Innocent Until Proven Guilty?

    How would you react if you were put into jail for something you didn't do? There have been hundreds of cases where people were wrongfully convicted and sent to jail for crimes they didn't commit. What would you do if you were in their shoes?

     Exoneration is when a wrongfully convicted person gets released from jail by getting DNA evidence supporting their innocence. For example, a group of teenagers were accused of raping and murdering a women. The police convinced them to sign a confession, and they were sent to jail for fifteen years before DNA evidence became more of a norm. After it was proven that they were not at the scene of the crime, a pair of two other men came forward and confessed to the rape and murder. They were released after a lengthy trial, and were a few of the first people to get successfully exonerated.

     This made me feel a little more nervous, to be honest. It's great that we have the ability to rule out who was and wasn't at the scene, but processing DNA evidence is expensive and you have to have a better argument other than "I didn't do it". It makes me worried that police officers may assume I committed a crime I had nothing to do with. However, I think that it's really great that we are able to initially rule out a lot of people, and then later do more specific tests to discover who committed the crime. DNA doesn't lie, after all.

Your Genes Are Not Your Fate

     Your genes seem like the only thing that's set in stone; they're written into your very being the moment you start becoming a person. And what would you do if I told you that there are ways you can slightly alter what's supposedly written in stone? Well, there's a way.

     In this TED talk by Dean Ornish, he talks about how through certain changes in lifestyle, you can change your genes in a similar way to how I previously talked about helping prevent and ward off cancerous tumors. If you do things such as manage stress, eat healthy, "love more", as he said, your brain gets more blood flow and oxygen, which helps it grow. Chocolate, tea and blueberries are some of the foods he mentioned that may help your brain grow more brain cells, and therefore you get healthier skin that doesn't wrinkle as fast, and even reverse heart disease. And you can pass these healthier genes onto your children.

     My reaction to this video is a little bit of surprise; I thought that if you had a certain gene, you can't help but have your skin wrinkle at an earlier age, or a later age. And it's kind of interesting that the increase of blood flow and brain cell growth can have a positive influence. I've always heard things about eating certain foods for healthier skin, but he put science behind it and conducted tests. I think that's it's pretty interesting that you can slightly alter your genes in your favor. I'd want to look into that some more and see more tests and statistics and get a better understanding of what he was talking about.

Is Cancer Treatable by Foods?

     Imagine being able to cure cancer. That's the dream of many doctors, scientists, and little kids dreaming of their futures. But what if we're already able to pick away at what worsens a cancer? Through a diet of certain foods, you can.

     In a TED talk by William Li, he talks about how certain foods can starve tumors of a blood supply. A tumor with a bloody supply is very dangerous, and could help it grow and become even more dangerous to your health. But with a diet of certain foods, called anti-angiogenic foods, you can make blood vessels return to their normal flow and make the little vessels retract. This can even help someone lose weight, because it makes the blood vessels retract from places they aren't necessary, such as where tumors may lie, or where there is access body fat.

     My response to this was that it made me hopeful for a number of reasons. One, I can share this information with my family and help us al reduce our chances of getting cancer because a lot of my family members have suffered from a form of cancer, or are at risk of it. This means my family and I are at greater genetic risk of developing cancer. So this helped me relax a little bit, and made me more confident in being able to help prevent cancer of affecting me and my family. I think that when someone is faced with a diagnosis of cancer, doctors should talk about all the ways of treating it, including small things such as anti-angiogenic foods to help starve cancerous tumors. This isn't a very talked about treatment, and it needs to be noticed.

Think Like A Mountain

     In a world where we are too busy with driving our cars and running our errands, we lose sight of what the world; what it does on it's own and how we interfere, how the squirrel benefits the world, or how every tree has it's own purpose. To think like a mountain is to observe life in it's entirety, and just the events we create.

     What this essay was about was a man who had killed a wolf; he was so busy with the desire to kill a wolf than what the wold means. As he watched the wolf die, he realized that the wold benefits the mountain. Every organism has a purpose and everything helps one another, even if it ends in another creature dying to serve as food for another. To kill a wolf merely for the pleasure and a story doesn't do anything for the mountain, or rather the ecosystem. We strive for what we call comfort, and at that is the cost of balance.

     I personally thought this essay was interesting; it gave a good perspective and new point of view on what we do and what kind of world we live in. If a wolf kills a deer, it helps the wolf and the deer; food and population control. It's how nature works. And if we come in and decide to kill the deer, then that's less food for the wolves. Or if we kill a wolf, then there goes a small fraction of the population control. Everything helps everything else, and we are really messing with the balance and what goes on by doing things for our own pleasure without a thought of the environment as a whole.

Life in the Deep Ocean

Click here to watch the video I'm talking about

     The ocean is a new world; creatures that have never seen the sun, creatures that we have only seen from video footage from submarines who's purpose is to discover new life. The ocean is vast, and has more bio density and biodiversity than even the rain forests.

     David Gallo and his team went into the ocean to discover new life in 1998, and while down there they discovered 198 new species that had never been discovered, just by peering through the eyes of a robotic camera. In the video, they talked about the diversity of life within the oceans, and how they live off of no sunlight and simply eating the bacteria that grows on the plants and other creatures. Even though it was filmed years ago, the information still holds valuable lessons such as the fact that the ocean is still unexplored, and in order to explore and learn about our planet, we have to preserve the oceans the best we can.

     I think it was fascinating. I didn't know about all of these strange little creatures living without sunlight, and feeding off bacteria and getting around without that vision we have. Life can form in even the darkest of depths, and to me that opened up a whole world of ideas. Literally anything could be lurking in the depths of the ocean that we just can't see. If you don't think that's exciting, then you need to watch this video. It shows you cute little octopi to beautiful coral reefs and plant life to creepy, spider-like crabs crawling around. It shows you what the ocean has to offer and all of the cute and creepy and beautiful creatures down there. It ignited a lot of thought about what might be under the water. The fact that there's more biodiversity and density than rain forests tells us a lot; life is capable of living in any condition, and even thrive. We know what's walking on the surface of the earth, and its about time to find out what's under the surface of our oceans.