Bananas are common fruits that one can fine in grocery stores. Many people dislike banana for its taste, its texture, or other reasons. I am a person who do not eat banana for its taste until I came across this video: Dole Banana Nutrition Facts. It makes me think twice about it. Is it the taste of banana much important than the health benefits that it provides?
Here are some nutritional facts of bananas:
Bananas have resistant starch that aides the digestion of fat. Including bananas in diet helps weight loss.
Stroke is a leading cause of death in Canada, and bananas prevent stroke because the ratio between the content of potassium and the content of sodium in banana is ideal.
Potassium also helps the body regulate hear rate and water balance.
The high content of iron content in bananas can prevent anemia, a low level of red blood cells in blood.
Vitamin B6 that are present in bananas helps to repair DNA and prevent cancer.
Eating bananas in prenatal stage can decrease the chance of baby’s being born with leukemia.
Consumption of bananas can help children build a good immune system.
Tryptophan, an amino acid, in bananas decreases the chance of getting depression.
It is said “do not judge a book by its cover”, and I think it is true that I cannot dislike banana for its taste, because it has a lot of health benefits.
With these information in mind, be sure to consider including bananas in your diet!
Dutch scientists have came up with the invention of robotic legs for stroke patients. LOPES, or the Lower-extremity Powered ExoSkeleton, helps improve the movement of the legs and for the patients to recover their natural steps. Spinal injury patients who have restricted movements have been given test trials. This device may be released to rehabilitation centres across different countries next year.
LOPES Supporting a patient; Source BBC News
Engineers from the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, developed this device to help and support the patients while on treadmill in rehabilitation centre. The machine operates by either walking for the patient or by assisting support on either side of the patients’ legs. Furthermore, if the patient is not moving right, LOPES can also detect their mistakes.
LOPES model
One of the testers of this device, Petra Hes, has what is known as “drop foot.” She has suffered a stroke at a very young age that caused her not being able to lift up or flex her left foot. Dr. Edwin van Asseldonk, a worker on the project, explained how LOPES is able to compare the patients’ movements to a reference and helps the patients by applying a force on them.
The forces exerted on the patients’ legs will physically guide the movement of the legs and feet. Researchers believe the machine acts as a memory aid to the patients who have forgotten how to move. The result with Hes has been turning out positively. By exerting the force on the patients, hence, LOPES aids the required signals in the brain to further regulate the movement.
LOPES exoskeleton; Source University of TwenteLOPES; Source University of Twente
Having such an innovation will help those who have suffered from strokes or those with impaired physical movement. Devices like these enable people to recover and start walking just as they used to! They are being tested in Netherlands before being released to clinics worldwide.
Furthermore, there are similar inventions called “Military Exoskeletons” used in the military to help lift heavy loads. Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) is designed by Berkeley Bionics of California. Soldiers can as much weight as 90kg. HULC is strapped around the soldier’s body and has been used by US Military.
As summer comes to an end and we’re back to school, some of us are still on vacation time. Assignments just keep coming, due dates are approaching and, surprisingly, nothing gets done. Where did the excitement for the new school year go? Procrastination is the answer.
Are we the only victims of procrastination? Definitely not. Ancient Greeks used to represent procrastination as a “state of acting against one’s better judgment”, or akrasia. Akratic behaviour is documented in discussion between Socrates and Protagoras. Socrates claimed “No one goes willingly toward the bad”. This makes sense from a biological prospective of natural goals of an individual. Aristotel, however, took this idea and examined it deeper. From his prospective, akrasia occurs as a result of opinion. An opinion is mentally developed form of reality or truth.
So when we think another 30min nap before writing a paper might help, we are sincere in our intentions to write the paper. However it does not necessarily mean we are right that we need a nap.
Did modern scientists figure out something more useful than ancient Greeks’ theory? Yes.
According to physiologists, procrastination arises in the front part of our brain, or prefrontal cortex. Earlier studies agreed upon the impulsive nature of procrastination. Prefrontal cortex is responsible for such brain functions as planning, attention, motivation and impulse control. When impulse control does not function in its maximum ability, the overall function of planning, attention and motivation decreases. This causes procrastination.
