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Humoral immunity: Primary response: The very first time the lymphocytes meet a particular antigen, plasma cells produce antibodies to kill the pathogen. Memory B cells remember how to kill the antigen. Secondary response: Exposure to the same antigen later triggers a stronger immune response, because the system is already prepared.
Cellular Immunity: T cells kill infected cells in the cell-mediated response. Once inside cells, pathogens are harder to detect. Cell-mediated immunity recognizes and kills the body’s own infected cells.
B-cells: Develop in the bone marrow and become antibody-producing plasma cells. Bind antigens to surface-bound antibodies.
T-cells: Develop in the thymus; differentiate into T-helper cells or T-cytotoxic cells.Antibodies: Antibodies are soluble proteins that are bound to the surface of cells, as well as unbound in the circulation. There are 5 types (isotypes) of antibodies: IgA: protects mucosal surfaces, IgD: B-Cell antigen receptor, IgE: involved in allergy, IgG: majority of antibody-based immunity and IgM: key to B-Cell immunity. |
Twelve-year old Daniel Harte and his father, Harold, have recently arrived in colonial Boston in 1773. Daniel's new friend, Peter Ward, is a member of the patriotic group known as the Sons of Liberty. Join Daniel and Peter as they prepare for the biggest "tea party" in Boston's history. This engaging new fictional account of the Boston Tea Party is based on primary sources and is designed to be read by the entire class, in small groups or individually. There are two distinct versions for your students to enjoy. The Digital Screen Reader
allows students to read the story via PDF on a computer screen. This version has a color cover and large print. The alternative version, the Personalized Student Reader
, is an exciting new concept designed to get quality reading material directly into the hands of every student. Teachers using this version of Patriot Courage can print a full class set of readers and have the students make them into booklets (including binding). The student illustrates the cover with their own drawing and continues to illustrate the book as they read chapter-to-chapter. When completed, the student takes the book home! The Teacher Guide
provides complete instructions on how to print and compile the Personalized Student Readers. It also contains lesson plans with activities for each chapter, as well as vocabulary worksheets. |
Image of the Child
All children have potential, curiosity and interest in constructing their learning, negotiating with everything their environment brings to them. Children are strong, and capable.
The child is a collaborator. The program focuses on each child in relation to other children, their family, the teachers and the community rather than on each child in isolation. The child is a communicator. The program supports a child’s intellectual development through a focus on representation including words, movement, drawing, painting, building, collage, dramatic play and music.
Children have the right to use many materials in order to discover and communicate what they know, understand, wonder about, question, feel and imagine. The children make their thinking visible supported by their teachers through these avenues.
Children have the right to feel safe, cared for, respected, and encouraged by caring, professional teachers.
Role of the Teacher
Teachers facilitate children’s exploration of ideas; work on short and long-term projects, and guide expectations of joint open-ended discovery and problem solving. Teachers listen and observe children closely as they guide the children through the projects and the daily activities. Teachers ask questions; discover children’s ideas, theories and provide occasions for discovery and learning. Teachers are seen as digging with the children for knowledge rather than filling the children with knowledge.
Teachers are seen as researchers. Teachers work together and maintain a strong, collegial relationship with each other, they engage in continuous discussion and interpretation of their work and the work of the children. Teachers are researchers preparing documentation of the children’s work.
Parents as Partners
Parent participation is essential in the strong relationship of the child, teacher and parent. Parents play an active role in their children’s learning experience. The exchange of ideas between the teacher and the parents support the child as she grows and develops within our programs. It is an intrinsic element in supporting, guiding and caring for the child.
Environment is the Third teacher
The children’s environment should be enticing, rich with materials, engaging, filled with wonder and delight and an occasional surprise. The environment should be aesthetically pleasing, welcoming and comforting.
The environment set up should promote choice and self-direction. The children need to be part of caring for the toys, equipment and materials. This promotes respect in young children. Teachers are role models for this type of behaviour.
