Resisting the Sweet Tooth

Trevia Hunt




Too many children in many countries are exposed to high amounts of fats, sugar and carbonated full foods. The TEMPEST program set out to find out how to teach young children in Europe how to supress the temptation to eat sweets. This research project took nine researchers each from a different European country to find out this answer. One of the members name is Liliya Nureeva, a student at Aarhus University.

The TEMPEST research project has come with ways to help children resist the desire to eat sweets and snacks. First the researchers had to address the problem of increasing overweight children and teenagers in Europe."Children and teenagers need to know more about health and the tools available so that they themselves can become involved in defining their diets and eating habits," explains Liliya Nureeva from the Department of Business Administration at Aarhus University.

Liliya believed that some children find it easy to avoid their unhealthy habits by completly avoiding them. Others use distractions such as sports to band their addiction as well. Then others set their own ground rules for eating unhealthy foods. Some eat fresh fruit everyday and some just eat sweets on the weekends. As long as children are aware of the techniques that will work for them, they can take actions to control the intake of unhealthy foods.

Pointing out the unhealthy aspects of children and teenage lives and then discovering ways to change their habits can be very challanging. One must first help the children/teenager develop knowlge about what is exactly the temptation. Then they must set goals and unique rules based on the individual on how to break away from these unhealthy habits. Liliya believes that parent, school teachers and people who have a close relationship with children and teenagers need to constantly inform students about different eating habits and strategies they can incoporate into their daily lives.

How Butterfly Wings Can Inspire New High-Tech Surfaces

The topic that I choose was called how butterfly wings can inspire new high-tech surfaces in the Science Daily they was talking about how this South American butterfly how it just flapped it’s wings and caused a flurry of nanotechnology research to happen in Ohio. They also talk about what type of butterfly to because of it color. When I was reading this article the researchers had this thing that made them want to studied butterfly wings and also rice leaves and how their texture can make different products work better. They was trying to make the butterfly wings texture look real on a surface that is plastic. In the journal Soft Matter that Ohio State University they made this texture fluid that would stop the surface from getting dirty and make it look like the real high-teach stuff. They use the Blue Morpho because it is a known butterfly and of it beautiful color so the people that was studying the butterfly notice that it able to keep dirt also water with its wings. Bhushan says that since the butterfly lives in the nature it’s hard for them to stay clean. The butterfly wings are so fragile anything that gets on their wings can make it difficult for them to fly. Bhushan was talking about that how the males and females know each other by its color and the pattern that is how they reproduce. When you look at the wings under you might think that it is smooth but it’s more like roof that is overlapping. The rice leaf looks more like a landscape when you look at it under the microscope which has this wax coating that makes the water drops fall strait down the leaf. The researchers took the two the butterfly wings and the rice leave to see what would be best for texture. After they did all that they made silicon and also plastic to make it look like the rice leave then put this special coating called nanoparticles. They was doing all these test so see which texture that had the nanoparticles for less water to fall on it and was comparing it to the non coated surface the rice leave was 26 percent and the butterfly wing was 15 percent. Then they put this stuff called caribide powder to see how easy it was to clean the surfaces. Then they measure how long that they was under the water then counted the amount of particles was on it before and after they washed it. The leaf came out to 95 percent then the butterfly wing was 85 percent so when you look at it only 70 percent came of the flat surface. So after all this Bhushan thinks that the rice leaf texture would be better for making the fluid go through certain pipes and the Blue Morpho lovely wings texture might be better for medical equipment that can help stop bacteria growth. Why I choose this article is because I love butterfly and to know that they can help the world makes me like them more. They can change our world today and make it better and improve thing also.      

