Category Archives: Issues in science

Olympic Fallout: Just How ‘Green’ is 2014?

Posted on February 10, 2014 by | 1 comment

Source: Flickr commons

Last Friday night, the world turned its eyes to a small town on the eastern coast of the Black Sea; the Sochi 2014 Olympics had begun. With opening ceremonies full of winter wonder, and the promise of a brave new world from International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach, Russia ushered in the next iteration of winter competition.

Though mired in controversy regarding the overrun of this Olympics (it is expected to cost roughly 50 billion Euros in total, by comparison Vancouver 2010 cost about 5.5 billion Euros), quietly shuffled aside are the concerns raised over the environmental impact.

Sochi National Park
Source: Flickr commons

To construct the Olympic venue for Sochi 2014, an area encompassing 8,750 acres of wetlands within the Sochi National Park has been effectively demolished. Though this area represents roughly 1.8 % of the total park size, it remains a sizeable portion to be lost. During the bidding process, Russia assured a zero-waste games and promised to follow Green standards. While this looks good on paper, zoologist Suren Gazaryan says “Sochi organizers have failed on all Green promises”. Gazaryan asserts he has witnessed not only illegal dumping of waste material, but also the blocking of major migration routes of animals residing within Sochi National Park; the park itself represents an extremely productive ecological area home to over 65 species of bird, none of which have been seen recently around Sochi.

Bolshoi Ice Palace – 12,000 seat multi-purpose arena
Source: Flickr commons

All of this begs the question: Just how stringent is this concept of Green? It shouldn’t be a surprise that an undertaking of this magnitude will needlessly (as many other locations possess the infrastructure to support international games) require substantial environmental sacrifices. In spite of this, the IOC gave the go ahead to Russia in the face of their fabled ‘no-waste games’ concept. While Russia admittedly maintained their lofty ideal of planting three trees for every one that they cut down during the construction of Sochi 2014, Gazaryan makes the keen observation that “…ecosystems are not Lego sets that you can take apart and rebuild somewhere else”.

For the next two weeks the world will come together to celebrate the best of human triumph, but in the face of glory and prestige have we lost sight of the Green standard we hold ourselves so fervently to? During the opening ceremony, IOC President Thomas Bach implored us all to embrace our diversity; let us not forget that if we are to attain that brave new world, we must also embrace our biodiversity.

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Posted in Biological sciences, Issues in science, Science in the news

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All-Nighters: Not worth it

Posted on February 3, 2014 by | 3 comments

Pulling An All-Nighter
Source: Pink and Black Magazine

I can recall the countless times I have found myself on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other social media sites when I should be studying. In wasting all that valuable time procrastinating, I end up pulling an all-nighter in order to complete my assignment. Or that time when I realize that I spent the majority of the term slacking off, so I resort to pulling all-nighters during final exams in attempt to learn all the material. 4 months’ worth of course load in 24 hours…that’s possible, is it not?

Many people believe that all-nighters are necessary to achieve better grades. Is it worth sacrificing a few hours of sleep to attain a higher GPA?

The answer, unfortunately, is no!

The Anatomy of an All-Nighter
Source: Staff Writers, OnlineColleges

Christian Benedict, a professor of Sweden’s Uppsala University in Sweden, and other researchers, performed a study to determine the repercussions of pulling an all-nighter. These sleep researchers analyzed the blood content in fifteen men: after they had a full 8 hours of sleep and after they pulled an all-nighter. After the participants pulled an all-nighter, researchers discovered an increase in the concentration of NSE and S-100B in the participants’ blood. The Swedish researchers compared the effects of sleep deprivation to that of head injuries’ (similar to a blow to the head or from a car accident), since it is known that the molecules NSE and S-100B increase in blood during head injuries.

According to study funded by NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke), the brain’s role during sleep is to rid itself of toxins. Lack of sleep may be connected to neurodegenerative disorders, which are result from toxin build-up between brain cells. Examples of neurodegenerative diseases include multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Not only are all-nighters harmful to brain health, sleep deprivation leads to poor grades! Pamela Thacher, a professor at St. Lawrence University, discovered that students who frequently pulled all-nighters had worse GPAs than students who didn’t. Dr. Philip Alapat, a medical director and professor of Baylor College of Medicine, agrees with Thacher in that a lot of rest helps with memory retention and increases both academic performance and concentration. Alapat recommends that students get 8 hours of sleep, study during the evening (6-8pm), and not abuse caffeinated beverages to increase both health and GPA!

For the students who might disagree and exclaim that they have received a better score when they replaced an hour of sleep with an hour of studying: it is not worth it if it is at the expense of your well-being!

The video below outlines why sleep is necessary for maintaining brain health.

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Happy studying!

-(Vy) Brenda Nguyen

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Posted in Biological sciences, Issues in science, Science in the news

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Memories are Lies!

Posted on February 2, 2014 by | 1 comment

Well…they could be. It turns out that our memories are not as reliable as we’d like to believe.

We catalog and store what we see and do everyday. We discard useless information and try to hold onto useful information (though that may suddenly be very difficult during exam period). This whole process is associated with three major steps: encoding, storage and retrieval.

Let’s say you see someone flip on their bike. You process the information that you see, hear and feel, selecting that is most important and filter out the distractions. You then store this information in a memory so that you can recall and describe this event on demand. This seems like a journal. You make an entry and you can read it back any time you want, just the way you wrote it. However, just recalling a memory will change it.

Car crash image used in Elizabeth Loftus’ study
Source: TED Talks

This effect can even be exploited to create false  memories. In a study done by false memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, she was able to successfully implant false memories in participants. A car crash involving a blue car was shown to participants. After providing half the participants with information that suggested the car was white, much of them later remembered that the car was white. In fact, just using the words smash to describe the crash rather than hit caused participants to falsely remember broken glass at the scene.

Childhood memories have also been manipulated. In the study mentioned above, a memory of being lost in a mall was successfully planted in participants. Another study planted an animal attack memory into 77 participants. In both cases, these “memories” became more and more detailed every time the participants retold the memory. At the end of studies, the false memories were rated by the participant as reliable and as vivid as the real memories.

Source: SalFalko on Flickr

Okay, you can plant memories in people. Cool idea for a movie, but how is this signifiant in real life? A lot of criminal convictions are based on witnesses. False memories have often led to false convictions. Victims have identified wrongly innocent people as perpetrators and have landed these people in jail. These convictions are pretty common, in fact, in recent study looked at 300 innocent people that spent up to 30 years in prison, 3/4 of these were due to faulty eye witness memory.

There is another exploit for false memories. Some have suggested to exploit this property for good: implant warm fuzzy memories about vegetables into children so that they eat health. Unethical? Maybe.

– David Ng

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Posted in Issues in science

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