The environment should encourage social interactions, cooperation, sharing, and problem solving. There should be choices for children to practice decision-making, can play with materials until they are finished, lessening the potential for conflict over equipment/toys and waiting.
The environment should let the children know what is expected of them; messy, noisy or quiet play. Children should be allowed to retreat and reflect, be alone, or interact with just one other person. Children are responsible for their possessions: clothing etc. And should respect other’s privacy and possessions.
The space should encourage movement and exploration and avoids conflict over lack of space and teachers should be able to observe and supervise with ease. |
These types of vehicles use a different technology from the conventional internal combustion engine.
Hybrid vehicles combine an internal combustion engine and also one or more electric motors installed such that they can power the vehicle either individually or together. They have regenerative braking, which uses the braking energy to produce electricity, and storage batteries.
- A Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) combine internal combustion engine and an electric battery that can be recharged from an external source of electricity via plug. For example, the Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid works just like a regular Prius, but with an extended electric driving range for enhanced fuel efficiency.
Electric vehicles (EVs) run on electricity only. They are propelled by one or more electric motors powered by rechargeable battery packs and produce less noise than traditional vehicles.
- Fully electric vehicles (EVs): work exclusively with one electric motor. For example, the Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe, etc.
- Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV): these vehicles have a plug-in battery pack and electric motor, as well as an internal combustion engine. The difference with a plug-in hybrid is that the electric motor always drives the wheels, with the internal combustion engine acting as a generator to recharge the battery when it is depleted. For Example: Opel Ampera.
The fuel cell is an electrochemical system that converts chemical energy into electrical energy and steam. This concept offers a substantial advantage over classical combustion technology, not only by increasing the efficiency but because when hydrogen fuel is the only emission produced water vapour is used.
The following options are alternatives fuels:
In these vehicles, the fuel is a mixture of propane and butane which is stored compressed in a tank. Environmental benefits presented to emit less pollution than conventional fuels.
- Bio ethanol
Bio ethanol is a form of quasi-renewable energy that can be produced from agricultural feedstock like sugar, starch or cellulose. It has a clear benefit over fossil fuels is the greenhouse gas emissions. |
Causes of the French Revolution of 1789
The French Revolution of 1789 had many long-range causes. Political, social, and economic conditions in France contributed to the discontent felt by many French people-especially those of the third estate. The ideas of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment brought new views to government and society. The American Revolution also influenced the coming of the French Revolution. The Philosophes planted the seeds for the French Revolution. Their goals were to expose and destroy the inequalities of the ancient regime (old order).
The political discontent of France was one of the causes of the Revolution. In the 17th and 18th centuries, France was ruled by an absolute government. The king had all the political powers. Anyone who criticized the government could be arrested and put in prison without trial. Louis XVI was king at the time of the French Revolution. He was more interested in hunting than governing France. He and his Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, lived an extravagant life at the Palace of Versailles. They did not really care about the state of their country. The excerpt from the cahiers mentioned in document 3 shows that the votes in the assembly were not taken by head. The people of the 3rd estate felt a sense of betrayal when the king supported the block voting over the head voting. The first two estates worked together to outvote the large third estate to keep them from becoming a threat to the power. Lord Acton, an Englishmen, states that the monarchy being overthrown wasn't the spark of the Revolution. He recognizes the American Independence as the spark of the French Revolution. The French government was inefficient, unjust and corrupt. There were numerous government departments, different laws in different parts of the country and officials. Many people became livid at the way France was governed. The people couldn't do anything to bring about a change. The French Parlement was called the Estates-General. It had not met since 1614 and couldn't without the consent of the king. It basically had no power.
