Rivers, Streams and all parts

Fresh water is defined as having low salt concentration. (Mostly less than 1%) Rivers and Streams are bodies of flowing water moving in one direction. They can be found everywhere and get their starts at headwaters, which may be springs, snowmelt or even lakes, and then travel all the way to their mouths. The mouth of a river is the part where it empties into another body of water, such as lake, bay, ocean or another river.  Rivers and streams make up about 3% of the earth's total fresh water. Freshwater fish such as trout and heterotrophs can be found there, and aquatic green plants and algae can also be found there.  Since there is less light, there is less diversity of flora, and because of the lower oxygen levels, fish that require less oxygen, such as catfish and carp, can be found. The temperature is cooler at the source than it is at the mouth. The water is also clearer, has higher oxygen levels. Towards the middle part of the stream/river, the width increases, and so does species diversity. Deposits of sediments and nutrients at the mouths of rivers build up protective coastal deltas. Toward the mouth of the river/stream, the water becomes murky from all the sediments that it has picked up upstream, which decreases the amount of light that can penetrate through the water. The levels and types of nutrients in a stream depend on what is happening in the stream’s watershed.  The characteristics of a river or stream change during the journey from the source to the mouth.  Rivers provide drinking water to many people in undeveloped countries and they are also sources of energy. That being so, we should protect the rivers because they support life and help us form other living conditions.

 

Health Benefits of Garlic

Garlic is a delicious seasoning, adding great flavor to numerous foods, but it is also anti-viral, anti-fungal, anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory. Garlic is composed of a variety of enzymes, flavonoids, antioxidants, and minerals such as calcium, copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus, potassium and selenium. The vitamins it contains are vitamin A, vitamin B1, vitamin B2, vitamin B6 and vitamin C. Daily consumption of garlic can prevent and even help to cure many health problems. If consumed in small doses, and consumed often, it is an excellent supplement. In history, garlic was considered to be the best medicine. In WW1, even though penicillin had already been discovered, if there was a shortage or lack of penicillin, medics and doctors would use garlic on the wounded to prevent infections and gangrene. It was placed raw on wounds, and may have saved many lives. It was used to cure cancerous tumors and was also put row on wounds; it saved many lives.

Garlic supports a healthy immune system, which is necessary to fight cancer. It appears that it also has the ability to reduce the formation of cancerous cells, and slow the growth of tumor cells. Studies have shown that compounds in garlic slow the rate of growth in the tumor, even reducing the tumor size by half. There are several healthy ingredients in garlic and they are useful to us in ways that we do not even know. Allicin is produced when garlic is finely chopped or crushed. It starts to break down almost immediately, so its medicinal effects decrease quickly as well, but cooking and microwaving also destroy its benefits. Therefore for it to be most effective, you should crush a little and combine it with cooked food shortly before serving. Another benefit of garlic to us is its ability to help control our blood pressure by thinning our blood. The chemical found in garlic, called ajoene, thins the blood and keeps clots from forming. Studies show that in populations where there is more garlic consumed, there is also a reduced incidence of hypertension and heart disease.

Sleeping in young and aged people

In young people, sleeping is viewed as very helpful and young people also believe that it helps them remember things unlike in older people, sleeping does not help them remember. Sleep has been shown in a wide variety of studies to increase people’s ability to recall words and objects and to improve physical skills. But that may only be available in the young ones. Researchers have shown that a night of sleep improves young people’s ability to learn a series of button presses similar to playing a piano. In adults over 50 years of age, that was not the case; they did not get a bump in performance from sleeping. But scientists believe that that difference may have been due to older folks’ slower reaction times. Although that does not agree with the new study, though, they suggest that its sleep’s memory benefits that are reduced with age.

The reason older people have trouble learning new tricks may be due to fragmented sleep patterns. Older people sometimes wake up more in the night (often to go to the bathroom), but also as people age, their sleep cycles get shorter. Although older and younger people get the same amount of sleep, older people spend less time per cycle in each of sleep’s stages. Particularly important in this case may be that older people spend less time in sleep stage 2, in which the day’s events are played back and committed to memory. It could also be that older people just don’t have enough time to replay and remember the entire sequence of the days’ events.

