Category: Articles

A Normal Winter Night

It’s a cold winter night, you’re snuggled up in your favorite blanket sitting on a couch and watching TV, the heater doing its best to prevent the winter winds from disturbing your moment of Zen. You’re thirsty, craving the delicious nature of nice, hot chocolate. So, you get up, placing your fluffy socks on the carpeted floor, blanket wrapped, and head towards the kitchen; however, on your way, you have to go through a closed door, and brace yourself against the icy, wooden floors that is your kitchen. As you take the courage to confront the chilly adversary and reach your hand to the metal knob, you feel a jolt of energy against you, a loud SNAP, and a flash of lighting going from your hand startles you, bringing about a moment of pain. Feeling betrayed, worried, you try again. What you felt was the power of static electricity, something that we’ve all experienced in one form or another.

What is Static Electricity?

Static electricity is a common occurrence in life. From rubbing an inflated balloon on your furry pet to rubbing socks on a carpeted floor, the friction between two objects (normally insulators such as fur, plastic, or clothing) causes electrons to move from one object to another. This creates a difference of charge, or electrostatic potential. When there is enough energy to match this electrostatic potential, the electrons will move. Think of it like this: every molecule wants to wants to be in balance, and whenever there is an imbalance, those molecules will do what is necessary to return to said balance, but need the energy to do so. In the example above, your covered feet rub against the carpet and collect electrons that spread throughout your body – this makes you negatively charged, or “electron rich”. Metal – the door knob – is typically positively charged, or “electron deficient”, and therefore wants to take any electrons it can get. When the two objects get close enough, there is less energy required for the electrons to move (imagine trying to move a ball far away from you compared to right next to you… much easier, right?) and so they do. This causes for that “flash” to be seen from your fingertip to the door knob, and the pain you feel is caused by the sudden movement of electrons (look at E-Stim, my other article, it talks a bit about the human body and electricity… this isn’t advertisement, I swear!)) that then trigger nerve receptors, the more electrons that move, the stronger the feeling.

So, how does all of this tie in with exploding gas? The answer, my dear friend, is one word: combustion. Combustion is the reaction of oxygen, a fuel source, and energy, as seen in the formula for the combustion of rubbing alcohol below:

But wait, what’s a reaction? Remember what I said before about molecules doing whatever it takes to return to balance? Well, that’s a reaction! When atoms combine to form molecules, they use energy to form bonds to stick together and reach a form of balance. In order to break these bonds, more energy is required, and atoms separate and join with other atoms nearby to form new molecules. This causes for energy to be, in this case, released. This is used in your cars to move pistons and make your car move, but that’s another lesson. Now, imagine your clothes rubbing against your seat when you’re getting out of the car to fuel up or after getting something. Considering that the fuel nozzle is metal, that gasoline has a tendency to become a gas, and you have a charge build up… since energy is made from the movement of electrons (they literally crash into other atoms when they move) it causes for this reaction to occur, and now the expansion of heat and air spread out and cause those explosions that many people see in horror movies.

But how do we counter this?!

It’s actually pretty simple: touch your car before you touch the nozzle. The extra electrons on your clothes and body will go to the car, and then to the ground instead of to the gasoline vapors near the nozzle. Make sure to do this a ways away from your gas tank – ideally by the doorframe by the driving wheel, and you should be fine!

Either way, there are other ways for energy to be transferred, so you need to always be careful when going near a fuel source. Just don’t smoke, use flint, or summon the power of the force while you’re gassing up. Be smart, and don’t do anything that might cause for combustion to occur!

Electric Potential Energy. (n.d.). Retrieved April 14, 2018, from http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/elepe.html

E., E., E., E., E., & E. (n.d.). Electricity – Electrical Charge, Electric Fields, Coulomb’s Law And The Forces Between Electrical Charges, Resistance – Current, Voltage, Ohm’s law. Retrieved April 14, 2018, from http://science.jrank.org/pages/2342/Electricity.html

Combustion. (n.d.). Retrieved April 14, 2018, from https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/combst1.html

Combustion Reactions. (n.d.). Retrieved April 14, 2018, from http://www.iun.edu/~cpanhd/C101webnotes/chemical reactions/combustion.html

Depression is a common but serious mood disorder that causes persistent feelings of sadness. Many people, ranging from young to old, suffer from depression. It is especially prevalent in young adults and college students. Those suffering from depression often have trouble doing every day activities and sometimes may feel that life is hopeless.

However, since depression has been around for so long and is so common, the good news is there are numerous treatments for it that have been proven successful. Two of the most common treatments are antidepressant medication (SSRIs) and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Here, we take a closer look at how these two treatments work in battling depression at the level of the brain.

Levels of serotonergic neurotransmission play an important role in determining mood. Depression is said to caused by low levels of serotonergic neurotransmission. SSRIs counter these low levels by interfering with the serotonin transporter 5-HTT—it causes slower reuptake of serotonin. This causes the low levels of serotonin in the brain to be elevated, thus relieving depression. Like antidepressant medication, cognitive-behavioral therapy also produces changes in the brain when treating depression. In those suffering from depression, their hippocampus decreases in size by the constant release of glucocorticoids due to stress. This, in turn, creates more stress and depression. It has been found that after completing CBT, those with depression show significant improvement in their depression, which is associated with significant increases in the hippocampus. Both antidepressant medication and CBT are successful in treating depression, however how they affect the brain in different ways to achieve this.

