Insane in the Mucus Membranes

Here in Colorado in February, we’re experiencing the typical blackoutdrunkepileptic winter, which is to say that the season of "winter" is too mentally unstable to chose between springy and frigid cold weather, so it just oscillates between the two for about six months. Though it’s not scientifically proven that cold weather makes the human body more susceptible to the common cold, catching a cold seems to go hand in hand with drastically changing temperatures. And with the cold, comes the snot.

Mucus, like everything in the human bod, can be disassembled at the cellular level, where mucus cells are produced in mucus glands in the mucus membrane. Mucous membranes are numerous in the human body, lining areas including the stomach, mouth, lips, eyelids, ears, genital area and anus, though not all secrete mucus. (Or at least not all the time). The cells are rich in proteins and water. The wet, sticky texture of mucus allows it to trap infectious agents including fungi, bacteria and viruses from damaging the protective tissue, or epithelium, in the aforementioned areas. In the nose, mucus traps the agents and holds them there in booger form until ejection.

A runny nose is often a reaction to a sort of ice/heat pack effect on the nose. The nose contains cilia, which are sensory organelles that sweep mucus toward the back of the throat. During cold weather the cilia become sluggish and the mucus becomes thicker. When reintroduced to warmblooded-friendly temperatures, the mucus thaws and runs out the nose until the cilia can shake it off. As for the heat pack effect, spicy food numbs the cilia temporarily useless, causing the should-be medical condition “spicy food nasal drip.” (Author’s note: I am writing this next to an empty bowl of spicy green chili and a resultant mountain of tissues. I‘m not just getting this stuff from wikipedia, I swear.)

Quick Facts on Mucus:

-Mucus is spelled "mucus" as a noun and "mucous" as an adjective. Sounds like Mufasa or Moukassa.

-Your body makes 1 litre of mucus a DAY! Sick!

-People with strong immune systems are more likely to develop symptomatic colds, as the symptoms of the virus occur because of a strong immune response. People with weak immune systems become asymptomatic carriers who unknowingly spread it to others.

-The common cold is a virus, not a bacterial infection. Antibiotics cannot cure your cold. You know this; Stop playing dumb and asking your doctors for them anyway.

-Attempts at creating a common cold vaccine have also been proven futile, as viruses are varied and rapidly mutating.

-If you're experiencing mucus overload, best to just let it ride.

Moussaka--sounds like mucus, tastes totally different

Is it Love or Heart Failure?

Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire Elizabeth Taylor was hospitalized last Friday for Congestive Heart Failure. She has officially been suffering from CHF since 2004. My unofficial theory is that she has been showing symptoms her entire life. The symptoms of CHF are strikingly similar to those of being in love, which Elizabeth Taylor did a lot.

CHF is when blood can‘t make it away from the heart and into the far reaching nooks of the body. Causes include high blood pressure, narrowed arteries, a past heart attack, congenital heart disease or a past heart valve problem. Meanwhile, Phenylethylamine (PEA, or “love chemical”) is an alkaloid, or chemical with a nitrogen base, that occurs naturally in the brain. It is released with highest frequency during the early stages of a budding romance, the first 6 months to three years.

A symptomatic breakdown:

CHF--Rapid/irregular pulse. Blood is flowing into the circulatory system at half its normal rate (35% verses 65%).
PEA--Running pulse. You’re thinking about sex.

CHF--Shortness of breath. Not enough oxygenated blood is making it to the lungs.
PEA--Heavy breathing. Still…thinking about sex.

CHF--Weight gain. Your metabolism is slowing with the lack of blood flow.
PEA--Heady emotions. “Do I look fat in this dress?”

CHF--Swelling of feet and ankles. The blood is just not flowing there.
PEA--Sweaty palms and shaky knees. Um, it’s a stretch.

CHF--General restlessness. Your heart is sick!
PEA--General restlessness. Your heart is sick!

What can we take away from this? Very little, if anything. Happy Valentine's Day. And shout out to the single ladies.

Life with Camry

Humans can’t get enough of longing for the unobtainable. If only--the ubiquitous phrase. If only I had cable, I could waste away more hours watching the NBA’s ridiculously long season. Or a smaller waist line, then I’d definitely get a man worth keeping! My personal favorite: if I could only get this girl/guy I’m obsessed with to notice me, I’d stop being such a douche bag to my friends. Life is deemed imperfect and empty until the next obsession comes along, creating a cyclical pattern of lust, greed and insecurity.

This winter I’ve developed one of my own. If I could only I could speak the language of my 1995 Toyota Camry, life would be a lot easier.

We haven’t been in each others’ lives that long and I’m really trying to understand her. I try to drive carefully and check her oils regularly. I even dropped a couple pay checks to get her rear struts replaced. Still, she locks her rear tires when I brake, spins them when I accelerate. She encourages unknown men to break her rear window and feel around her insides when I’m not there. Recently she locked my key in the ignition and instead of just telling me to reposition the mug in the cup holder so she’d be fully engaged in Park, she laughed at me.

She’s kind of a tease.

