If you think your job is hard, you should try being an amoeba. While they often just lounge around the bottom of a lake, which sounds like a good ol' time, other times they have to go ahead and eat some brains.
The latest victim chosen by the Naegleria fowleri -- which might as well be Latin for zombie -- was a 14-year-old boy who happened to get some lake water up his nose around Sept. 10, 2007. The boy died one week later after the amoeba, which was in the water, ate its way from the boy's nasal cavity into his brain.
There were six deaths associated with this zombie-amoeba in 2007 and -- guess what -- half of the cases were in Florida. The most common way for the amoeba to enter the nasal cavity is through water, as it is known to live near the bottom of warm fresh-water lakes and in some swimming pools. I still don't understand why people go swimming in lakes when the state is covered in beaches and swimming pools, granted not all pools are safe from this microscopic beast.
Besides Florida, there have been two cases in Texas this year and one in Arizona. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 23 documented infections between 1995 and 2004, which makes the six cases this year that much more significant. Apparently amoebic infections are on the rise, possibly leading to a zombie uprising of microscopic proportions.
This type of amoebic infection can be found using an MRI, and it can be treated with antibiotics. Unfortunately, many medical professionals are not used to looking for amoebas, reports CNN. Yes, this article was linked earlier, but I'm not sure if any of you click the links anyway.
For some reason, no one ever believes me when I bring up the brain-eating amoeba in everyday conversation. This habit started in 2002 when I read about the case in Georgia and, for some reason, the habit is still going strong.
Maybe I just like to say the word "amoeba."
One of our sneakier amoebic friends, the Acanthamoeba (Latin for eye-muncher, or something), found its way into the eyes of 138 people earlier this year and was supposedly linked to contact solution. It was never officially determined whether the solution contained the amoebas or if the solution simply didn't kill the organisms. Instead of going for the brain, this amoeba is seemingly content with the cornea.
Unlike the zombie-amoeba, eye-muncher is not linked to certain death. It only seems to lead to vision loss, which is still a serious problem. Some of the amoeba's victims are undergoing Keratoplasty, or corneal transplants, in an effort to correct their vision.
I don't know what we did to anger these little organisms, but as Tyra Banks would probably say, amoebas are fierce.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Better late than never
I'm sure there's something important you could be doing right now, but chances are you are waiting until the last minute to do it. It's ok: 90 percent of college students are guilty of procrastination, at least according to LiveScience. And now, thanks to a 10-year study, science has finally determined why people put things off until tomorrow ... sort of.
According to professor Piers Steel of the University of Calgary, we procrastinate because we are impulsive, and we need that jolt of pressure toward the end of a deadline to actually get tasks accomplished.
And here I thought I was just more productive in the morning; turns out that I just need that extra push to get things done.
Anyway, college students are impulsive by nature - really, how many times have you crammed for a test - so it makes sense that we are the largest contributors to the procrastination population. Out of the total population, procrastinators only make up 15 to 20 percent, which shows that we may eventually grow out of this awful habit.
Or it could just be an indication that 80 to 85 percent of the population doesn't use the Internet, which is the greatest procrastination tool since the television. It seems like we procrastinators thrive on instant gratification, and apparently Steel agrees.
"[Procrastinators] are the type of people who choose short-term gain and incur long-term pain," Steel told LiveScience.
Yep, that sounds like college: the land where the short term goal of having an active social life sometimes trump the long-term goal of graduating on time.
Granted, this is FAU. I'm sure there are plenty of students who don't get to graduate on time for reasons beyond their control, such as the small class sizes of many required courses and having to fight for department permission.
Anyway, for all you math people, Steel also says that procrastination can be described using the following formula:
U = E x V / I x D
According to Scientific American, U is a person's desire to finish the task (e.g. homework), E is the person's expectation of success, V is the value of the completed task, I is the immediacy in which the task needed to be done, and D is the person's sensitivity to delay.
I think the formula's just another excuse to waste time. I'm sure Steel used a considerable amount of time coming up with the formula when he could have been doing other things. I know I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the formula when I could have been doing homework.
Or, you know, surfing the internet.
According to professor Piers Steel of the University of Calgary, we procrastinate because we are impulsive, and we need that jolt of pressure toward the end of a deadline to actually get tasks accomplished.
And here I thought I was just more productive in the morning; turns out that I just need that extra push to get things done.
Anyway, college students are impulsive by nature - really, how many times have you crammed for a test - so it makes sense that we are the largest contributors to the procrastination population. Out of the total population, procrastinators only make up 15 to 20 percent, which shows that we may eventually grow out of this awful habit.
Or it could just be an indication that 80 to 85 percent of the population doesn't use the Internet, which is the greatest procrastination tool since the television. It seems like we procrastinators thrive on instant gratification, and apparently Steel agrees.
"[Procrastinators] are the type of people who choose short-term gain and incur long-term pain," Steel told LiveScience.
Yep, that sounds like college: the land where the short term goal of having an active social life sometimes trump the long-term goal of graduating on time.