-Angelique Delarosa 

Caffeine Effects

Trey Tickle

Professor Gazdik

Biology 101

2 November 2012

Effects of Caffeine

                There are effects of caffeine shown in molecular imaging with positron emission tomography (PET). Scientists have for the first time been able to visualize the sites of caffeine in living human’s brain. They have explored possible positive and negative effects of the caffeine consumption. Scientist research was published in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. They showed images of F-18-8-cyclopentyl-3-(3-fluoropropyl)-1propylxanthine (F-18-CPFPX). In which all show the intake of the caffeine beverages we take in each and every day. Humans taking in so much caffeine, results in up to fifty percent of an occupant brain’s A1. The effects of the caffeine are attributed to the cerebral adenosine receptors.

I learned that the intake of caffeine does have a substantial effect to a human brain. Caffeine is the most commonly consumed psychoactive substance in the world. It is an active ingredient in most of our food and beverages. Eighty percent of the U.S. adults consume caffeine each every day with coffee and soda. The effects are known to show in the brain’s A1. So with consuming caffeine on a regular base can affect a person’s alertness, attention, performance, and also reduces sleepiness. I have concluded to stop drinking caffeine myself before this blog entry.

Habits

Habits are behaviors wired so deep in our brains that we do them without hesitation.  Recently MIT neuroscientists has discovered a small region of the brain's prefrontal cortex is responsible for the moment-by-moment control. The prefrontal cortex is where most of your thoughts and planning occur. Professor Ann Graybiel, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT said " that the value of a habit is one you don't have to think about it." If you dont have to think about doing that habit, it leaves space in your mind so you can think about other important things. Habits often become so serious that we keep doing them even though we do not gain anything. 
The MIT team preformed an experiment with rats. They let the rats run a T-Maze. When the rats got closer to the turning point the heard a noise telling them to go either right or left. When the chose correctly they was rewarded. After a while the stopped rewarding the rats and found out that the rats still ran the right way. This proves that their behavior was habitual. Using optogenetics, a technique that allows researchers to inhibit specific cells with light, the MIT scientists turned off IL cortex activity for a few seconds. As the rats neared the point in the maze where they had to go left or right, the rats forgot all about the previous turns and went a different way. This says that turning off the IL cortex switches the rats' brains from an automatic  mode to a mode that is more engaged in the goal.
This topic was interesting to me because everyone, including myself, have at least one habit that needs to be broken.


-Travis Farmer-

Which trout fish is smarter?

Taylor Noblett

Bio 101

Gazdik

Which trout has a better memory?

A fish’s personality can tell a lot. From how it learns and responds to threats or predators. There are two kinds of trout that Brown looked at. One was a shy trout and the other was a bold trout. The shy trout are a little more cautious, have a good memory, and can remember a predator’s sense better than the bold trout. The shy trout has a better chance of mating and defending where it lives because it keeps the sense of its predators. So when a predator comes around it knows it and can escape while the bold trout are forgetful and have a lesser chance to mate and survive because it does not remember the predators smell. A trout needs to be able to retain a predators smell wherever it goes because a predator can show up anywhere at any time.

Brown and his team set up a tank with removable Plexiglas and tested which fish would escape the test tank faster. He found that the bold trout would move quickly and use risky behavior. While the shy fish was more cautious and took its time to avoid being risky. Brown and his team also had the trout remember the smell of pumpkin seed. They tested to see which trout would remember the smell after 24 hours and after eight days. By the end of their research they found that the personality of the trout helped them remember the smell. Both the bold and shy trout remembered the smell after 24 hours, but when it came to the eight days the shy trout came out on top.  

            I feel that personalities can tell a lot especially about trout. Some animals are smart while some are not. This test of the two trout shows that even though they are the same fish they do not retain information the same. This test was a good way to determine which trout would remember and which one would not, but I feel as though they should have done more than just this test to test their memory. I chose this article because I love animals, and I have been trout fishing a few times. It was interesting to learn about one of the animals I hunt and see how their minds work. The article is relevant to society because some people, especially animal science people are interested in animals and fish, and some people, like me, like to learn about animals they hunt. This article also helps show society that not all trout have bad memories like the bold trout.