The Myth About Cloth Bags

Posted on March 26, 2018 by | Leave a comment

My family and I have always preferred getting the plastic bags from the grocery store, rather than buying the cotton ones. This means that I often had to guiltily avoid eye contact with the cashier when they asked if I wanted to buy plastic bags.

Source: Flickr

What I discovered last week in my chemistry class was, however, that plastic bags are better for the environment than cotton bags are. A study assessing the life cycle of supermarket carrier bags found that in order to have the same environmental impact as a HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene) bag – which is basically the plastic grocery bag – a cotton bag had to be reused 131 times!

When I read this report, I couldn’t figure out how they got this value. I mean, plastic must be worse for the environment than cloth in landfills. With some more digging, however, I found that the production of cotton bags is worse for the environment than the production of plastic. The cotton bag life cycle analysis, which assesses the impact on the environment from a product’s production to end of life, has a larger impact on the environment. It needs to be extracted from non-renewable resources, made in factories, and transported to areas all over the world.

I felt better about using plastic bags after this article, but not completely at ease with my carrier bag decision. The report states that they think the reusable cloth bags are much better in the long run, if they are used more than 131 times. The problem of plastic waste still exists, even though the myth of cloth bags is debunked.

So what can be the solutions to this massive environmental problem?

In the podcast below, presented by Isabel Hardman, they discuss the public misconceptions about replacement of plastic materials. One I found interesting mentions using bioplastics, which are grown organically, to replace the starting material for carrier bags. If I just heard about this on the news, I would believe it is a good idea to use plant-based starting materials. In reality, however, as mentioned in the podcast, the land required to generate enough plastic would be equal to 1/10 the land used for agriculture today. Further, the plastic generated from this material will degrade in landfills to form methane, which is a much worse greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide.

So, the solution to the plastic problem may not be organic sources. In the video below, Leyla Acaroglu, from TED youtube channel, states that the solution has to be in our society’s product designs. She states that the biggest way to stop waste from increasing and thus halt climate change, would be to redesign how our community waste systems and products work to minimize waste in landfills.

So, all in all, many things that we believe are correct for the environment may not be as great as we think. The best thing for us to do is to reuse as many things as we can while trying to control the number of things we throw away. Don’t displace the action on to someone else, start small in your own home.

-Pravnit Kooner

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Gaming to Greater Cognition

Posted on March 26, 2018 by | Leave a comment

“Stop playing those video games Aaron, they will rot your brain. Starring at that screen that much is going to damage your eyes.” My mother, just as many others, believed that video games were entirely useless and detrimental to a developing child’s mind. I have been a gamer for all of my memorable life. Pretty most people I meet, who are not at least minor gamers themselves, find video games to be a waste of time and pointless. With over 155 million Americans gaming regularly, and gaming trends increasing in countries all over the world, research into the effects of gaming have become a popular study.

Source: gamesdailynews

Video games have advanced significantly in the past 20 years. There are so many different types of games with varying complexities, publishers, and gameplay. One of the most popular genres of games is action video games which include popular examples such as Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Battlefield, Halo, and many more. Most of these action video games are ones that many concerned parents believe promote violent behavior. This notion that action or violent video games promote violent behavior has been disproven by many studies. These video games do have an effect on people, just not in the negative way that many people believe.

Researchers such as Matthew Dye, Shawn Green, and Daphne Bavelier wanted to examine the effects that action video games had on human cognition. Their study examined how action video games influence perceptual processing. They found that (action) video games provided an efficient training regimen that increased the speed of perceptual reactions in participants without decreasing accuracy. Not only does gaming seem to increase perceptual processing, but a meta-analysis of action video games found that they can also enhance top-down attention and spatial cognition. It was also found that regular gamers had superior multitasking abilities than the average person, even those that claimed to be excellent multitaskers.

It is amazing to know that I have been working hard to improving my cognition and not just wasting my time playing video games. A month after Call of Duty: Balck Op’s release the game had been played the equivalent of 68,000 years worldwide. That amount of time is shocking, and its even more shocking to think what a game designed specifically to increase cognitive function could achieve. Although not all games are created equal in their ability to positively influences cognition, researchers have begun to try to isolate what aspects of these video games are resulting in these positive effects. Daphne Bavelier hopes that by teaming up with entertainment-media experts, researchers can try and find a way to use video games to better understand the brain functions utilized during gameplay. Then, researchers can use that knowledge to provide new and more engaging games that can be used to train and rehabilitate cognitive functions in children, adults, and patients. This positive effect that video games have, and how it could be utilized in the future is explained by Daphne Bavelier in the TED Talk included below.