Most teens have trouble waking up in the morning or for school because their bodies drift in a later direction. In order for everyone to avoid sleep disorders in the future, everyone is advised to pay close attention to their sleep health.

Your brain knows you more than you think

 The unconscious workings of the brain are so critical to everyday functioning that their influence often trumps conscious thought. There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing. Consider the simple act of changing lanes while driving a car. The motion of turning the wheel rightward for a bit, then straightening it out again would steer you off the road: you just piloted a course from the left lane onto the sidewalk. The correct motion for changing lanes is banking the wheel to the right, then back through the center, and continuing to turn the wheel just as far to the left side, and only then straightening out. You are not consciously aware of the vast majority of your brain’s ongoing activities.  The best choice is that you not want to be because it would interfere with the brain’s well-oiled processes. The ability to remember motor acts like changing lanes is called procedural memory. It is a type of implicit memory meaning that your brain holds knowledge of something that your mind cannot explicitly access.

By the early 1600s, René Descartes had already begun to suspect that although experience with the world is stored in memory, not all memory is accessible. The concept was rekindled in the late 1800s by the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who wrote that “most of these experiences remain concealed from consciousness and yet produce an effect which is significant and which authenticates their previous existence.” To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and for very particular kinds of tasks.

I agree with the fact that my brain knows me more than I know myself  because sometimes I do things, but I cannot explain how I did them  or demonstrate the process step by step. I suspect my brains well, but too dab it cannot talk.

Food Ink

Food Ink is a documentary movie that talks about food today and where it comes from. When I first saw this movie, I hated myself for not considering what I eat. I used to believe that every food I eat is grown and is natural, but this movie proved me wrong because companies have changed the processes from which our food comes from. Our food chain has changed from natural, healthy to industry. Farmers who want to protect us from eating harmful food are constantly criticized. They are kept on the thumb by companies, forced to raise their crops faster than the crops’ natural cycle of growth. They are enslaved by companies because companies want to feed the world, but they don’t care what they feed the world; they just want money. I believe the outside air is cleaner than the inside air, but companies instead say “outside air is not good for food”, which is not true, so they treat all our food away from nature and the atmosphere. Corn became cheap and because of that, it is fed to animals. Companies benefit from this because corn makes cows, chickens, and pigs fat and it also makes them grow faster. They like that because they want to keep producing meat. There are no seasons in the super market. Most foods are genetically modified, so that they may be in stores early. Unhealthy food is cheap and tastes better, so people buy it because they just don’t have enough money to buy healthy food. I recommend everyone to watch food ink because it reveals secrets companies will never reveal to us the consumers. For example: the fact that farmers suffer greatly because we take all their food and they get little money from it. As a result, they cannot buy materials to grow more food and they also cannot feed themselves. The movie calls us to think about what we eat and where it comes from.

Sciences

Science is the subject and the field of study that most people do not normally choose because they think that it is hard. When one mentions looking into the science fields for studies, they are thought of as extremely smart people. I do not know if it’s true or not, but I happen to believe that sciences are harder than other subjects and fields.  Although they may be hard, people who choose to pursue them have passions for them. That passion is love. They love them and want to benefit from them; therefore they keep their hope and passion positive in order to not give up. The science subjects I am talking about include: Biology, Physics, Chemistry and many more subjects that apply. Scientists are thought of as nerds by people who cannot wrap their brains around the idea of studying science, but they are seen as geniuses by people who somewhat have a passion for science. I used to think that anyone who learns and works with science is absolutely smart, although I have come to a conclusion based on my knowledge and experiences that anyone can study and learn sciences if they have a passion for it. Science professions also have a factor of attraction to people because they are great jobs from which one earns a lot of money. For example doctors are in school for a long time, but they make a lot of money and that brings more people to that profession. In other words, love for sciences should be stronger than that of money in order for the exchange between the two to be fair. You can achieve anything you want as long as you trust and strongly believe that you can. Believe that you can and strive for it because that’s what scientists do.

