Farewell to 20 Time: Last Post Plastic Pollution

For my project I created 3/4ths of a video to illustrate how the media impacts how we view plastic pollution  in our society. Unfortunately, I was unable to complete this video due to various setbacks that I describe in my ted talk such as mismanagement of time, a computer crash, etc. 

Here are pics from my project that I showed in the video:

       
At first glance                                                      A closer look


An average American throws away about 185 lbs plastic per year.
- Ecowatch


What's wrong with this picture...? No recycling bin!!


Microbeads are just as deadly as regular plastic.
They outnumber zooplankton 6:1 in some areas of the ocean.
- NOAA


Reusable options

Here is my Ted Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNZOSdFayec&index=33&list=PLXVa0vGCksTaQxb0DUCUENbC9LuWRDKTr

I was a little bit nervous going into my Ted Talk which caused me to look at my notecard sporadically throughout my presentation and maybe overuse the card despite my constant rehearsals of the presentation at home. I believe that this nervousness also caused me to talk more than I should have and go over the five minute time limit that was provided.

I think a good thing that I will take away from this entire experience is to work on time management since with projects with due dates further away I tend to mismanage my time more than I would in a project with a closer due date. Listening to the other Ted talks made me see how the 20 Time project was more of an individual learning experience than a project that needed to be turned in for a grade. People seemed to learn much more about themselves and develop healthier habits as a result of this project. For example, I thought that the presentation on different exercises and why people don't exercise was really interesting because it showed both the positive effects on why people should want to exercise more, but at the same time showed the negative reasons people have for not wanting to exercise. I also thought that the one presentation on the guitar was interesting because although the person who did the project originally was going to be a lot of fun, he discovered that the guitar wasn't his passion and that was a great learning experience that not everyone has the same passion, but they can all find their way and be successful at different things. For me, I learned that procrastination is horrible and to counteract it, it probably would have been helpful to set smaller due dates for myself before an entire project is due.

Although I find plastic pollution really interesting and a big problem in our world, if I could redo my 20 Time, I probably would have focused more on ways to promote time management as that is a larger skill that I need to work on and will be important for the future.

Reflex Lab

In this lab we had the opportunity to examine various types of reflexes such as the photopupillary reflex, the knee jerk reflex, and the blink reflex. A reflex is an action that takes place in response to internal signals or external signals from the environment and usually preformed without conscious thought.
To test the photopupillary reflex, one member in our group closed both of his eyes for two minutes and  we positioned a flashlight close to one of his eyes. From there we had him remove one of his hands quickly in order to measure the change in size of the pupil we uncovered compared to the one that was uncovered and not exposed to a lot of light. We observed that the less light that entered the eye, the wider the pupil was; and the more light that entered the eye, the smaller it was. I believe that humans have developed this reflex in order to help them adjust to new places where they might find food or take shelter and needed to have their eyes adjust to the changing brightness of the sun throughout the day so that they could see.
One thing that I didn't know before this lab was that the blink reflex is different from the photopupillary reflex. We got to test the blink reflex by holding plastic wrap in front of a persons face in our group and throwing a cotton ball at the plastic to see if they would blink or not. Every time that we tested this, we found that people blinked when they saw the cotton ball flying towards them. I believe that this is because people try to protect their eyes as much as possible so whenever they see something coming towards their face, the usually close their eyes to prevent damage towards their eyes.
In our next experiment our group tested the knee-jerk reflex by having a group member sit and gently have another team member hit a certain spot on their knee with a reflex hammer in order to text their muscle reflex where the leg kicks out automatically. I believe that humans have evolved this reflex because of their "fight or flight" response, and when part of the body is hit, then the body's reaction is to immediately tense up and prepare itself for either defense or offense.
One of the most memorable parts of our lab was when we tested how fast our reflexes were by having a partner drop a yardstick from the air and seeing how fast the other person could catch the end of it. In the second part of this experiment we tried the same thing as above, but now you had to text with one had and grab the yardstick with the other hand (see graphs below). When comparing the two measurements, I noticed that the reaction time was almost twice as fast in the original experiment without texting. Our entire class grouped our data together, and got similar results. Based on our data, (and other data from the scientific community) if you are texting while driving, it can slow your reflexes tremendously, and people can get seriously hurt with this slower reaction time.

