Monday, June 27, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Thursday, June 09, 2011
WE HAVE MORE THAN FIVE SENSES!!
It turns out, there are at least nine senses and most researchers think there are more like twenty-one or so. The traditional “five senses” model (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste) is credited to Aristotle.
Just for reference, the commonly held definition of a “sense” is “any system that consists of a group of sensory cell types that respond to a specific physical phenomenon and that corresponds to a particular group of regions within the brain where the signals are received and interpreted.
The commonly held human senses are as follows:
* Sight: This technically is two senses given the two distinct types of receptors present, one for color (cones) and one for brightness (rods).
* Taste: This is sometimes argued to be five senses by itself due to the differing types of taste receptors (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami), but generally is just referred to as one sense. For those who don’t know, umami receptors detect the amino acid glutamate, which is a taste generally found in meat and some artificial flavoring. The taste sense, unlike sight, is a sense based off of a chemical reaction
* Touch: This has been found to be distinct from pressure, temperature, pain, and even itch sensors.
* Pressure: Obvious sense is obvious. ;-)
* Itch: Surprisingly, this is a distinct sensor system from other touch-related senses.
* Thermoception: Ability to sense heat and cold. This also is thought of as more than one sense. This is not just because of the two hot/cold receptors, but also because there is a completely different type of thermoceptor, in terms of the mechanism for detection, in the brain. These thermoceptors in the brain are used for monitoring internal body temperature.
* Sound: Detecting vibrations along some medium, such as air or water that is in contact with your ear drums.
* Smell: Yet another of the sensors that work off of a chemical reaction. This sense combines with taste to produce flavors.
* Proprioception: This sense gives you the ability to tell where your body parts are, relative to other body parts. This sense is one of the things police officers test when they pull over someone who they think is driving drunk. The “close your eyes and touch your nose” test is testing this sense. This sense is used all the time in little ways, such as when you scratch an itch on your foot, but never once look at your foot to see where your hand is relative to your foot.
* Tension Sensors: These are found in such places as your muscles and allow the brain the ability to monitor muscle tension.
* Nociception: In a word, pain. This was once thought to simply be the result of overloading other senses, such as “touch”, but this has been found not to be the case and instead, it is its own unique sensory system. There are three distinct types of pain receptors: cutaneous (skin), somatic (bones and joints), and visceral (body organs).
* Equilibrioception: The sense that allows you to keep your balance and sense body movement in terms of acceleration and directional changes. This sense also allows for perceiving gravity. The sensory system for this is found in your inner ears and is called the vestibular labyrinthine system. Anyone who’s ever had this sense go out on them on occasion knows how important this is. When it’s not working or malfunctioning, you literally can’t tell up from down and moving from one location to another without aid is nearly impossible.
* Stretch Receptors: These are found in such places as the lungs, bladder, stomach, and the gastrointestinal tract. A type of stretch receptor, that senses dilation of blood vessels, is also often involved in headaches.
* Chemoreceptors: These trigger an area of the medulla in the brain that is involved in detecting blood born hormones and drugs. It also is involved in the vomiting reflex.
* Thirst: This system more or less allows your body to monitor its hydration level and so your body knows when it should tell you to drink.
* Hunger: This system allows your body to detect when you need to eat something.
* Magentoception: This is the ability to detect magnetic fields, which is principally useful in providing a sense of direction when detecting the Earth’s magnetic field. Unlike most birds, humans do not have a strong magentoception, however, experiments have demonstrated that we do tend to have some sense of magnetic fields. The mechanism for this is not completely understood; it is theorized that this has something to do with deposits of ferric iron in our noses. This would make sense if that is correct as humans who are given magnetic implants have been shown to have a much stronger magnetoception than humans without.
* Time: This one is debated as no singular mechanism has been found that allows people to perceive time. However, experimental data has conclusively shown humans have a startling accurate sense of time, particularly when younger. The mechanism we use for this seems to be a distributed system involving the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. Long term time keeping seems to be monitored by the suprachiasmatic nuclei (responsible for the circadian rhythm). Short term time keeping is handled by other cell systems.
Pasta Is Not Originally from Italy .
Worldwide, pasta has become synonymous with Italian cuisine. Italian immigrants themselves brought pasta everywhere they went. While it is true that the most famous varieties and recipes of cooking pasta really do come from Italy, surprisingly, the actual origin of pasta lies elsewhere!
