scientist Doubt it” For my entire life, I’ve only thought that alcohol is harmful in everyway, turns out it can also be beneficial.

As I researched more on this topic, I discovered that there are two sides of alcohol.

First, the BAD side. (What people generally think of alcohol)
Alcohol is infamous for its negative effects. The short term effects of alcohol ranges from feeling relaxed and reduced concentration to aggressive behavior and risks of accident. On the other hand, the long term effects of alcohol can be more risks of cancer and liver damage. The negative effects of alcohol seems to go on and on. Cancer, hyperglycermia, kidney diseases, liver diseases. Click here for more information

Now, the GOOD side of alcohol.
To my surprise, the positive effects of alcohol is just as long as the negative effects. According to the Alcohol and Health site, moderate drinking can be “beneficial in reducing or preventing diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, bone fractures…” the list goes on. The most important benefit of alchol is that it reduces the risks of heart attacks, which occur when the blood supply to a part of the heart becomes interrupted, causing the heart tissue at that area to die. Alcohol helps by improving the blood lipid profile and decreasing blood clotting. It increases HDL (good) cholesterol and decreases LDL (bad) cholesterol, while also reducing fibrinogen(a blood clotter).

The Harvard Health Professionals Follow-Up Study of over 44,000 males found “moderate alcohol consumption to be associated with a 37% reduction in coronary disease.” Another research with middle-aged men who drinks moderately compared to abstainers done in China found that men who drinks moderately had a nearly 20% lower over all mortality compared to abstainers.
For more statistics click here

So…alcohol! Good or bad?
In my opinion, it’s good, however, I’m not here to decide what is best for your health. Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself. If you do choose to drink, just make sure you take in moderate amount of it and are in a safe environment.

Works Cited

“Alcohol And Health.” Potsdam.edu. Web. 6 Apr. 2010. <http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/AlcoholAndHealth.html>.

“Alcohol and Heart Attacks — Does a Drink a Day Lower Your Risk?” Johns Hopkins Health Alerts: News on Prostate Cancer, Arthritis, Heart Disease, and Other Conditions Which Affect Health After 50. Aug. 2007. Web. 18 Apr. 2010. <http://www.johnshopkinshealthalerts.com/reports/heart_health/265-1.html>.

Gelsomin, Emily. “So You’ve Seen the Ugly Side of Alcohol … Care to Know the Facts?” The Daily Collegian Online – Published Independently by Students at Penn State. The Daily Collegian Online, 21 Oct. 2003. Web. 10 Apr. 2010. <http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2003/10/10-21-03tdc/10-21-03dscihealth-column-01.asp>.

Medicine, Insider. “Alcohol Beneficial for Heart.” Insidermedicine – Daily Health News, Daily Health Videos, Latest Medical Information, Medical Videocasts. Web. 6 Apr. 2010. <http://www.insidermedicine.com/archives/Alcohol_Beneficial_for_Heart_251.aspx>.

“What Alcohol Does to Your Mind and Body.” Bupa. Web. 6 Apr. 2010.

In my experience, perhaps the only reason that anyone would envy birds is for their flight. I’ve never heard anyone mentioned that they wished they were a bird so that they could… ‘Lay eggs.’

Then again, maybe they should.

According to a 2008 BBC news poll, 4 in 10 parents say that they would love to choose the sex of their child, and 1 in 5 even said they would pay up £1000 to do so.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7362541.stm

It turns out that certain species of female birds can influence the sex of their child.

In a study conducted by Rutstein et al. (2004), the food intake of female zebra finches was regulated and compared to the gender of their offspring. The results showed that those females who were well fed were significantly more likely to have female offspring, while those who were poorly fed were more likely to have male offspring. This is due to the fact that female zebra finches need to be better nourished to survive, so the mother produces more of whichever gender offspring would survive better under her current conditions.
http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/RITCHISO/avianreproduction.html

As, unfortunately, we cannot do as birds do, humans have come up with their own methods for selecting the gender of their child. Still, I can’t help but think that there is a reason that we were did not evolve with that ability.

Should we try to influence the sex of our children?

Here are some ways in which we try:

• My mother joked that she always wanted a girl. She was told that eating green foods would lead to a boy, whereas red foods would encourage girls. While this might sound ridiculous, researchers in England found that there was a correlation between diet and baby gender in terms of the range of nutrient intake in first time mothers, but critics warn that “a correlation does not make the truth.”
  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24262928/

• According to Landrum B. Shettles, the ‘male’ sperm(Y chromosome carrying) is smaller, faster, and shorter lived than its ‘female’ counterpart (X chromosome carrying). The Shettles method of gender determination involves regulating the position and time in the woman’s menstrual cycle of intercourse in order to increase the chances of success for each type of sperm. Other experts, however, such as J. Martin Young, doubt the effectiveness of such a method, as he says it is too simplistic and not based on scientific research.
  http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=52103 
   

In the cases of trying to determine gender through diet or sexual positions, little harm is done to the mother or child, so scientists like Dr Simon Fishel, a leading fertility doctor and head of the CAREfertility group of clinics say that “In the end I don’t think we should decry this too much as long as every child is loved and cherished.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7362541.stm

But what if every child is not loved and cherished?

One of the three main issues facing China is the ‘shortage’ of girls due to a demographic imbalance propagated by ancient prejudices against girls, and the one-child policy.

The current ratio of men to women in china is something like 120 boys for every 100 girls.