Our Data:

(Without texting)                                    (While texting)

Class Data:
  

Sheep Brain Dissection

During our lab, we had the opportunity to open up a sheep's brain. First, we cut open the cerebrum longitudinally in order to see the different sections of the brain including the thalamus, optic nerve, medulla oblongata, the corpus callosum, etc. The different sections of the brain are labeled below with colored pins. Some of the printed colors of pins are crossed out and replaced with other colors due to the limited colors of pins available for our lab.



Furthermore we were able to see the difference between the white matter and the grey matter in the brain. Grey matter is darker than the white tissue and contains nerve cell bodies and dendrites which in turn help with functions like sensory perception (sight, smell) and memory. White matter contains myelinated nerve projections and carry nerve impulses throughout the brain with myelin acting as an insulator that speeds up the transmission of such messages.


Sheep's Brain

The Cerebrum, the largest part of the brain, encompasses the four lobes: frontal, parietal, occipital, and the temporal lobe. The cerebrum also helps control the voluntary functions of the body, perception, and helps process visual and auditory information, and other sensory input. The cerebellum, located at the back of the cerebrum, helps control muscle movement, balance, coordination, and speech. Lastly, the brain stem contains the medulla oblongata, pons, and the midbrain and controls the flow of messages between the brain and the rest of the body.


Sheep's Brain cut longitudinally




Longitudinal Cut of the Sheep's brain cut Laterally

Sheep's Eye Dissection

In this lab, we got to dissect a sheep's eye in order to examine its anatomy and physiology. One major difference I noticed as our group started opening up the eye was that the iris was oval-shaped and the pupil was lying on its side horizontally, while human eyes have round iris's and round pupils.

On the outside of the eye, extrinsic muscle bundles are found side by side with yellowish fat which helps protect the eye. The cornea is the cloudy, black-looking centerpiece of the eye, though it's clear and cloudy (not black) outside of the picture. Inside the eye, the eye's anatomy is arranged so that the cornea is the first thing that light hits as it enters the eye. Next, it is the pupil which is in the middle of the iris, then the lens is behind the pupil while the sclera surrounds the rest of the eye. The vitreous humor fills the inside of the eye so that everything is held in place. The retina is the yellow film-like layer (shown in the third picture below) that's located at the back of the eye. Behind this object, in order, there's the tapetum lucid, the choroid coat, and the optic nerve.

The physiology of the eye eye allows us to have our sense of vision, and our perception of light and dark. The cornea helps protect the eye from things such as dirt which is why it is located at the front of the eye instead of inside it or at the back of it. Behind the cornea, the pupil is the one opening in the eye which allows light to enter this item, and the lens behind the pupil helps bend the light to focus on objects that we can see. The Ciliary body holds the lens in place and the suspensory ligaments adjust it's size and therefore, focus. In between the lens and the retina is the vitreous humor which provides nutrients for the inside of the eye and maintains the eye's pressure. The images from the lens are then projected onto the retina, which converts them into signals that it sends to the brain via the optic nerve. The dark choroid coat behind the retina helps with this process by absorbing light so that it will not scatter around the eye.



(outside look at the sheep's eye)


Inside of the eye left, and the back of the
inside of the eye right showing the retina
on top, then the tapetum lucid, the choroid
coat, and behind that, the optic nerve.


