Akinsanya Grace
Stories (53/0)
Humans and the Cold
A new medication called pleconaril, intended to treat the common cold, underwent clinical trials in 2000 at the hands of ViroPharma. The pill worked for many patients. But in 7 of them, after just a few days of treatment, scientists discovered mutated virus variants that were almost entirely resistant to pleconaril. Although viruses are constantly evolving, this one did so quickly that it was able to outwit years of study and development in a matter of days. Without an immune system, a cold would quickly spread deep inside of your lungs if you had one. When the lungs couldn't give your body enough oxygen and you asphyxiated, rabid viral replication would continue to destroy tissue there. This risk exists for millions of people worldwide who take immunosuppressant medications or who have a compromised immune system because "minor" infections can develop into serious or even fatal conditions.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Humans
Benefits of positive self talk
You ask yourself, "Why did I set it so early?" as your alarm goes off in the morning. You think, "I need a haircut. If not?" As you dash out the front door, you reach for your keys and discover they are missing. Just as your neighbor notices you shouting in frustration, "I can't do anything right!". Talking to oneself out loud can be embarrassing, and some people may even stigmatize this behavior as a sign of mental instability. But decades of psychology research demonstrate that talking to oneself is completely normal. In fact, most of us—if not all of us—talk to ourselves in some way every day. The narration inside your head, also known as inner speech, is referred to as self-talk.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Humans
How are new words formed?
The Oxford English Dictionary receives about 1,000 new additions each year. With over 170,000 words currently in use in the English language, it might seem we already have enough. But where do they come from, and how do they make it into our daily lives? However, as our world evolves, fresh concepts and innovations emerge, and science advances, there are gaps in the meanings of the words we currently use that we try to fill in as creatively, practically, and occasionally oddly as possible. To learn a word from a different language is one method. Over the course of its history, English has taken so many words from other languages that almost half of its vocabulary is foreign-language-derived.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Humans
The disease that changes the shape of your cell
You probably don't give much thought to the physical characteristics of these building blocks, but at the microscopic level, even small adjustments can have profound effects. Are your cells squishy cylinders or jagged zig-zags? And while some adaptations improve these shapes, others can set off a chain reaction of crippling complications. The history of sickle cell disease is presented here. Red blood cells, which carry oxygen from the lungs to all of the body's tissues, are impacted by sickle-cell disease. Hemoglobin, a protein that carries oxygen molecules, is a component of red blood cells and serves this crucial function. Red blood cells are flexible enough to accommodate even the smallest blood vessels because of the free-floating proteins that keep them in their doughnut-like, malleable shape. In contrast, hemoglobin's structure is changed in sickle cell disease by a single genetic mutation. The mutated proteins lock together into rigid rows after supplying tissues with oxygen. The cell takes on the shape of a long, pointed sickle when hemoglobin rods are present. These red blood cells are now more rigid and sticky, and they no longer pass through blood vessels easily. Snags and accumulations of sclerotic cells can completely block a vessel. This prevents oxygen from getting to a variety of cells, resulting in the wide range of symptoms that sickle-cell disease patients experience.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Education
Why pneumonia is so dangerous?
Every time you take a breath in, air passes through the trachea, a network of bronchi, and small collections of air sacs called alveoli. The lungs have about 600 million alveoli, which together make up an area of about 75 square meters, or a tennis court's size. These minuscule sacs, each only one cell thick, serve as a vital conduit for an exchange that allows oxygen from the air we breathe to enter the bloodstream and removes carbon dioxide. This interaction suffers from pneumonitis. Alveoli become infected with pneumonia, which causes them to swell with fluid. Pneumonia can be brought on by many different pathogens. Bacteria or viruses are the most prevalent ones. When we touch our eyes, noses, or mouths after touching a contaminated surface, these microscopic invaders enter the body through droplets in the air we breathe. The mucociliary escalator is the respiratory tract's first line of defense after that. The mucociliary escalator is made up of cilia, which are minuscule hairs, and mucus, which traps foreign invaders and moves toward the mouth where it can be expelled through coughing.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Education
What Causes an Economic Recession?
