Honors General Science Current Events

 In the article "How to Be Happy", it states that to be happy, you must tame negative thoughts and keep optimism always in mind. Now, you may be thinking that sometimes you can't just "tame" negative thoughts, and you are right but that doesn't mean you can bring happiness with those thoughts. Everyone has bad days, where all you can do is think about all the bad times, but you have to look through those times and find positives. In this article there are many different ways to keep optimism in your mind, such as: think about your breathing, realize that you are thinking negative and fix it, get moving (exercise), rewrite this negative story, etc. All of these things can help to keep you happy and not constantly thinking about the rough times. Being happy is so important life, because if you are just sad all the time, then you never really get to experience life the way you should be able to. Also, in this article, it talks about finding your happy place. By...

      "This is not just an ocean issue, it's a land issue, too. It's everywhere." About 390,000 camels live in the United Arab Emirates. Plastic kills around 1% of them. Of 30,000 camels that were found dead around 300 had stomachs packed with plastic. When the camels eat the plastic it clogs the stomach. This is called polybezoars. Since their stomachs are filled with plastic they do not eat because they think they are not hungry anymore. This causes them to starve to death.  This may not seem important to many people but it is. It is not just the camels effected by the amount of plastic we use. The best way to solve this problem, to not only help the camels, but also the marine life we must ban the use of plastics. If everyone would use reusable water bottles, reusable bags, metals straws, etc. we would help all of our animals.   https://www.sciencenews.org/article/camel-eating-plastic-trash-waste-deadly-masses  

       A deep-learning program, that was created from a champion chess program, makes huge progress in solving the mystery of how proteins fold. The chess program is called StockFish-8 and was turned into AlphaFold2. StockFish-8 can process 70 million different moves a second. We don’t know why the program makes correlations, we just know that it works. A protein not folding right can cause Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease.       Figuring out how proteins fold is the first step to being able to fold them ourselves. Folding proteins might help us genetically modify plants. The processing power of AlphaFold2 could make research in many different fields easier. Like scanning through the cells of a person to find cancer.

 Corals can be bleached by heat by the slightest change in temperature. But, some are able to recover. Apparently, as shocking as it is, water pollution and other stresses actually have made coral reefs stronger and more resilient to shocks of climate change. In coral reefs, there are super small invertebrates called polyps. Each of the polyps contribute to the skeleton and algae of the coral reef.  The reasons coral get bleached when the water is warm is because these polyps get stressed and eject the algae from the coral reefs, resulting them to turn white. The coral bleaching can affect many things, including fish, underwater animals like crabs, and the polyps. The coral losing its color might also effect the waters around it. Link to Article

     In the United states humans are responsible for more wildfires than nature itself. In California the settlement of humans has made the conditions that assists the spread of wildfires. " Human-sparked fires typically spread about 1.83 kilometers per day, more than twice as f ast  as the 0.83 kilometers per day for lightning-induced burns..."(Tess Joosse,2020) " Studies have shown human ignition is to blame for 84% of all wildfires in the United States..." (Tess Joosse,2020) this shows that people being cautious could lead to less fires. This is important because the amount of forest fires that happened throughout last 5 years could have been prevented.

      There are many reasons why people think we should train doctors to think like scientists. One of the more popular reasons is because people think that doctors should be doing research and running new trials as opposed to just helping people. I think that the more we know about medicine the better, but I also think that doctors should not put 95% of the time they work in to a new trial for a dissease. Doctors are trained to help people from the start. If we want out doctors to think like scientists, then we need to start there when people first come to medical school or any type of schooling to become a doctor.  https://nyulangone.org/news/training-young-doctors-think-scientists

 Scientists have recently found that platypuses not only have an electricity-sensing bill, venomous heel spurs, and lay eggs, but they have now found that they glow under ultraviolet light. The article I found stated that their fur absorbs the ultraviolet light, and gives off a blue-green glow. Scientists found this discovery because other types of marsupials were giving off different colors under ultraviolet lights. It also said that not all platypuses fur may do this, and only some have this interesting characteristic. One scientist thinks that they have this capability so they have less of a refection in nighttime to protect against predators. Who knows, there could be hundreds of animals in the world with this capability, us humans just don't know about yet. Furthermore, some scientists think that there were many animals like this in the past, that have now went extinct. This article just goes show that there are so many things that us humans are still learning about animals in...

