Perfect Evidence Podcast

Most know that our justice system is a little...tricky, but little know the full force of this system. This podcast tells the story of four teenagers who spent 15 years behind bars for a crime they didn't commit. Thanks to the evolution of DNA evidence and analysis, these teenagers now walk free from being wrongly convicted.

Here's the story: In 1986, Lori Roscetti was raped and killed in Chicago. 1986 carried an extremely high crime rate, with 284 other murders through out the year. Mostly because Roscetti was a white female killed in a black neighborhood, her murder case became highlighted in the media as a hate crime. This fact played a part in the wrong conviction because there were loads of pressure to get the killer convicted quickly. When you aim for speed rather than accuracy, mistakes happen, and four boys had to pay that unfortunate price. In a rush to appease the media, police dragged in four boys with previous criminal records and tricked them into saying they were involved with the Lori Roscetti case. The profile that an analyst compiled of the crime scene turned into the "confession" from the four suspected boys. From there, police tricked a suspect to become a witness and struck a deal to get the other suspects convicted. The media was convinced, the world was convinced, and the judge was convinced that these boys were guilty. 15 years into being locked up, The Innocence Project was discovered. The Innocence Project is used to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted by testing post-conviction DNA. Now that DNA evidence can be analyzed and tested against the suspects, it is a fool-proof way of convicting the correct killer. In the end, The Innocence Project saved these boys from life in prison, and two males confessed to the crime shortly afterwards.

After listening to this podcast, I had very mixed feelings towards our justice system. On one hand, I was infuriated that the police could manipulate people so far that they could convict someone without real evidence. On the other hand, I was grateful to hear that many trials without hard evidence are being reevaluated and are testing DNA to catch the true killer. All in all, I understand how much power our justice system holds, and how it can manipulate all of us. However, with the addition of DNA analysis, I feel this system is being refined and improved, and I am exceedingly glad I live in the twenty-first century.

To listen to this podcast, click here:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/210/perfect-evidence

To research The Innocence Project, click here:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/

TED Talk- Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?

I know, I know. Big words here. However, with those big words could possibly come big answers. This TED talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?, explores the idea that the cure to cancer could be in a process called anti-angiogenesis, and that cure can be see in the food on our plates.

"Imagine that one medical advancement held the promise to conquer cancer, perhaps within your lifetime … the potential to also end more than 70 of life's most threatening conditions, affecting one billion people worldwide. This is the promise of angiogenesis, the first medical revolution of the 21st century."                             --William Li
                                                                           
   Angiogenesis is the development of new blood vessels.  Blood vessels don't normally grow in adults except in three cases: to form the placenta, to form the lining of the uterus, and to grow under scabs to heal wounds. When there is a fault in angiogenesis, big health issues arise. An example of angiogenesis out of balance is when the body is unable to produce enough blood vessels in the right place at the right time, or is creating too many blood vessels that can feed tumors. If too little are produced, problems such as wounds that don't heal, heart attacks, strokes, and nerve damage arise. If too many are created, problems like blindness, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer arise. Cancer was the focal point of this talk because cancer is a hallmark of angiogenesis out of balance and because the common factor between ALL types of cancer is problems with angiogenesis.

    Anti-angiogenesis helps patients restore the balance of their blood vessels by targeting the blood vessels that feed a tumor. Experimental medicines with anti-angiogenic treatments have been created and tested through people and animals. The results have been remarkable, and in some types of cancer the life expectancy has more than doubled. Anti-angiogenic therapy has had remarkable results, but the problems is that results were not always consistent.  Li answered that this was because they were trying to treat cancer too late in the game. The cancer had already formed and they were simply trying to ward it off. With this, Li went into researching how to get cancer to not form in the first place. Surprisingly, he found that certain foods have anti-angiogenic factors, and by eating those foods, we can keep cancer at bay. Varieties of foods and spices with seemingly no similar factors have been found to have anti-angiogenic properties and can aid in preventing cancer.

This TED talk was extremely interesting to me and left me yearning to learn more about cancer. I loved the idea of a new, less painful treatment for cancer, but the effectiveness of this cure was debatable. Why did anti-angiogenic treatments work remarkably in some cases and not at all in others? Why do some foods have anti-angiogenic properties and others don't? Lots of questions remain unanswered from this talk, but one thing remains clear: the cure for cancer is on the horizon. 

To watch this TED talk, click here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html

To see a list of anti-angiogenic foods click here:

--http://blog.ted.com/2010/02/10/dr_william_lis/

To learn more about eating to defeat cancer, click here:

http://www.eattodefeatcancer.org/

Lucy the Chimpanzee Podcast

Ever wonder what it would be like to be raised by apes? Would you begin to act like one, or stay true to human instinct? Well, thankfully, no humans were sent off to live with an ape couple, but a chimpanzee named Lucy was sent to live with a human couple as a nature-versus-nurture experiment.

