Upset Stomachs in the NBA

This is the story of two NBA point guards. Both were drafted the same year, both were contenders for Rookie of the Year (guy on left got it), and both are blaming food and drink for current bodily woes.

Beast

There he is, point guard of the hour #1. Thursday Derek Rose announced that he had stomach ulcers caused from eating too much spicy food. Friday night he played anyway, for 38 minutes and 22 points.

Did he really have stomach ulcers or was he faking it? And if so, were they really caused by spicy food?

He probably wasn’t lying. He’s just a beast. There are three main parts of the intestinal track in which ulcers originate—the esophagus (called an esophageal ulcer), the stomach (a gastric ulcer) and the most common, the duodenum (a duodenal ulcer). The duodenum is the upper part of the small intestine. Most often, a bacteria called helicobacter pylori colonizes the duodenum, over-stimulating the production of gastric acid. Gastric acid is necessary for digestion, but too much of it causes a depletion in the duodenum’s protective mucus layer.

GROSS, RIGHT? Here’s a friendlier image of what's happening:



So, Rose’s ulcer could have been duodenal and caused by the cutie at left. Awww.






HOWEVER, he’s a professional athlete…under a lot of bodily stress…couldn’t NSAIDs (non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs) be partly to blame? Yes. NSAIDs such as asprin or Ibuprophen can inhibit the the stomach’s secretion of its protective mucus lining. The ulcer would be gastral, not duodenal. The likelyhood that NSAIDs were to blame depends on whether Rose has chronic pain.

There’s always a chance it could have been the spicy food. I’m not his doctor.

As for the other bballer: O.J. Mayo (O.J. jokes withheld) was recently suspended for ten games for testing positive for the performing-enhancing drug dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA. Though he was drafted the same year as Rose, Mayo’s career has not launched in the same fashion. This season in particular has been riddled with off-court drama and the loss of his starting position.

The NBA suspension announcement came Thursday (about the same time Rose was in the worst pain); Mayo announced Saturday that the performance-enhancing drug must’ve been in an energy drink he bought at a gas station. Is this possible? And/or likely?

No idea. DHEA exists organically in the human body; it is secreted by the andrenal glands (part of the hormone-information-sharing endocrine system, located above the kidneys) and the brain. Studies have shown that supplementation of DHEA doesn’t have too significant of an impact on performance and sometimes even elevates the levels of estrogen instead of the intended testosterone.

Thus, it is entirely possible that he did just get punked by the energy drink people. God knows those things contain everything under the kitchen sink…



Parties like a rock star. (Especially during his USC years.)

A Sperm's Tale

I’m not sure whether or not my Irish Catholic grandparents would approve of their unwed granddaughter writing two sex-related articles in one week. Alas, my cousin, a nanny (a.k.a. a “mother without having messed up her vagina”), just gave me the scoop on the Shettles Method and I can’t help myself.

The method is named after Landrum Shettles, author of the 1971 book How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby. The book breaks down male verses sperm traits in relation to the timing of the menstrual cycle, identifying how to conceive a baby of each gender. Experts have claimed that the Shettles Method is a load of crock, but people have been swearing by in since ‘71.

The female menstrual cycle is an epic event with many players. A woman’s eggs are stored in sacs in her ovaries called follicles. At birth females have somewhere in the range of half a million of these follicles, which is way more kids than even Jesus reincarnated in a husband could ever help raise. In the menstrual cycle, the follicles mature over seven days, all the while causing the release of the hormone estrogen into the bloodstream. When the estrogen reaches a certain level, it signals the hypothalamus (the gland in the brain that controls hormones) to burst open the most mature follicle by releasing even more hormones. The egg that emerges from the follicle finds its way into the Fallopian tube, where hair-like “cilia” push it toward the uterus. Fertilization can occur if sperm and egg hook up in the Fallopian tube as the egg is in transit.

There are two hormones involved in all of this—estrogen (aforementioned) and progesterone. If the egg and sperm can hold onto each other during the long and treacherous journey to the uterus, then get the necessary amounts of estrogen and progesterone, the woman is likely to get pregnant. In joyful preparation, progesterone will cause a bunch of mucous to build up on the surface of the uterine lining. If the sperm/egg combo isn’t implanted in the uterus after ovulation, the arteries of the uterine lining actually close off (I picture these tubes bending in a sort of turning-up-the-nose fashion), which stops blood flow to the surface of the lining. The blood that should have been flowing pools up until it bursts, and, carrying the mucous lining with it, flows over and out.

Thus, the most fertile period is when the egg is in transit. If followed correctly, the rhythm method indicates when a woman should have sex in order to conceive and when she can go wild in the sack without becoming a weathered-looking mother of twelve. Unless you’re hyper-aware of this method’s nuances, however, you’re likely to mess it up.