Granted, this is FAU. I'm sure there are plenty of students who don't get to graduate on time for reasons beyond their control, such as the small class sizes of many required courses and having to fight for department permission.
Anyway, for all you math people, Steel also says that procrastination can be described using the following formula:
U = E x V / I x D
According to Scientific American, U is a person's desire to finish the task (e.g. homework), E is the person's expectation of success, V is the value of the completed task, I is the immediacy in which the task needed to be done, and D is the person's sensitivity to delay.
I think the formula's just another excuse to waste time. I'm sure Steel used a considerable amount of time coming up with the formula when he could have been doing other things. I know I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the formula when I could have been doing homework.
Or, you know, surfing the internet.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Time after time
We all complain about needing more time: time to sleep, time to study and time to stalk our classmates on Facebook. Apparently our complaints have been heard, as scientists have just created a 25-hour day. The hard part will be getting Earth and the sun to cooperate.
While adding an extra hour may be difficult on Earth, since even Wal-Mart is only open for 24 hours, the experiment was designed to get the human body adjusted to the 25-hour days found on Mars. The study involved 12 people living in a controlled environment without any time clues, such as windows or clocks, for 65 days. The participants followed regular time in the beginning, but later the researchers delivered two pulses of light at the end of the "day," which tricked the participants’ internal clocks and allowed them to stay awake an extra hour. This method could be used to keep astronauts from getting jetlag when traveling to Mars — whenever we get there.
By going to Mars, we'd essentially gain more Earth-time, as days are slower on the red planet. I’m not sure how many days the average person would want to spend on Mars, though, since there’s nothing to do there yet.* Anyway, this is similar to how a time-traveling device, i.e. a time machine, would operate.
To travel forward in time, we would just need to travel close to the speed of light for a while and then come back to Earth, physicist Brian Greene told LiveScience. Of course, this is easier said than done, but at least it works on paper. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work for traveling back in time. This means that if you really, really want to go to the future, you’ll have to learn to love it, since there’s no going back.
Time is considered to be the fourth dimension — the other three being length, width and height. While it is possible to move the first three backward and forward, time can only move forward. Thus, we cannot make time move backward, nor can we make it stop, no matter how much we may want to or how hard we try.
That said, the most developed way to travel back in time is to find a wormhole, or a tunnel which connects two areas of time and space. Unfortunately, no one is really sure if wormholes exist — not even the writers of Star Trek, who greatly depend on the wormhole in Deep Space Nine — and no one knows if our future selves have yet accomplished this task.
Here's a video from The History Channel that explains time travel and wormholes with better visual representation:
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once asked in a PBS special, "Time travel might be possible, but if that is the case why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?"
He makes a good point.** While these future-people may be able to help us in ways we can’t even imagine, they may choose to travel to our time just to laugh at us and our primitive ways. You know you’d do the same thing if you could, and then probably post the photos on Facebook.
*Really, Mars would be more boring than Boca.
**We have enough problems with tourists from other states; could you imagine tourists from other eras?
While adding an extra hour may be difficult on Earth, since even Wal-Mart is only open for 24 hours, the experiment was designed to get the human body adjusted to the 25-hour days found on Mars. The study involved 12 people living in a controlled environment without any time clues, such as windows or clocks, for 65 days. The participants followed regular time in the beginning, but later the researchers delivered two pulses of light at the end of the "day," which tricked the participants’ internal clocks and allowed them to stay awake an extra hour. This method could be used to keep astronauts from getting jetlag when traveling to Mars — whenever we get there.
By going to Mars, we'd essentially gain more Earth-time, as days are slower on the red planet. I’m not sure how many days the average person would want to spend on Mars, though, since there’s nothing to do there yet.* Anyway, this is similar to how a time-traveling device, i.e. a time machine, would operate.
To travel forward in time, we would just need to travel close to the speed of light for a while and then come back to Earth, physicist Brian Greene told LiveScience. Of course, this is easier said than done, but at least it works on paper. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work for traveling back in time. This means that if you really, really want to go to the future, you’ll have to learn to love it, since there’s no going back.
Time is considered to be the fourth dimension — the other three being length, width and height. While it is possible to move the first three backward and forward, time can only move forward. Thus, we cannot make time move backward, nor can we make it stop, no matter how much we may want to or how hard we try.
That said, the most developed way to travel back in time is to find a wormhole, or a tunnel which connects two areas of time and space. Unfortunately, no one is really sure if wormholes exist — not even the writers of Star Trek, who greatly depend on the wormhole in Deep Space Nine — and no one knows if our future selves have yet accomplished this task.
Here's a video from The History Channel that explains time travel and wormholes with better visual representation:
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once asked in a PBS special, "Time travel might be possible, but if that is the case why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?"
He makes a good point.** While these future-people may be able to help us in ways we can’t even imagine, they may choose to travel to our time just to laugh at us and our primitive ways. You know you’d do the same thing if you could, and then probably post the photos on Facebook.
*Really, Mars would be more boring than Boca.
**We have enough problems with tourists from other states; could you imagine tourists from other eras?
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