Lucy the chimpanzee was part of psychological experiment. She was adopted within the first week of birth and raised to be as human as possible. As shocking as it may be, the experiment worked very well. She learned to dress herself, make tea for company, and eat with silverware. Lucy could communicate using sign-language, could recognize and react to peoples emotions, and had the mental flexibility to lie. One could say that the experiment worked a little too well. Lucy was even attracted to male humans and expressed fear when introduced to a male chimpanzee.
After the first few years, things started to get out of hand. Since chimpanzees are at least five times stronger than humans, Lucy quickly became the dictator in the household. She became very destructive and violent. Eventually, the couple decided it would be best for Lucy to go back to the wild and finally become a chimpanzee. She was shipped to a rehabilitation center in Gambia. Lucy didn't relate to the other chimps and showed many signs of depression. She continued to be only attracted to male humans, didn't eat, and expressed "hurt" via sign language.
A year later, Lucy was found to be poached. Her hands and feet were missing and people said it appeared that her skin had been skinned off and no hair or skin was found. Because of her fondness of humans, Lucy most likely walked up to the poachers innocently. Essentially, the way she was raised was the reason she died.

This story is very controversial. I happen to think that even though Lucy didn't have an easy life and didn't really fit in anywhere, the experiment was worth-while. Chimpanzee's are relatively similar to humans, and through Lucy we learned a lot about both humans and chimpanzees. We learned that chimpanzee's can grow up to be the equivalent of a minimally disabled human. If chimpanzees can basically become human, can humans grow up to be, in essence, chimpanzees? Is the only difference nature-versus-nurture?

Want to check out the 'Lucy' podcast? Click the links below!
Part I-  http://www.radiolab.org/story/91706-lucy/
Part II-  http://www.radiolab.org/story/91707-lucy-the-epilogue/

"Thinking Like a Mountain"- By Aldo Leopold

I can think like a human, I can think like a cat, I can think like an osprey. But think like a mountain? Not so much. After reading this article, I learned what it means to 'think like a mountain' and how it could help us all.

In this article, the author, Aldo Leopold, tells the story of how everything in nature is a balance. In the beginning, a human always leaped at the chance to kill a wolf in order to preserve the deer population. After a while, all the wolves disappeared and suddenly there were only deer. With more deer and not as many wolves, more plants were being eaten and not enough created. That meant all the plants were gone and all the deer eventually died. They didn't just kill that one wolf, they killed the whole mountain.

"While a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades." 

In my opinion, this article is a great example of deforestation, and the fault here is ours. We did what we thought was best for the mountain, but little did we know that our one little act would cause so many unfortunate events to ensue. If we had thought like the mountain, we would have known that by killing those wolves, we would overpopulate deer, kill the plants, and so on. Who would have known that our minor error would cause so much trouble? To recap, everything in life and nature is a balance. If that balanced is played with, well, you know what happens. Maybe next time we should start to think like a mountain.

Want to read this article? Click Here:

                                                  http://www.eco-action.org/dt/thinking.html

TED Talk-Seas of Plastic

Ever think that when you throw away a plastic bag or plastic bottle, you are killing our planet or something living on our planet? Well, you probably are. Living in a plastic packaged world, the damage to our planet is becoming more and more obvious. Being a somewhat educated planet person myself, I was still shocked by what was happening in our oceans, and this TED talk, by Charles Moore, put some perspective on it.

Did you know that 2 million plastic bottles are used every five minutes in the United States?

While participating in a yachting competition, Charles Moore discovered a huge swath of floating plastic garbage the size of two Texases. Even worse, all of the garbage is trapped in an enormous, slow whirlpool called the Pacific Gyre. Moore once said, "There were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and fishing floats as far as I could see. Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic". The 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' in some places can outweigh the surface biomass six-to-one! For example, in the Pacific Gyre, a sample was taken to count plankton, but more plastic was found than plankton.

What is this effecting? Besides the obvious answer, which would be the ocean, it is effecting the birds and sea creatures also. Hundreds of thousands of birds and fish are dying with mainly plastic products filling their stomachs. The floating caps of plastic bottles are easily mistaken for bird food and the flying animals are dying because of it.

"But there's recycling now", you might say. The scientific amount of plastic we recycle is diddly point squat. Compared to the amount of plastics we throw away, the amount recycled is close to nothing!

So how do we fix this? Since straining the ocean of plastics would be far too expensive for any country, and could cause unforeseeable damage to aquatic life, our best bet is to not use so much plastic. If you have to use plastic, reuse it! Anything you can do to stop throwing away so much plastic will help repair our planet for a brighter future.

Obviously, I think what is happening to our ocean is a HUGE deal, but right now, I'm not seeing a whole lot of effort coming to help stop all the damage to our environment. Since the issue of using too much paper has floated to the surface, I have seen an increase of people voting for plastic over paper. But this change doesn't help our planet any more than before. We need to find a way to stop using paper AND plastic... or at least make them more recyclable.

I guess the real question is how do we stop the damage from paper AND plastic? Is there a solution?

To watch this TED talk, click here:  http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html

Introduction

As Albert Einstein once said, "welcome." My name is Hannah Langford and I go to Animas High School. This blog will take you along with the adventures that ensue in my 10th grade biology class. You will (hopefully) learn all about the living things on this planet just as I will. Come along with me and let's learn something!