     Article               With a scarcity of food for the monarch caterpillars , they have become aggressive. The article talks about how Monarch caterpillers behave and act with the decreasing food availability. Alex Keene started observing and researching the activities the Monarch's have shown. The insect only eats milkweed, and survive on the plant until the grow/bulk up. "Making things more difficult, the caterpillars need a huge amount of food to transform into a butterfly." The monarch, from egg to chrysilis multiply in weight 3,000 times. Researchers have pointed out that some are more aggressive then others. The next steps into this research of the behavior is to see if the cateripillers will grow into aggressive butterflies.      I found this article to be very fascinating. The thought that Monarch caterpillers are now becoming aggressive towards each other because they are losing food sources makes sense, ...

      There are many theories as to why we dream. I will be discussing the ones that stood out to me. First, there is a theory that we dream to see how we would handle certain situations. This would be an evolutionary advantage because if you were a hunter in a tribe, you would want to have a dream about a big cat trying to attack you to survive. Second, dreams are just neurons firing randomly. This is an understandable theory as it explains why you sometimes dream about what you were thinking about before sleeping. Finally, the theory that it is your subconscious of your brain sharing its desires with the contentious part. 90% of our brain is subconscious, so it would make sense that it would need to communicate more easily. 

Life does not exist on Mars  currently, but a new study suggests that if there were aliens  on the Red Planet in its past, they may have lived far below the surface. New research suggests that ice sheets below the surface melted geothermal heat, creating water, and providing the perfect environment for any form of life.  The findings could help researchers understand the faint young sun paradox, which notes approximately 4 billion years ago, the sun was "much fainter" than it is now. This should have caused the Martian surface to freeze; instead, it was warm and wet.  https://www.foxnews.com/science/life-on-mars-may-have-lived-below-surface

      The telegraph machine from the Titanic could be recovered. Scientists say, "The telegraph machine, sometimes called 'the voice of the Titanic', could be recovered from the ship. Some people are don't agree that it should be recovered. The man-in-charge, David Gallo, has been called a greedy treasure hunter and a grave robber. A picture of the Marconi room where the telegraph is was taken last year. The room is badly corroded and collapsing, which makes it soon unrecoverable. The company plans an expedition to cut the machine out but the government says the ship is protected by two countries. Gallo claims that recovering the telegraph is for the Titanics legacy rather than financial gain. Gallo says, "concerns that the shipwreck should be left as a mass grave were perhaps misinformed." I feel recovering the telegraph would be a smart decision because you could hear the distress calls coming from the ship and would really help inform people about the Tita...

 Scientist believe that by studying how dogs age, it can help to figure out how humans age. Scientist notice  like how they act during adolescence and old age, and what happens in their DNA as they get older. Based on this information they believe that they can 'mode' human age. They actually believe that maybe we can learn to age better. Some study show that dogs personality's  can change just like and human. Some dogs are also born old or have a 'old soul' too.      I think that this is very interesting. One day if scientist can figure out how to help humans age better it can impact the world a lot. Maybe we could live longer or just be in less pain when we grow old.   the link:     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/science/dogs-aging-behavior.html 

 Climate Change has been causing hurricanes that hit the land to take longer to weaken causing more destruction. Hurricanes develop over warmer oceans and as the world continues to get warmer the hurricanes will continue to get stronger and be able to last longer. Scientists predict that in the future hurricanes will be able to reach farther inland. Inland communities must prepare for stronger winds and rains then they usually are prepared for. The article states,  "This shows that stored moisture is the key factor that gives each hurricane in the simulation its own unique identity," said Li. "Hurricanes that develop over warmer oceans can take up and store more moisture, which sustains them for longer and prevents them from weakening as quickly." This means that the more moisture stored the harder and longer the rain. Professor Chakraborty says that if we don't curb global warming the hurricanes will claim more lives and create more economic  disaster farther i...