So how did pasta make its way to Italy? One of the more popular theories was published in the ‘Macaroni Journal’ by the Association of Food Industries. It states that pasta was brought to Italy by Marco Polo via China. Polo ventured to China in the time of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and the Chinese had been consuming noodles as early as 3000 B.C. in the Qinghai province. There is even some evidence there of 4,000-year-old noodles made from foxtail and broomcorn millet.
Unfortunately, there are problems with this theory, least of which is that the noodles they were making in China aren’t technically considered pasta. Polo also described Chinese noodles as being like “lagana”, which implies he was possibly already familiar with a pasta-like food before going to China. Further, in 1279, there was a Genoese soldier that listed in the inventory of his estate a basket of dried pasta. Polo didn’t come back from China until 1295. For those who don’t know, Genoa is a sea port in Italy. Further, the modern pasta like we know it was first described in 1154 by an Arab geographer, Idrisi, as being common in Sicily. So Marco Polo could not have brought pasta to Italy via China. It was already in Italy at that time.
So how did it get there? Most food historians believe that Arabs (specifically from Libya) are to be credited for bringing pasta, along with spinach, eggplant and sugar cane, to the Mediterranean basin. In the Talmud, written in Aramaic in the 5th century AD, there is a reference to pasta being cooked by boiling. It is thought, then, that pasta was introduced to Italy during the Arab conquests of Sicily in the 9th century AD, which had the interesting side effect of drastically influencing the region’s cuisine. It also known that by the 12th century, the Italians had learned from the Arabs methods for drying pasta to preserve it while traveling. Further support for this theory can be found by the fact that, in many old Sicilian pasta recipes, there are Arab gastronomic introductions.
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER AN AMERICAN HERO
George Washington Carver has changed the way we live today in many ways. Not only did he invent peanut butter, he also came up with over 300 products from the peanut, such as soap, ink, and candy. He made up 118 products from the sweet potato, like flour, shoe blacking, and candy, and 75 products from the pecan. There are so many things that we enjoy today because of Carver. Although he only got three patents, he discovered things such as adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder, and wood stain. This agricultural chemist changed the South into having multi-crop farmlands instead of single crop lands. The farmers grew profitable because of his discoveries and inventions. When someone asked him how we found these different crops, he would say, "God gave them to me." He was recognized for his achievements by receiving the Springarn Medal, awarded to outstanding members of his race, in 1923, and the Roosevelt Medal in 1939.
His life story...
George Washington Carver was born a slave on a plantation near Diamond Grove, Missouri in 1864. The plantation was owned by Moses and Susan Carver who treated George and his older brother like their children because they never had children of their own. Unlike other black people at the time, Carver was able to get an education and went to college at Simpson College and later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College. There, he learned about soil conservation and chemurgy. On January 5, 1943, George Washington Carver died at age 71.
About peanut butter...
Peanut butter is very important in our American culture today. Peanuts are a major food source, and because of his discoveries, George Washington Carver invented something that we will always cherish and remember. Before he invented the 300 uses for peanut butter, peanuts had to be discovered. His inventions of the many different crops gave people different kinds of food and created new markets for farmers.
CHANGING THE GAME!!
I remember one day me and a couple of my patnas went to a club in downtown oakland ca,called "the Oasis". we left briefly to smoke, Upon returning the bouncer patted us down as is customary to gain re entry to an event.. My boy Shum went first the bouncer saw that Shum had something in his back pocket....
He informed Shum that he had to take it out Shum complied and pulls out his wallet.. Bouncer looks at it grunts then tells Shum to go in.. Next up is me he saw that I had something in my pocket too. told me to take it out i pulled out my phone upon short scrutiny from the "thorough" bouncer i was allowed entrance. Up next was my folks T the bouncer saw that he had something in his pocket.. Then something strange happened.
The bouncer didn't ask T to take what was in his pocket out as he instructed me and Shum . he in fact gave a testimony of what he thought it could be in T's pocket COLOGNE? he asked T looked at him and shook his head yes.. The bouncer gave a nod and told him come in.
The fact that he guessed what was in T's pocket destroyed all of his fake security ethics that he demonstrated on me and Shum.So we came up with a skit as to say that the imaginary cologne could in fact be anything we could think of! Remote control? trident spearment gum?word up magazine? The bouncer gave us a glimpse into the real world where anythings possible!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)