Before learning of Shettles and his Method, I thought that was it. Family planning meant following the rhythm method which meant searching Craigslist for used Aerostars and free kids clothes. Now I know it includes application of doggy-style sex and baking soda douches.



(noice braids)

Sperm carrying the Y chromosome (boy sperm) are small and weak and really speedy. Sperm carrying the X chromosome (girl sperm) are big and strong and kind of slow. If sex is had three days before ovulation, the Y sperms are more likely to die off because they’re too weak to survive the fallopian tube journey. Sex at ovulation or right after it, however, favors Y sperms because they’re fast enough to get to the egg before the slow-moving Xs.

Alkalinity can also determine whether or not the girl or guy sperm survive. Girls are more likely to survive in a more acidic environment, as opposed to guys, who thrive in one more alkaline. Thus, a vinegar douche right before sex will provide the acidic environment girls need to thrive; a baking soda douche will give guys the alkaline advantage.

Doggy-style helps boy sperm dodge the acidy entrance to the female vagina, while the more shallow-penetrating missionary position exposes boy sperm to the elements. Another aid for the tiny guys: mom’s orgasm. Female orgasms release a substance that makes the whole place more alkaline. If a woman is to not orgasm before the sperm are released (SURELY an inconceivable event) the girl sperms have the advantage.

Shettles has more tricks up his sleeve to aid couples in producing offspring of the gender of their choice, but these are the basics. It is also recommended that couples do further research into douching before attempting one, as the vinegar scent may knock one of the two partners unconscious and completely botch the whole thing.

Win/Lose/Tie? You'll Still be Sore.

best sport EVER

WARNING: This article contains information that may trigger muscle contractions in readers who participated in the Phoenix Cactus Classic Field Hockey Tournament this past weekend. Read with caution.

In mid-December, I played a pick-up field hockey game in Fort Collins, Colorado with friends. We played for about an hour and half—a rewarding workout but not overexerting. I wasn’t tired the next day, nor was I nervous about participating in a two-day tournament in Phoenix six weeks later. Field hockey, yay, field hockey, my muscles were telling me.

Fast forward those six weeks to the tournament. I’d tried to keep a base level of fitness in the in-between, running, biking, yogaing and/or swimming with some sort of regularity. I even ran five sprints across a goose poop covered field one day. Regardless, I failed to make it to even one field hockey session, and when game day came my muscles had all but forgotten how to contract and lengthen in field hockey fashion.

Still, I was feeling okay on Saturday. Slight Pain in the right IT band, but nothing big. By evening I felt tired, hungry, easily buzzed off the tournament party keg beer, but not too sore.

Sunday was an onslaught of pain.

I was far from pain’s only victim. One of my teammates walked onto the field with his legs and torso forming a stiff 90 degree angle, another had a dead-eyed look for the rest of the tournament. We all managed to regain the necessary amount of flexibility to play our last game, but there was a lot of “I never used to feel this way”/”Getting old sucks” chatter.

The name of this phenomenon is Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness and it’s far from unique to old people and/or field hockey players (though we do experience DOMS most acutely because field hockey is inarguably the most physically and mentally multi-dimensional sport in existence). There are three types of muscle contractions—those that lengthen muscles (eccentric contractions), those in which the muscles remain static (isometric contractions) and those that shorten muscles (concentric contractions). When you curl a dumbell into your chest, you are shortening your muscles. When you slowly bring the dumbell back down to your side, you are elongating them.

Eccentric exercises are the hardest because the muscles are working against forces. In the previous example, the muscles in your biceps are working against gravity and the weight of the dumbell, so they are decelerating the speed of the dumbell’s movement as they lengthen out to their original position. Eccentric exercises include any sort of muscle movement that requires breaking after a quick acceleration, including swinging and twisting motions, quick sprints and stops, squats, jumps and, eh, oh I just deconstructed the sport of field hockey. Look at that.

DOMS is worst in the 12-48 hours after a new bout of hard physical activity, meaning that if we were to play in a similar tournament this weekend we’d leave feeling pretty normal. Unfortunately for us, the next one isn’t until April.

Until them, keep it eccentric, field hockey gurus.

Message in a Pheromone

Last week a study was released that brought chemosignals (messages we send subconsciously to other humans through bodily fluids and scents) back into the limelight. Apparently men are universally turned off when women start to cry, which kind of sucks for all the emotionally-wrecked females out there. Male participants in the study were given female tears to smell and then had their brains scanned for lobal activity. Activity in the hypothalamus and fusiform gyrus (areas affected by sexual arousal) immediately dropped.