Britain's population had been using bronze as a trade currency and for millennia to make tools, jewelry, and other objects. However, that started to change around 800 BCE as the price of bronze fell, leading to social unrest and an economic crisis—what we would now refer to as a recession. There has been much debate among economists over the years about what causes recessions, and for good reason. A recession can range in severity from a brief downturn with local effects that lasts months to a protracted downturn with global effects that lasts years.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Education
Life cycle of a cup of coffee
How many people are needed to make a cup of coffee? For many of us, it only requires a brief stroll and a quick pour. But this commonplace item is the result of a global process that was much more expensive and complex than you might think. Pitalito, a small town in remote Colombia, is where it all starts. To make room for orderly rows of Coffea trees, local family farms have cleared local forests in this area. The equatorial regions now cultivate these shrub-like plants, which were first domesticated in Ethiopia. Coffee cherries, which are tiny berries, are found in abundance on every shrub. The best way to harvest fruit is by hand because different fruits on the same branch may ripen at different times, but each farm has a different way of processing the fruit.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Humans
How does AI learn?
Today, artificial intelligence aids in the diagnosis of patients, the operation of commercial aircraft, and the traffic forecasting of cities. But whatever these AIs are doing, it's likely that their creators—the computer scientists—don't fully understand how they're doing it. This is so because artificial intelligence frequently learns on its own, building its own set of rules and tactics based on a limited set of instructions. There are many different ways to create self-teaching programs, so how exactly does a machine learn? But they all rely on the three fundamental varieties of machine learning: unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Consider a scenario where researchers are attempting to glean information from a set of medical data that includes thousands of patient profiles. Unsupervised learning is the first topic. The analysis of all the profiles using this method would be perfect for identifying commonalities and insightful patterns.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Education
How to see with Sound
Bats have limited vision in a completely dark cave. But they can move through rocky terrain at amazing speeds even when they close their eyes. This is due to the fact that a bat's ears as well as eyes help it to fly. Although it may seem impossible, bats, sailors, and doctors routinely use sound to see by taking advantage of ultrasound's special qualities. The vibration of molecules in any medium, including air, water, and other substances, results in the production of sound. The wave's frequency, expressed in hertz or cycles per second, depends on the separation between each peak.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Education
Your Brain during a Migraine
A headache that is pounding and throbbing. In your field of vision, there are bright, zigzagging lines. Light sensitivity, persistent tiredness, and sleep disturbances. Any of these signs or symptoms could be a migraine. Although one of the most typical migraine symptoms is an incapacitating headache, the term "headache" doesn't really encompass the full range of migraine-related symptoms. There are no two alike, and some don't even involve a headache. So what is a migraine, and what is going on in the brain to cause it? To trace the anatomy of a migraine, we must start in the days and hours before a migraine, when people frequently notice warning signs such as fatigue or mood changes, bursts of yawning, sleep disruption, nausea, light and sound sensitivity, or even increased thirst.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Humans
What makes a Language whole
The various spoken forms heard around Bremen, Germany and Interlaken, Switzerland are considered regional dialects of German. But when someone from Bremen visits the Swiss Alps, the stories they hear among the locals may not make sense to them. Mandarin and Cantonese are also often referred to as dialects of Chinese outside of China. But they are also different from Spanish and Italian. On the other hand, speakers of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, three recognized languages, can usually communicate in their mother tongue with little difficulty. And Turkish series broadcast without dubbing or subtitles are among the most popular programs in Azeri-speaking Azerbaijan. So when is a spoken form considered a dialect versus a language? It seems reasonable to classify the two speech styles as distinct languages or as dialects of the same language, determined by the degree of mutual intelligibility.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in History
Normal and Different
Two sculptures that were intended to represent the typical American man and woman went on display at the American Museum of Natural History in 1945. They were given the names Norma and Normman based on measurements taken from tens of thousands of young men and women. A search for Norma's living embodiment began in the same year. Normal is frequently used interchangeably with terms like "typical," "expected," and even "correct.". By that reasoning, the majority of people ought to be considered normal. None of the nearly 4,000 women who entered the competition, however, matched Norma, the ostensibly "normal" woman. This conundrum isn't just a problem for Norma and Normman either—normal explanations of our bodies, minds, and perceptions have repeatedly been found to fit almost no one. Nevertheless, a large portion of the world's infrastructure is built on a normalcy-based foundation. In statistics, a normal distribution refers to a set of values that fall along a bell curve.
By Akinsanya Grace12 months ago in Education