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...