Okay, but is she suicidal? See she's does this thing with her gas pedal a couple times…I’ll let off and she’ll just hold it there for a second. And another second. Aaaand, there are break lights in front of us, COME ON, STOP IT, IS THIS SOME SORT OF A SICK GAME TO YOU?!? To which she’ll finally let off with a mocking rumble rumble.

The U.S. Department of Transportation says it’s not an electrical flaw. Nope, nothing wrong with her noggin ma’am, just her floor mat and/or her sticky gas pedal. SURE. Me, I think she's bat shit crazy and wants to go visit her Camry friends in recall land. I can picture them having planned this on the assembly line, exchanging VIN numbers and washer rings, “Guys, if we aren’t already totaled in 15 years, let’s all start sticking the gas pedals, okay?”

Me, I'll play along. Take her to the dealership, then maybe give her a little wax rub if she starts behaving. Maybe I'll never speak Camry, but who doesn't like to get rubbed down?

Forces in Yoga

When Janet Tsai steps in front of her Saturday morning yoga class, she's got a different vantage point than most instructors.

Instead of seeing her students like this...



She sees them like this...


Janet is a Ph.D student at the University of Colorado; her focus is engineering education with a twist (er, ardha matsyendrasana). Janet studies forces in yoga, or how fundamental laws in engineering can be identified in basic yoga poses.

An example: Janet shows Newton’s Third Law in sukasana, or the "easy sitting pose".

“Your sit bones contact the earth as your mass is pulled down by gravity. At the same time, you can feel the equal and opposite reaction of the earth as it supports your weight, pushing back up exactly equally and oppositely. Notice that your bones do not actually sink down into the earth, and the earth does not actually lift you up — instead, it’s exactly equal and perfectly matched.”

Janet breaks her research down further to show physics concepts happening in isolated body parts: torsion in a twisting spine; torque and lever arm in a bent arm. She says this example of torque is more universally accessible than, say, the infamous wrench and pipe.

“What if I’ve never used a wrench, what if I don’t know what (torque) feels like. That’s what everything else is based on. If you don’t know that first step then the rest of it’s going to be shaky. If we make people tangibly feel (torque), then they’ll have a sort of self-reliance.

Janet once counted how many free body diagrams in an introductory textbook related to structures such as cars, rockets and airplanes, then noted how many men verses women were pictured in the book. “Six women in the entire book,” she says. This is what Janet, through yoga, is trying to change.


Engineering & Yoga’s Hot Asian Lovechild

As a high schooler in Fort Collins, Janet was far from turned off from the supposedly masculine career of engineering. She was big into robotics club--“I loved creating things“ and “Guys made fun of me sometimes but it was no big deal because I was the smart Asian kid”. She proceeded on to the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, where she was part of the program’s first graduating class of 2006. The school has a unique 50-50 male to female ratio, something that Janet took for granted at the time.

When she landed her first job “laying out the curves” on robots for the company I-Robot, the lenses were abruptly removed. The company sent her to supervise factory production of their products in Shenzhen, China. “Literally, I was the only woman always,“ she said. “I was frequently mistaken for an escort.

“I felt like I was between masculine and feminine because I had to be ‘manly’ all the time.”

Janet found release in yoga. She began doing yoga constantly--in her room; her hallway; the massive seven studio center she belonged to in Hong Kong. When the year was up Janet was sent to Boston, where yoga got smoother and engineering got rough. Massive recession lay-offs in Janet‘s department meant endless work on her desk. After two years she abandoned her robotic dream job and moved back to Colorado.

In Boston she had taken a yoga teacher training course in Ashtanga-based Vinyasa, which is a classical yoga philosophy that guides its practitioners through eight steps of separation with the impure before achieving bliss. When she settled in Boulder, she began to experiment with different studios and styles. She learned the more flow-based Colorado (er, California) style, as well as Anusara, a form of yoga grounded in the Tantric philosophy. Tantric is a “heart-centered" philosophy--instead of realizing a separation of mind and body, the mind and body are connected. "It teaches you that everything you need is within," Janet says.

The practice helped her put her engineering experience into perspective.

“I realized that I can actually see things in a different way than most of the people I work with in engineering…and maybe I can try to change it.”

Janet applied and was accepted into the engineering education PhD program at CU Boulder, just as she broke into the heavily saturated Boulder yoga community and landed a teaching position. The forces of yoga became stronger (or, the arrows on the free body diagrams became more defined).

Though Janet is still trying to get monetary support for her forces in yoga research, she believes in her cause. "We can empower these students," she says. "We can give them mechanical intuition." Still, the department doesn’t traditionally fund the unconventional, so it’s been an uphill battle.

One thing CU Engineering does offer in no short supply is men, many of whom Janet insists interact with no women outside of their families.

“I try and wear a skirt once a week,” she says, smiling.



Janet‘s site: http://forcesinyoga.com/pa/Home.html

*CALLING ALL ENGINEERS: What are your thoughts? Related experiences/ideas to share? Nerdy jokes to replace "forces of yoga getting stronger"? Please comment!

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.