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By Aaron Reiss

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An Unlikely Hero

Posted on March 19, 2018 by | 1 comment

Conservation has entered the spotlight in recent years, but there is one resource shortage no amount of recycling can help: human organs. Every day 2o people die waiting for an organ transplant and this problem is only getting worse. From 1991 to 2015, the number of people on the transplant list in the US has risen by nearly 100, 000, while the number of donors has risen by less than 10, 000. This problem is exasperated as only 3 out of every 1000 deaths leave organs viable for transplant. Luckily Biologist Luhan Yang may have a solution with an unlikely face.

Source: Google

Yang literally hopes to bioengineer pigs into human organ farms. Yes, organ farms. Although it sounds crazy, xenotransplantation, the transplant of animal tissues/organs into people, is not a new concept. Pig and cow heart valves have been transplanted into humans as an alternative to mechanical valves for almost 50 years. But implanting a functional organ is very different than implanting a simple valve. 

Source: Flickr Commons

Pig and cow heart valves are treated with a variety of chemicals to preserve the tissue and prevent it from rejection by the immune system. Since the tissue is only preserved, it is not technically alive, which obviously would not work with an organ. To be of any use, an organ must be alive and fully connected to the rest of the body, which understandably presents some major problems.

The first problem is organ rejection. Everyone’s cells have protein “markers” displayed on their surface completely unique to the individual. Your immune system uses these to distinguish between what’s you and what isn’t, so it doesn’t accidentally attack itself. That’s why patients’ blood types AND protein types must match for a transplant to be successful. Even then, the recipient must spend the rest of their life taking anti-rejection medications. Even organs from close family members often don’t match well enough to risk the operation, so transplanting from an entirely different species is undoubtedly more difficult.

Source: Flickr Commons

The second problem is the potential spread of viruses. Pig and human anatomies share certain similarities, which makes them ideal to grow organs. But this means many of their diseases can also infect us, like the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009. Specifically, the type of virus of concern is called an “endogenous retrovirus”. Retroviruses are a special type of virus able to open up an infected host’s DNA, and insert its own before repairing it. This means the virus is literally part of the pig’s genome, and therefore is exceptionally difficult to remove.

Source: Flickr Commons

This is where Yang comes in. She hopes to solve these issues by genetically modifying pigs using CRISPR/Cas9 technology. CRISPR is a revolutionary gene editing technique that  allows scientists to open organisms’ DNA up at specific locations to add or remove segments. In 2015, Yang’s team made history by successfully developing a method to remove 62 retroviruses from pig cells at once. It was the largest number of modifications ever done to a mammalian genome in one procedure. Then last year, her team produced 15 live piglets without any harmful retroviruses. Their next goal is to take CRISPR even further to produce what they call “Pig 2.0”. They hope to further modify pig’s DNA to make their organs more human-like, solving the problem of organ rejection.

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Need to Memorize Something? Sleep On It

Posted on March 19, 2018 by | 3 comments

Have you ever stay up all night studying for an exam and feel brainwashed even though you studied really hard?

With research into sleep growing, there is a unique study of the relationship between sleep, learning, and memory. One of the most interesting hypotheses is that sleep contributes to processes of memory and brain plasticity.

It is important to note that the brain does not stay in one single physiological state across 24-hour, but instead cycles through periods and be divided into wake and sleep. A complete sleep cycle takes an average of 90 to 110 minutes, with each stage lasting between 5 to 15 minutes. The deepest sleeping stages (combined stages 3 and 4) are collectively referred to as “slow wave sleep”. In the same way, memory cannot be considered homogeneous. The spectrum of memory categories existed in the human brain, such as the processes that create or sustain memory, are equally diverse.

A girl tries not to fall asleep while studying for her exam. Source: Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/83633410@N07/7658254172

A study of napping at the University of Lübeck in Germany researched on the extensive evidence that in wakefulness, new situations and stimuli can prevent new memories from consolidating. To test the idea, they asked 24 volunteers to memorize 15 pairs of cards with pictures of animals and everyday objects. After the first memorization session, half of the group stayed awake and the other half took a nap. Forty minutes later, the volunteers were asked to learn a second, slightly different set of card pairs. This second task was to act as an interfering disruptor of the initial learning.

When both groups were tested for recall of the first set of cards, the sleep group remembered much better (85% correct versus 60% for the awake group). The memorization processes persisted during sleep made the original memories more resistant to disruption.

The consolidation of memories happens during the slow wave sleep and the consolidation of memories can protect the fact-based memories from any subsequent interference.

Here is a TED-talk video explained the relationship between sleep and memory.

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Video Resource: YouTube Channel: TEDxRiverCity Robert Stickgold – Sleep, Memory and Dreams: Fitting the Pieces Together

Sleep can be defined as a consolidation of memory. It is important to take a short nap as soon as possible after trying to memorize something. After a study session for a school exam, take a nap right away has a better chance to consolidate than if you stayed awake and got exposed to many new interfering situations. Study hard and get enough sleep to enhance your memories!