Work

Work in the normal world is not the same as work in the physics world. In the normal world, work is doing anything as long as it is productive to you or to others, however in the physics world, work cannot be anything that did not move. It also includes math, i mean calculation to find out the amount of work you have done while in the normal world you need not number, you know your own work. When people think of work, they think oh that’s hard, but there is hard work and simple work and it’s up to a person to decide the kind of work they do. In our world, hard work is never the best choice to take, but it is on the other side the most credited type of work. Simple work is considered to be for lazy people because of the word simple although it might not be simple sometimes.  I do not know if there is simple work and hard work in physics but I would suspect that it is all hard work because it takes time no matter what it is and it also requires your brain to get involved in the process of work that you may be accomplishing. Work in the science world also needs mass, but the work in today’s world does not need mass. Working is a huge responsibility in our lives and is necessary for one’s survival, but in physics, it is not necessary for an object or body to survive. In order not to confuse one self, it is best to know that work in this world and the physics world is different.

We are learning about work and energy and it is an exciting chapter.  I hope that it will not be complicated in the end.

Last Week in the Quater

The end of quarter week is not preferred by many students because of the unpleasant gifts that come with it. These include: tests in every class, checking power school to make sure you have all of your work turned in and correctly recorded by the teacher, and making sure you do all your make ups or missing assignments. I don’t know what teachers think about this week but I would suspect that it is a bit of a hustle for them too because they have about four days to grade and enter all the tests and assignments that were recently turned in. This week would not be as bad if teachers didn’t all give tests on the same day. When I add all the tests that I have on that, it is a total of seven tests, which follow each other back to back. This does not do well for my brain; it destroys and weakens it because it is just too much information to process every fifty minutes. And that’s the reason as to why I don’t like the end of quarter week. Another reason is also that it causes stress, sleepless nights and confusion. My suggestion to solving the negative that come with this week is that we do less in classes in preparation for the tests and that teachers should  give their tests on different days to allow students time to process the material for every single class. Taking seven different tests in one day leads students to failing most of them because their brains get tired after a short time. These tests are supposed to help the student’s grades, but in the case of failing them; they kill or decrease their grades. In order to make these tests more effective, they should be given earlier and should not contain new material for example material covered during that week.

Carbon Sequestration

     

     Carbon Sequestration is the removal and storage of carbon from the atmosphere in carbon sinks (such as oceans, forests or soils) through physical or biological processes, such as photosynthesis. It can be performed in many ways, some of which include: Mineral sequestration; traps carbon by placing it in its thermodynamics ground state where it will be nonreactive. Injecting into deep saline aquifers, Saline aquifers are underground formations containing brine or salt water that is not suitable for agricultural purposes or for drinking. Ocean Fertilization: Ocean phytoplanktons take up carbon dioxide to grow, and that this growth can be stimulated in certain ocean basins. They are also simpler ways to capture carbon for example Tree planting, grass planting, organic matter. PH reduction, reduces climate change, carbonate dissolution are its environmental impacts. It is expensive and different programs have different costs. We produce a lot of CO2 today in many forms through the process we use to produce our daily needs. In order to reduce green house gases we can use the new advanced CCS method, which is known to capture and store CO2. The largest sources of carbon are fossil fuel power plants and factories.

The CCS has been significant in that it has so far been successful and it can reduce global warming thus reducing climate change in the environment. CCS will strengthen our economy and will reduce our environmental foot print .Although it may be expensive, it can be seen as a reduction of poverty because of the financial subsidies provided by the central government. It is now our time to take over and do as we please considering what carbon does for us and what we do for it. All we need is to agree and to take action to our path to the future.