(image of the lens, small white circle, and
the choroid coat (black) inside the eye)


(assembly of all the dissected parts of the eye,
excluding the fat)

Microbeads and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In the past couple of weeks I have been concentrating my research on the main products causing plastic pollution and solutions to fix them. In particular I was struck when I realized that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was really a big swamp-like area of floating garbage instead of a solid land mass of trash as many people are led to believe. The main problem with plastic, as I mentioned before, is that as it photodegrades in the ocean, it only breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces leading to millions of tiny plastic particles floating around instead of one digger piece of plastic. These tiny particles of plastic can be found outnumbering zooplankton 6:1 in some parts of the Pacific Ocean around the Garbage Patch. Furthermore, more tiny particles of plastic called microbes, can be found pre-made in girls beauty products such as face wash. Once microbeads end up in the ocean they are eaten first by zooplankton and small fish due to their resemblance to fish eggs. As smaller fish are continuously eaten by larger fish, the plastic and toxins in the microbeads continue to bioaccumulate instead of disappearing. They can affect the entire food chain- including us when we eat seafood. Fortunately, President Barack Obama signed the Microbead Free Waters Act of 2015 to phase out the production of microbeads in beauty products by 2020.

In order to learn about the other items that were poluting our oceans and our beaches, I volunteered in a beach cleanup over the weekend to help the community. When I reached the beach, I was pleasantly surprised to note that there was an abundance of trash and recycling cans dotting the beach so that people had the opportunity to get rid of their waste in a sustainable and non-polluting way. While I did find some trash buried in the sand, overall, there was much less garbage than I expected.

I also took a trip down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium over the weekend in order to earn more about sustainable methods that help save energy and marine life along the coast. Examples of coastal life shown below.









As I walked through the exhibits, I realized that they had a section on plastic and the North Pacific Gyre.




(Plastic taken from the Gyre)

What I took from the exhibit was while plastic could be deadly and very harmful to marine life, it could also be very beautiful as well. If people take the time to recycle plastic, they can turn it into art like the jellyfish made out of bottles below.





Through this process so far I've learned to see the silver lining in every cloud because if society allows us to only focus on the cloud and the negatives, then we'll never be looking for the solutions. My greatest setback is time right now as I am putting together my final project. My research is as complete as it can be at this point and I just need to put it all together.

The Clay Brain

In this activity, our team assembled a brain out of different colors of play dough in order to illustrate the different parts of the brain. In our models, we tried to show not only the lobes, but the different glands, gyrus's, and sulcus's as well. For example, the lateral cerebral sulcus is located in between the frontal and temporal lobes, and the pineal gland (shown in pink in the first picture) is located in between the cerebellum, brainstem, thalamus, and cerebrum. The different parts of the brain are labeled on the cardboard next to their corresponding structure.



Left Hemisphere of the brain (view
along the Sagittal plane)


Right Cerebral Hemisphere (lateral
view)

Living Without Pieces of our Brain

A woman who had been having trouble with speech and balance throughout her life was discovered to be missing a cerebellum in her brain. So far only 9 people have been able to live without a cerebellum as most people without this part of the brain die in childhood. This woman discovered that she was missing a cerebellum at age 24. 

The cerebellum is an important part of our brain located underneath the right and left hemisphere. It contains about 50% of the brain's neurons even though it only makes up about 10% of the brain's total volume. The cerebellum is also in charge of controlling voluntary movements, balance, and is involved in speech. According to researchers, it appears that the woman's brain has worked to compensate for her missing cerebellum and she is experiencing less movement and speech impairment than they expected.

If the parietal lobe was missing in a person's brain the same way that the cerebellum in missing in this woman's brain, then that person would have trouble processing pressure, visualizing spaces, and understanding the spoken word. The right side of the parietal lobe integrates sensory information such as touch (mainly processed in the somatosensory cortex part of the lobe), spatial sense and navigation. A person may have trouble finding their way around, even in places that are familiar to them. They may also have trouble feeling temperature and pressure so it is important for people with damaged or missing parietal lobes to stay away from hot stoves since they may be damaging themselves without even knowing it. Several parts of the parietal lobe process language, so a person missing a parietal lobe may have trouble understanding what they and other people are saying. Other parts of the brain could take over the spacial sense, language, and feeling pressure, but while missing the parietal lobe a person will most likely to have a varying amounts of disabilities in these areas.