A large contributor to this fact was gender selective prenatal abortions, which, though illegal, were made easy by the availability of cheap portable ultrasound scanning machines,.

In their efforts to indirectly emulate birds, many Chinese parents contributed to an issue that will have a large effect on prostitution, and the stability of the country due to the excess of males.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5953508

This phenomenon suggests that abortions solely to regulate the gender of your child can have serious repercussions on a large scale.

Then again, there is a process known as Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) which involves the extraction of cells from an embryo from the uterus. These cells are analyzed for genetic disorders (especially sex specific disorders) and then only the healthy cells are replaced to develop into a child. Sometimes parents asks for an abortion if they discover through this method that their child will suffer from a genetic disorder, or if the child is not of the desired sex.

In the cases in which the child would be subject to crippling genetic disorders, abortions might be a viable option, since such a disorder can put unbearable strain on a family financially and emotionally.

Scientific research can give us reasons for the effectiveness of a gender selection method, it can document harmful results of abortions, or it can show us birds which influence the sex of their children. In the end, however, science cannot answer questions of morality or ethics. It is up to each parent to make those decisions.

Another thing about birds: they don’t have to read blog posts which tell them whether they should or should not try to influence their offspring’s sex.

Works Cited (Click to see)

Recently, as our IB Physics class learnt about electric and magnetic fields, we came upon the concept of DC motors. Last class, we started to design and create our own DC motors. Only then did I realize the extent that DC motors are used in our lives.First of all, how do DC motors work?

By using the principle of Lorentz force, which states any current carrying conductor in a magnetic field would experience a force. As the force is always directed in the same direction relative to the magnetic field and current flow, this force is used to drive a motor. See here for a more detailed explanation of how these motors work: http://www.howstuffworks.com/motor.htm/printable. The diagram below illustrates this principle.

Now, how does this affect us in our everyday lives?

If you are reading this, chances are, you are using a DC motor. For all those of us who have a hard drive, CD-ROM drive, or a fan somewhere in our computer, we have been doing something that would be impossible without a DC motor. These motors even are crucial to printers. Chances are, if you can think of an electronic device that moves, it has a DC motor. Besides that, if

For those of us who rode a bus or a car to school, we did something that would be impossible without DC motors. But don’t buses and cars run using fossil fuels, rather than electricity? While that may be true, it is also important to note that without the first few spins of a car’s starter motor, the combustion engine would be useless. Once, people had to crank the engines by hand, as people still do with motorbikes, but the sheer engine size of big vehicles made that a limitation. So, without DC motors, we would probably all be riding horses to school, or biking. How fun, eh?

Also, the very cellphones we carry around have tiny motors in them to create the ability to vibrate. These motors spin a unbalanced weight, and it results in the vibration of the entire cellphone.

DC motors are in our everyday lives, used so often, but are rarely seen, and even more rarely noticed. This invention has made our lives a million times more convenient. Those of us who played with remote controlled cars or planes in our younger days would have made use of this concept of Lorentz Force. Those of us who have set our phones to vibrate instead of having a ring tone are making use of this concept as well.

It might be worth reflecting for a moment, and thinking how much harder our lives would be without this simple, mechanical object. Automotive transport would require an immense amount of effort to start, computers would not work, cellphones would not have a “vibrate” option,  and even hybrid cars would not be possible without this. So then, consider how much more we have, compared to people who do not have access to these.

Most people learn in science class at a young age about the case of DDT. I was one of these people. However when I read an article just a few days ago about DDT, I wondered whether it should actually be banned.
On the left is the structure of one of the many isomers (structures with the same formula but different structure) which makes up DDT. It works because the chlorine on the outside of the DDT molecule reacts with the sodium channels in the neurons (nerves) of an insect and causes them to fire sodium ions spontaneously causing spasms and then death.

Because of its effectiveness DDT is an insecticide far superior than the sorts of ones we have today and it is also over twice as cheap to manufacture than its alternatives, however it had side effects on the ecosystem which caused a lot of deaths. This is what happened in Borneo:

As well as this, DDT is in peoples food and accumulates in people when they eat food like chicken which eats seeds that are treated with DDT. This causes a potential fatal risk to humans. Due to this, in 1972, the use of DDT was banned in the USA. The following is stated from EPA:

The general use of the pesticide DDT will no longer be legal in the United States after today, ending nearly three decades of application during which time the once-popular chemical was used to control insect pests on crop and forest lands, around homes and gardens, and for industrial and commercial purposes.

Although it was not banned in other countries, the USA stopped producing DDT because of the ban and therefore third world countries with higher cases of malaria suffered greatly. As well as this, countries who supported the ban would pressure third world countries to stop using DDT. In the british medical journal, the use of DDT in Mozambique

was stopped several decades ago, because 80% of the country’s health budget came from donor funds, and donors refused to allow the use of DDT

Since 1972 when DDT was banned in the USA, malaria cases have exponentially increased until today in which they cause 1.1-2.7 million deaths a year. There are also 300-500million new cases a year of which in severe cases the mortality rate can exceed 20%. The question is: Does the benefits of DDT outweigh the costs? It is up to you to decide.

Links to sources:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/DDT.svg/800px-DDT.svg.png
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
www.acsh.org
http://www.dolphinwatchnaturetours.com/edres/images/DDT.jpg
www.epa.gov/history/topics/ddt/01.htm