The "Week"

Whoever said physics was easy was wrong. That person was wrong because the first three chapters are extremely hard and therefore there is a lower chance of the next chapters being easy. I know that keeping a positive mind is necessary and important in order to do it, but as of now the negative mind takes over. My biggest question is why is physics so complicated? I believe a physician would think am crazy, but it turns out that it goes from easy to hard in no time. For example: we were doing right triangles last week and everything seemed easy, but then there came angles which made right triangles hard. My most confusing moment is when I read a question and then am supposed to use two to three formulas to find one answer. It kills me when there is only one piece of information and you need 6 pieces. This week in physics was short and not fun because I did not learn all the problems we did although I learned a few, not enough. In preparation for the upcoming test, I went through all the home work for chapter 4 and I still don’t know how to figure out what information is missing and how much of it is needed to answer the question being asked. Now I still have hope that I will at least learn how to tell what kind of info I need by the end of the week.

The more positive side of this week in physics class was that I learned how to solve for x and y using cosine, sin and tangent. I also can now plug numbers and pieces of information into the formula to solve a problem in that class. I did not participate in the nerf gun fight because I had a lot of work to catch up on and I did not think I would like it. Although I did not participate, my classmates had a good time doing it.  

Cloning Humans

The non political science hot topic going on now is cloning humans. I think we should not clone human beings. There are advantages ad disadvantages, the advantages include: the creation of identical humans to prove organs for transplants. On the negative side, we may lose important aspects that apply to us as humans. For example: we may compromise our individualities and lose genetic variation. If we clone humans, people will not want to give birth; instead they will want organs to be donated so that they may clone themselves. As a result, a black market for fetuses will be created and that will be abusing human dignity (everyone deserves respect no matter who they are). Human dignity is lost because humans lose the right of uniqueness because after a while of cloning them, we will all be living for the same purpose and will die at the same age. We should not look at clones like strange creatures, we should respect them because they provide us with organs that save our lives when we no longer have hope that we can live any longer. They also cure many various diseases including Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, heart attack. They do so because doctors can replace tissues and organs damaged by disease or injury to restore our health. We need to be fair and generous to them because we benefit from them in many different ways. Studies show that most the American population is unhappy, ant not willing to clone humans. They feel uncomfortable being surrounded by clones. These people thought about it and decided to come to a conclusion that if we clone humans, we should also clone fruits and other foods we eat.  That suggestion was not taken well because no one wants to eat cloned food or fruits; therefore no one wants to live with cloned people.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Technology

                                          
Over the years, our technology has improved in many various ways. Although technology can be helpful, it is however sometimes not great as it seems. We use it for communication; we use a lot of hi-tech gadgets everyday to communicate with people from all over the world. Now days we have the privilege to use computers and the internet which has a wide variety of easy communication offers. There is also a bad side to this and that is that too many people can communicate with us at the same time, and that can create scams and viruses. Young people are using too much technology because it is so advanced and that is not good because it takes away too much valuable time. Our lives will never be the same, because we have so many medicines and other discoveries that enable us to live long if we wish to. Lengthening our lives is very easy these days; technology can easily do that for us.
                                               
Man has developed knowledge of how to create machines and he has used that knowledge well. Today we have more than a billion machines that do our work and chores for us. Now, that is a good thing because we get to relax and do no hard work, but it all turns around when you count just how many people have lost their jobs due to man's knowledge (machines). The production of goods has also increased since the invention of machines. They can produce lots of products in a short time, thus making man demand more of their power. For example: farmers who use fertilizers do so because the fertilizers enable their plants to grow faster. The more plants one has, the more money he/ she gets. But those farmers do not understand that the fertilizers they use kill the environment and cause health problems for the consumers. E.g. A poor person is not going to buy organic food because it is expensive, but he/she will buy genetically modified foods because they are cheaper. But today we all know that organic food is healthier for us more than genetically modified foods.