Sending signals through tears is an interesting concept, as were the results of another chemosignal-related study conducted in 2008, one relating to your girlfriend’s nightly cell phone alarm and that strange little calendar of pills she carries in her purse.

The birth control pill as a marketable contraceptive hit its fiftieth anniversary last year, causing cautious females across the globe to pat their pill pack and cross their fingers that they hurry up with the male version already. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/opinion/08collins.html) Though the pill’s positive contributions to society are widely noted, increasing awareness that birth control can cause adverse side effects has caused many women to drop it. One woman particularly susceptible to fear mongering told me she got off the pill because she was afraid she’d be infertile forever.

This particular study fuels the anti-BC fire: birth control, it concludes, may cause women to sniff out the wrong suitors. Men and women communicate their genetic compatibility through pheromones, subconsciously choosing those with whom they’d make the fittest babies. All humans possess what’s called a major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which encodes molecules that are an integral part of the immune system. Men and women are supposed to seek out partners of the opposite sex that have a different MHC coding than themselves, as breeding between two MHC-similar couples leads to less genetic variance and weaker immunity in future generations. Birth control meddles with everything, causing women to seek out suitors that actually smell more like their dads than their ex-boyfriends, making them choose men that are histo-incompatible.

Unnerving news, sure, but human relationships and successful child rearing are based on more than just a cocktail of scents. Besides, there are at least a billion and one other things out there that could adversely affect female fertility and the strength of their offsprings’ immune systems.



Was it birth control that made her say “l-l-lick me like a lollipop”? WHO REALLY KNOWS?

What the Quark is going on here?

atom smashing in pre-particle acceleration era

You may be asking, why should I care about the Tevatron shutting down? (see last post.) Or about particle accelerators in general? Here’s the thing: large-scale particle accelerators like the Tevatron & Large Hadron Collider are not far off from the microwave in your kitchen or the computer screen from which you’re reading this.

“Microwaves” heat up food by emitting a microwave at a 2500 megahertz frequency (FM radio bandwiths use 88-108 mhz) that is uniquely absorbed and converted into heat by water, fats and sugars. And “atom-smashing” occurs in computer screens every time you power them on: electrons stored in a cathode accelerate through a cathode ray tube, change direction at the pull of electromagnets and smash into the phosphor molecules on the screen, creating a pixel, or light spot.

Particle accelerators produce microwaves on which particles ride. Like computer monitors, they too speed up particles and then very suddenly smash them into targets. The difference between the big-time smashers and those small appliances is that their microwaves are one million times more powerful, and the max speed of their particles is close to the speed of light (approximately 180,000 miles per second).

Thus, the big guys are powerful enough to break down matter into subatomic particles, and we’re not just talking protons, neutrons, electrons here. I personally feel cheated for not having learned about quarks (the smaller components of protons and neutrons) in high school, as well as for not seeing quark as a commonly-used noun in the English language (“the building quarks of matter”, “the little quarky spider”; great opportunities wasted).

After speeding up and smashing particles, particle accelerators use detection devices to analyze the results, including liquid and cloud chambers that track the trail of the scattered bits (similar to cloud trails left by airplanes, which are formed by exhaust condensing in the atmosphere). Some of the subatomic-particles that can be observed include:

-matter including QUARKS (you already know) & different types of LEPTONS (sounds like: leprechaun. similarly speedy. electrons are one type).

-anti-matter including POSITRONS (essentially a positive-charged electron).

-some BOSONS, which are particles that carry forces. The four known forces are strong, weak, electromagnetism and gravity. There is still a lot that scientists hope to discover regarding BOSONS via atom smashing.


Perhaps the biggest aspiration scientists have for atom-smashing is to recreate the Big-Bang theory and understand exactly how the universe formed. The theory is widely-accepted but until it is proven, a theory it shall remain. Other questions left unanswered: what gives particles mass, and what really is the deal with quarks? Who really is that ugly guy from Star Trek? And what DNA manipulation do we need to do to get earlobe/eyebrows like that in the human species?



Quark the bartender from Deep Space Nine


So many questions for Tevatron to answer, and only seven more months to answer them…

Death of a Tevatron

Located beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gained international notoriety in Fall 2008 when its proton beams circulated its 17 mile track for the first time. It was officially the world’s largest particle accelerator—physics enthusiasts across the world cheered at “first beam” all-night pajama parties, calling it the beginning of a new frontier in particle physics.



lookin snazzy there, scientist

Chances are you’ve heard of the LHC, but unless you’re one of those pajama-wearing physics geeks (or a northeastern Illinois resident), you might not have heard of the Tevatron. The Tevatron is a smaller particle accelerator located at the Fermilab center in Batavia, Illinois. Its track is three miles long, which remained the longest in the world until 2008. It ran its first accelerated beam in July 1983. By October 2011 it will have run its last.