Is a procrastination purely physiological phenomenon or are the psychological aspects? Needless to say there are numerous psychological theories trying to explain procrastination. One of the most common theories is the lack of self-confidence. Also anxiety levels of procrastinators are especially high near exam period, and these individuals feel the most relief right after exams are done or papers are turned in. Tice and Baumeister (1997) reported a study where they show a number of college students, procrastinators and non-procrastinators. Research found that procrastinators get lower grades than non-procrastinators, as opposed to a belief that best work is done under pressure.
Procrastination is a problem for scientists publishing a paper. As we know, whoever publishes his work first gets the acknowledgments. That is why it is so important to concentrate on true long term benefits and produce a great piece of work that will contribute to humankind, whether is it is just another paper or a finished experiment. Procrastination should neither affect the quality of our work not stay in our way of enjoying what we do.
Further reading:
Evans, James R. (8 August 2007). Handbook of Neurofeedback: Dynamics
Adler, J.E. (July 2002). “Akratic Believing?”. Philosophical Studies 110 (1): 1–27
Ferrari, J.R.(2001). Procrastination and attention: Factor analysis of attention deficit, boredomness, intelligence, self-esteem, and task delay frequencies. Journal of Social Behaviour and Personality, 16, 185-196
Over the course of Earth’s history there have been many mass extinctions. After each one there is the devastation of a world rid of many forms of life. Barren and bleak, it must be a hard place to live. Nevertheless, each mass extinction allows space for new life to grow and develop, such as dinosaurs and humans. The uprisings, life spans and demises of several creatures have been well documented by scientists throughout history.
It is well known that mass extinctions do occur, but their exact mechanism is often unknown, or speculated at best. For example, one of history’s greatest mysteries is what caused the massive Permian-Triassic extinction. Caused by a large volcano eruption or a meteor strike resulting in a severe lack of oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean, this extinction is estimated to have killed 85% of all living organisms on the planet. However, a recent Vancouver Sun article cites rising ocean acidity levels as the culprit for the P-T extinction, not a lack of oxygen.
A large meteor strike is one of the possible causes of the Permian-Triassic extinction.
While this article raises interesting points, there is a complete lack of evidence for the ocean acidity hypothesis. As scientists it is important to remember that we haven’t found out everything there is to know about the world, and that new discoveries are being made on a daily basis. However, each new discovery needs to have accompanying evidence to confirm the finding. While most scientists are aware of this, and are wary of research presented without evidence, members of the public may not be so cognizant. Thus, when new information is presented without evidence it can be misleading to people outside the scientific community. It is therefore important that as scholars we communicate clearly with both the public and the media who will be translating our information. This will ensure that there is no room for misinterpretation or deceptive statements. By keeping the language we use to communicate science clear and simple, it will make it easier to convey our ideas to the general public and thereby bolster an interest in the field.
If you’ve ever used a word processor like Microsoft Word before, you’ve probably encountered the wonderful Autocorrect function. Autocorrect fixes some commonly made spelling errors as you type, which helps improve typing speed by reducing the need to manually correct those mistakes.
Interestingly enough, the human brain also has a built-in mechanism that catches these types of errors and mentally fixes them while they’re being read. Let’s take a look at this paragraph:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Weird, isn’t it? However, there are a few flaws in this argument.
According to the way the letters are supposed to be shuffled (the first and last letter of each word stays in the same position), words with three or fewer letters are unchanged. There are 32 words that are unaffected by the shuffling — that’s almost half the paragraph! Likewise, the shuffled four-letter words are easy to read because they can only be rearranged by swapping the middle two letters. For the remaining words, the rearrangements of the letters are fairly intuitive. For example, “porbelm” is only two letter switches away from “problem.”
Although it is true that we consider the entire word instead of just the individual letters when we read, the examples presented in the paragraph above are much too simple. Consider words like “Cgibramde” as opposed to “Cmabrigde” that was in the paragraph; a well-shuffled word is much harder to recognize.
What does this have to do with communicating science? Being able to be clearly understood is an important skill to have when it comes to sharing knowledge and information with others. While there is some truth with the “letter order doesn’t matter” argument (in the fact that the brain processes entire words at a time instead of letter-by-letter), a lot of it is just misleading science.