 Since Denmark tracked twelve COVID-19 cases back to minks they decided to kill and burry around 17 million mink. They buried these minks in trenches of military zones. The interesting part of this is that the minks are starting to rise to the surface of where they are buried, the media over in Denmark are calling them zombie mink. This is probably due to the gases that were used to kill them.   Article

 https://www.sciencenews.org/article/astronomers-spotted-colliding-neutron-stars-magnetar  When two neutron stars collide it produces a magnetar. A magnetar is a type of neutron star that is believed to have an extremely powerful magnetic field. An astrophysicist from North Western University claimed to have spotted a bright cosmic blast that might be the birth of a magnetar. "If it is, this will be the first time astronomers have witnessed the formation of this kind of star. The astrophysicist said, It's potentially the most luminous kilonova we have ever seen... It basically breaks our understanding of the luminosities and brightness that kilonovae are supposed to have." This is what leads astronomers to believe that this collision could have possibly produced a magnetar. If it is a magnetar it could tell astronomers more about magnetars since they've never seen one. Observing this star could tell them about the stability of neutron stars, how big they can get, and ...

     Killer whales are known to be the biggest members of the oceanic dolphin family. There are two main types of killer whales, resident and transient killer whales, resident whales stay around coastlines and mainly eat fish, while transient killer whales are known for their hunting, especially for seals, sea lions, and even other whales. In the video, the group of tourists was very frightened by a group of killer whales; which was a transient group, that was following their boat. Killer whales don't prey on humans and are usually fussy eaters. Though it looks like the killer whales are attacking the tourists they most likely were not and the video even comes up with the prediction that they were learning to hunt and building teamwork with each other.      I think that it is very interesting that the whales didn't want to harm the tourists and were just training themselves for hunting. Overall I think these whales are very interesting animals and find it f...

 While eating healthy can boost health, it's also true the other way around. Between the ages of 10-19, eating too much junk food can harm your brain as well as body. It can impair the brains was of thinking, learning, and remembering along with possibly causing anxiety and depression. Eating unhealthily is most harmful to teens because their brains are not fully formed yet. The prefrontal cortex- part of the brain that weighs risks and make decisions on how to behave- doesn't fully develop until our early 20s.  I think this interesting because I always enjoyed learning about mental health and how to maintain good mental health. I never actually thought that the foods you eat could effect the way you think and even damage your brain. Most of the time I just think of it negatively effecting the body. This makes me wonder if it may be more difficult for teens to avoid these kinds of foods depending on how their brain specifically functions/ has functioned their whole life. ...

 The Mandela Effect is an unusual phenomenon where a large group of people remembers something differently than how it occurred.  Conspiracy theorists believe the Mandela Effect is a result of alternate universes present in society. The Mandela Effect first got its name when Fiona Broome remembered South African President Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. She swore there was major news coverage of this, yet, this didn't happen. She later found out that the vast majority of people remembered Nelson Mandela dying in his prison cell as well. As a result, the Mandela Effect was "born."  I really like these types of things as well as conspiracy theories. I 100% believe that the Mandela Effect is real. You can find some great examples of the Mandela Effect online. Everyone has most likely experienced the Mandela Effect at some point in time. It's crazy to me how a whole group of people can remember something so distinctively, yet this isn't how it is at all....

      This article talks about how scientists have newly discovered that alligators can regrow tails just like lizards. They said that this gives the alligators an advantage when in the murky water. How this works is, the tissue from the new alligators tail, interlaces with the nerves of the alligator. The alligator is basically producing new muscle and tissue. This shows signs of regeneration within the alligator family too.  How is this an advantage for them?  This gives them a functional advantage to maneuver around the water with a tail. If it were to lose its tail, now it can grow the tail back.  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201123100952.htm