Saving Energy

It takes one step at a time to change the world. One light bulb can be the beginning of a world changing process. The more people who take the step the more energy we save. Here are a few easy steps we can take to save energy: Don't leave lights on when they are not in use, turn off the TV when no one is watching it and turn off the radio if its not in use. During warm weather set the thermostat at 78 degrees and in cold weather set the thermostat at 68 degrees or lower during the day and evening if health allows. Most people may not realize their impact on the environment but in truth we all affect our environment in both positive and negative ways. If you take a step to saving energy, you will be one of the many fair citizens who strive everyday to save our beloved environment. Encouraging your friends to recycle and save energy will add 4 years to your life time so that you may have a longer life. If we save energy, we will gain a few prizes these include: lower energy bills, we will not run out of limited sources such as petroleum or natural gas. You can also reduce your CO2 emissions (the biggest contributor to human-induced global warming. You can reduce your smog emissions (nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxide) for any energy you use that was produced using fossil fuels - especially energy that comes from coal.
Being a good citizen of your environment requires you to be faithful to it because we need to live it just the way we found it for the generations that will come after us. We are called to serve one another; saving the environment will be our tribute to someone else’s life.

Atoms

You might want to ask what are atoms? Atoms are the smallest units of an element consisting of a dense, central, positively charged nucleus surrounded by a system of electrons, equal in number to the number of nuclear protons. An atom is also a unit of matter. In the 1800’s, John Dalton performed experiments with various chemicals that showed that matter consists of atoms. Everything is made up of atoms for example: air, water, desks and people.

Scientists have discovered that living things are mostly made from the atoms carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Now you may want to ask that how does that happen? Relax I have the answer or so I think. In order to find out how this really happens, my suggestion is that you take your laptop apart and then trying putting it back together. You will find a lot of small pieces put together to make one and that is how people are made too. We are made of small particles. The idea that everything is made up of atoms is fascinating and a bit scary but it’s the truth although no one has ever seen an atom. We have trained ourselves to believe in things that we see but not those that we do not see. In a few cases people believe without seeing but in the atoms case, people want to see in order to believe. In order to see the atom, you use experiments which result into not only explaining the process but they still do not show the real atom. In the humans’ case, our DNAs are made up of atoms. Science can explain what an atom is and how it’s made. The fact that we have atoms in us is a big topic for scientists to research and explain who a human is.

In the article “Plastic: Too Good to Throw Away” by Freinkel Susan, the advantages and disadvantages of plastics are described and expanded briefly. We use plastics as electrical insulators, and plastic syringes “have been great allies in preventing the spread of infectious diseases like H.I.V., even plastic water bottles, which after disasters like the Japanese tsunami, are critical to saving lives.” We use plastic bags to carry our groceries from the store to our homes; plastics also make possible green technology like solar panels, lighter cars and plane that burn less fuel, thus saving energy. Although we can use them for great causes, we tend to make and use them in wrong ways. When we dispose plastics in places they are not meant to be disposed “they clog storm drains, tangle up recycling equipment and threaten wild life on land and at sea.” “Eliminating plastic is one of the greatest things you can do to lower your ecological footprint.” Recycle your plastics and use them only when necessary. Freinkel assures people that plastics aren’t necessarily bad for the environment; “it’s the way we tend to make and use them that’s the problem.”

One of Freinkel’s salient strategies is the production of safer plastics from renewable sources rather than finite fuels and harmful chemicals to the earth and our health. We can improve our ways of life by being eco-friendly to the environment. Every plastic that has ever been made still exists somewhere in some form because Plastic doesn’t biodegrade unless it is incinerated, which produces very harmful chemicals and toxics in addition to air pollution. Freinkel also invites everyone to rethink plastic and strongly advises us to “stop wasting plastic and take better advantage of what it can do for us.” Facts about today’s life, “we are not going to feed, clothe and house ourselves solely from wood, ore and stone. We need plastics. And in an era when we’re concerned about our carbon footprint, we can appreciate that lightweight plastics take less energy to produce and transport than many other materials.”

In my opinion, the article was a great call on people and encouragement for us to take care of the environment. We all need to live more sustainably. We need to support plastic recycling programs for a safer environment and we need to change or advance our ways of treating plastic because it can be deadly to us and other species. If we use it well we can attain more value from it.