Those who struggle with depression also face risk of relapse after discontinuing treatment. In terms of preventing relapse, it has been shown that CBT has significantly less risk of relapse than medication. In one study, it was found that the percent of relapse after treatment was 30% for CBT versus 76% for antidepressant medication. A reason for this disparity may be that CBT teaches patients how to change the way they think and in turn, how they feel and act, so that even after they discontinue therapy, they can continue to apply the skills they have learned in therapy. Medication only changes the serotonin levels in the brain with no conscious effort on the person’s part, so it is harder to prevent depression after discontinuing the medication.

In conclusion, both antidepressant medication and cognitive-behavioral therapy relieve depression by altering the brain. Medication works by inhibiting serotonin reuptake, which elevates the low levels of serotonin in people with depression. CBT helps patients change the way they perceive thoughts, which has been associated with increased hippocampus size, which helps prevent stress and depression. However, when discontinuing treatment, those who completed CBT are at a much lower risk of relapse than those who took medication, as CBT teaches people skills they can apply even after treatment ends. It is often recommended to those suffering from depression a combination of medication and therapy, so that they have the most promising outlook on overcoming their depression.

We’ve come a very long way in the way we perceive medicine and how we use it. We’ve grown from studying the humors of medieval times and performing brain lobotomies in the 1900s to the most complex surgeries and medicines that can save millions of lives. But sometimes the question that isn’t asked is, what was the cost of this new knowledge? Were the decades of long, painstaking research and repeated experiments worth it when some subjects were put through experiments that ended in permanent injury or their death? There has always been a long and dark history to the cases of medical bases, especially in the case of race, sex, and gender. In this article, I want to focus on racial bias, discussing the story of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, why it is an example of medical bias and the impact that this bias made on history and future research.

What Started This?

In 1932, a study was started by the Public Health Service to study the natural history of syphilis to justify treatment programs for black males. The experiment was meant to build upon a similar study on untreated syphilis in Norway in 1928. The initial goal of the study was to follow the disease in black men for six to nine months, and have a treatment phase for the subjects after. The study took place at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and the subjects were recruited from Macon County, which is part of the Black Belt, a region with rich soil and black sharecroppers. The participants were mostly poor and illiterate, signing up mainly for the benefits described to them. About 600 participants were recruited, 399 who had untreated syphilis and 201 who acted as control subjects.

What Went Wrong?

The problem with this study that caused so much controversy was what the research participants were told about the study and what would happen to them. The participants were told that they were being treated for bad blood, which was used to describe issues like fatigue, anemia, and syphilis. They were told that they would receive medical exams, rides to and from the clinics, meals on examination days, free treatment for minor ailments and guarantees that provisions would be made after their deaths in terms of burial stipends paid to their survivors. The participants were told that the study would last for six months in 1932, but it went on until 1972. Another problem with the ethics of the study was the fact that the participants gave no written or informed consent to be experimented on. There was no evidence to show they had an option to leave the study, and the treatment they were given was slightly effective and highly toxic. After years of research and generations of unknown diseases transferred to spouses, children, and many affected, a report by the Associated Press was released in 1972 about the experiment, which was then forced to shut down a month after. Even though a class-action lawsuit led to nine million dollars given to the participants and an apology was given by President Clinton, the consequences brought to the participants and their families couldn’t be undone. The last survivor of the experiment passed away in 2004, and the last widow receiving benefits from the Tuskegee Health Benefit Program passed away in 2009.

How Has It Affected Research & Medicine Today?

Despite the heartbreaking story of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it has helped to change how researchers approach studies similar to it. The study led to the creation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and the National Research Act, as well as the establishment of institutional review boards, or IRBs for institutions receiving federal support. Since the end of the study, IRBs require that all participants in a study are willing and voluntary patients. In the end, because of the syphilis study, the U.S. was able to become a more ethical place for research, even creating the Tuskegee Bioethics Center, a national center for research and health care.

Sources:

About the USPHS Syphilis Study. (n.d.). Retrieved October 25, 2019, from https://www.tuskegee.edu/about-us/centers-of-excellence/bioethics-center/about-the-usphs-syphilis-study.

Brown, D. N. L. (2019, August 26). ‘You’ve got bad blood’: The horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Retrieved October 25, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/16/youve-got-bad-blood-the-horror-of-the-tuskegee-syphilis-experiment/.

CDC. (2015, December 22). Tuskegee Study – Timeline – CDC – NCHHSTP. Retrieved October 25, 2019, from https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm.

Heller, J., Burns, L., Merritt, C., Corine, Thompson, M., Sam, … Bryant, D. (2018, April 13). Generations later, the effects of the Tuskegee syphilis study linger. Retrieved October 25, 2019, from https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/10/tuskegee-syphilis-study/.

Jones, J. H. (1993). Bad blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New York: Free Press.