The Tevatron is named after the speed at which it is capable of accelerating protons and anti-protons: 1 TeV (see “Breaking it Down”). Though it continues to make significant scientific discoveries since the opening of the LHC (especially in the wake of LHC malfunctions), the larger particle accelerator ultimately renders the smaller obsolete. The Large Hadron Collider is designed to operate at 14TeV. Discover magazine has a great article that chronicles the race between Tevatron & the LHC in more depth (visit http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance and scroll down to January 11th’s “The End of Tevatron” posted by John).

Researchers at Tevatron still have hope that their track will see the Higgs boson before the LHC does. Higgs boson, aka “the God particle”, is a hypothetical massive particle whose discovery would legitimize the Higgs mechanism, which explains how elementary products become massive. Basically, its discovery would turn theories into laws, giving physics a whole bunch more street cred.

Despite the Tevatron’s contribution to that new frontier in physics, its demise is eminent and far from sudden. Congress voted not to extend funding beyond September 2011 way back during Clinton‘s term. The Director of the Office of Science at the DOE wrote a letter on January 6th confirming that the date has not changed. Even if its scientists were to discover Higgs boson this spring or summer, the Tevatron’s particle beams will still stop beaming come autumn.

Breaking it Down:

Particles in the Tevatron accelerate to near the speed of light (about 180,000 miles per second) but they get there via high voltage. Voltage is analogous to water pressure. The more water pressure there is in a pipe, the faster the water will flow. Electronvolts are thus markers for electron acceleration; an electronvolt is the amount of kinetic energy (energy of motion) gained by one electron when it reaches one volt. A TeV (ie TeV-atron) is defined as one trillion electronvolts. It takes the Tevatron approximately one trillion electronvolts to reach its top speed.

There are two types of particle accelerators: the linear particle accelerator (moves in a straight line) and the circular particle accelerator. Both Tevatron and the LHC are circular particle accelerators.

Both are also synchrotrons, which use synchronized electromagnetism to move particles. The particle beam is what moves; it is synchronized with a magnetic field (it keeps the particles circulating around the track) and an electric field (it accelerates the particles). Synchrotons have the best potential to reach ungodly fast speeds because of this carefully timed synchronization.

Another noteworthy type of circular particle accelerator is the one that paved the way for all other particle accelerators: the cyclotron. Ernest O. Lawrence invented the first in 1929 at 4inches in diameter. Today many cyclotrons are used to treat cancer. The technique is called proton therapy; ion beams are shot into the body to kill tumors without harming healthy tissue on the way. Because they can only move particles at a few percent of the speed of light, however, cyclotrons are not capable of making physics discoveries on the same scale as synchrotons.



rip Tevatron

Haitian Havok

This week Haiti solemnly marked the one year anniversary of earthquake destruction. Just two months earlier, jittery Haitians panicked at the small tremor of a minor earthquake under Port-au-Prince, which shook around the same time scientists concluded that the 7.0 earthquake of January 2010 wasn't caused by a strike-slip in the previously suspected Endriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone. No, that one was a new, lesser known fault. Conclusion? The built up tensions in the E-P G fault are still tense. Haiti's not out of the danger zone.

This unfortunate truth, coupled with the nation's failing reconstruction attempts, begs an important question: What is the breaking point for cities and states prone to national disasters? The question has been asked countless times in regards to Southern Louisiana, which endured hurricane and oil spill within four years. The area's history and zeal caused many to scoff at the question. Though the region is still one of the nation's most economically devastated, there is no arguing against the fact that its turmoil unleashed motivation in Americans--residents fighting for the city they call home and idealistic youth fighting for the city they call party.

America cannot save Haiti. Our residents can call in monetary donations during a Jay Z performance on a TV fundraiser, but we cannot collectively fuel the country's reconstruction (if we could, we'd probably botch it). Working under the assumption that the rich can't aid the poor here, the dilemma is whether or not Haiti is worth saving, considering its unstable structure and location over so many deadly fault lines.

whether Haiti is worth saving...

It's such an easy line to throw out when you're on the outside. Even as a visitor to New Orleans I had no problem saying it in 2007. Ultimately, there's no doubt that it is and it will. Haitians will not up and flee as a society, so their roots will remained grounded in this faulted, tense country regardless of whether they live in abject poverty or just pretty poor poverty.

Americans poured money into rebuilding New Orleans despite scientific projections that this very well could happen again. In Haiti, however, the same truth may have turned the faucet off.