By Rain Xia

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What is Cryptocurrency Mining and is it Profitable?

Posted on March 19, 2018 by | 1 comment

By now most people have heard of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, but where does this currency come from? Much like gold, there is a fixed amount of bitcoin, 21 million bitcoins to be exact. These bitcoins can be ‘mined’ using computers running a special algorithm. In the past miners would use old computer hardware, specifically GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) which are typically used for computer gaming. This meant it was very easy for someone with a gaming computer to make some extra money by letting their computer run the mining algorithm while they were not using their computer.

Gaming GPU: Wikipedia Commons

As cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin become more mainstream, its value skyrocketed. This drove more people to become miners. More miners and newer, more powerful GPUs in computers lead to many bitcoins being found. So far, this sounds great, so should you go out and buy a GPU and become a miner?

Bitcoin Prices: Wikipedia Commons

Here’s the catch; as more bitcoins are found, it quickly becomes much more difficult to mine. This is because of the way bitcoin is setup. Because there is a fixed amount, it is very easy to mine the first bitcoins, but as more are found, the remaining bitcoins become much more rare. This rarity and huge popularity causes the value of bitcoin to rapidly inflate, causing more people to become miners.

One might ask, is mining profitable? The answer is more complicated then you might expect. Back when miners were just using old computers to mine, the only cost they had to worry about was electricity, and yes it was very profitable. Nowadays you need much more powerful hardware and multiple GPUs to mine. Although GPUs have become more efficient, multiple GPUs will still consume a lot more electricity than a single older one. Not only that, GPU pricing has also sky-rocketed, much to the dismay of computer gamers. 

So with all these variables taken into consideration, let’s see what it would take to become a miner. First you would need an extremely powerful computer with as many GPUs as possible. For our example lets say we use 8 high-end GPUs. This system would cost around $18,000 and would make around $11 a day in profit (assuming your electricity rates are relatively low in your area). This means it would take over 4 years to just break even and that is assuming the cryptocurrency market remains stable, which it is notorious for being very unpredictable. So no it is not profitable to be a cryptocurrency miner using regular computer hardware, unless you already have the GPUs. Nowadays, you are better off using dedicated mining machines or just trading cryptocurrencies on the stock market, if you are trying to make some extra money.

Dedicated mining machine: Wikipedia Commons

 

 

 

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Time Travel, is it possible?

Posted on March 19, 2018 by | 2 comments

Video Resource: YouTube Channel: Second Thought   Is Time Travel Really Possible?

 

Time traveling has been an interesting topic for a long time. In 1985, a movie called Back to the Future caught great attentions from the crowds about time traveling. In 1988, the publication of the great book named A Brief History of Time written by Stephen Hawking raised people’s attention about time traveling again. Since traveling through time is such an interesting topic, is time travel possible in real life?

Image result for back to the future

Image Resource: Google Image:  Wikimedia Commons

 

There are two parts of time traveling. The first one is traveling to the past, and the second one is traveling to the future. Let’s talk about travelling to the past first. It is usually stated that people cannot go back to the past. A very common way to explain it is the Grandfather paradox. It says that if a time traveler can go back in time and kill his grandfather before their their mother or father was born, then he will not be born himself and the killing would not be possible. Another recent explanation was given by Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest physicists in the world. He said that if we want to achieve time travel, we need to consider time as the fourth dimension like length, width and height. However, unlike those three spatial dimensions, time does not have multi-directional property. We are only able to move forwards on the time dimension. Although lots of people still believe that traveling to the past is possible, current knowledge and theories do not support it.

 

We cannot move backwards on the time dimension, but we can move forwards. If we want to go to the future, we must consider one important thing, speed. There is a speed limit in our universe, which is 186 thousand miles per second. This is the speed of light. If we can travel near this speed, we can go to the future. Imagine that we were in a spaceship that travels at 99 percent of the speed of light, every minute on the spaceship is a year on earth. Therefore, if scientists can invent spaceships that are fast enough, human will be able to travel to the future. Also, Albert Einstein once said that mass is also a factor that will influence time. Time on earth is slower than it is in the universe because of the mass of earth. Therefore, if we can find a planet that is large and heavy enough, the time we spend on it will be much slower than it on earth. When we come back from it to earth, we will be in the future.

 

All the theories and conclusions are all based on the knowledge we have right know. Maybe in the future all of this could be wrong, and people can go back to the past. However, since going back in time is impossible now, we should just cherish the present and live every day to the fullest because we cannot go back in time.

 

Liang Zou

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