The economic problems created by the French kings also contributed to the Revolution. During the 18th century, the French government spent more money than it collected in taxes. By 1788, the country was bankrupt. Arthur Young, an Englishmen and observer, who traveled to France from 1787 to 1789 angrily describes the living conditions of the peasants in his
book Travels in France. The amount of tax each person must pay is unfair. Landholders found in the nobility weren't taxed much. The landholders found in the commoners were taxed heavily. There was lack of bread. The price of bread was a lot higher then one's ability to pay which caused great misery for the people of France. Most of the money was spent on wars. France had been at war for nearly 50 years out of the previous one hundred years. France supported the Americans in the American War of the Independence. After that, France was in financial ruins. A large sum of money was also spent on palaces, entertainment and gifts by the kings of France. The government spent a lot of money which put forth high taxes. The tax system was unjust. The nobles and the clergy hardly paid any tax. The Church owned one-tenth of the land in France and did not pay any taxes. The peasants were the victims of the heavy taxation. Louis XVI tried to reform the taxation system but the nobility and the clergy refused to accept the new reforms. Therefore, the king was unable to make any financial reforms. The gabelle, salt tax, was also levied by the French Kings. When Jacques Turgot tried to impose the corvee, tax on land property, he was opposed by the nobility. He failed to pass the corvee and was dismissed by Louis XVI..
Social problems were also a major factor that brought about the French Revolution. In the 18th century, France was a feudal country with class divisions. People were divided into three estates. The First Estate consisted of the clergy. The Second consisted of the nobility, and the Third included the bourgeoisie, the city workers and the peasants. The state you belonged to decided your power and rights. Document 2 shows the social class distinctions. The first estate was made up of 1% of the people and owned 10% of the land in France. The second estate consisted of 2% of the people and owned 35% of the land. The third estate held 97% of the people who owned 55% of the land. The people-to-land proportion was unjust looking at the amount of people in each estate. The third estate held very little land compared to the amount of people it had. It was overcrowded. The first and the second estate were the privileged classes. They clergy and the nobility were exempt from many taxes. They had to pay about four-fifths of their income on tax. They also needed to pay the land tax: also the taxes on property, roads, and salt. The third estate was the most discontented class. The bourgeoisie were well educated. They were strongly influenced by the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau who attacked the injustices of the time. Rousseau believed that people are basically good but become corrupted by society. In an ideal society, people would make the laws and would obey them willingly. Probably the most famous of the philisophes was Francois-Marie Arouet who took the name Voltaire. He used biting
wit as a weapon to expose the abuses of his day. He targeted corrupt officials and idle aristocrats. With his pen, he battled inequality, injustice, and superstition. He detested the slave trade and deplored religious prejudice. They resented the privileges of the nobility and wanted a larger role in state affairs. City workers were angry because their wages were not enough to buy goods when prices were going up rapidly. The peasants made up 80% of the population and had to pay heavy taxes. In his book The French Revolution, Albert Mathiez states that the Revolution was caused by the middle classes. The working classes weren't able to control or start the Revolution. They were just starting to learn how to read. French peasants were subject to certain feudal dues, called banalities. These included the required used-for-payment of the lord's mill to grind grain and his oven to bake bread. The lord could also require a certain number of days each year of the peasant's labor. Peasants were targeted by society. They couldn't do anything on there own or try to fight back.
The French Revolution was caused by social, political and economic problems. People were in discontent with the king. The first two estates were privileged and the third was very unprivileged and had to pay heavy taxes. The third estate did not get along with the first two. French kings spent a lot of money on wars. They spent more money then they made. It was time for a change in France.
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French Revolution Essay: What were the reasons and results of the French revolution?
In 1789 financial times were hard in France. The peasants were upset that the nobles were living lavish lives collecting taxes, while they suffered. The prices on food were rising and the people were starving. The French social system was outdated and consisted of three The French and English Revolutions THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The French Revolution was effected and caused by many things and people. Some people that had to do with the French Revolution were, Louis XVI, and, Marie Antoinette. Marie played an active role in the Revolution but suffered for her royalist sympathies. King Louis XVI also played an important role in the The French Revolution Sample essay topic, essay writing: The French Revolution - 426 words
The French Revolution had many causes. According to the historian, French people revolted because they were, "intelligent, free, and prosperous to be critical of the existing conditions." In other words, this historian is saying that the people of France knew what was going on in French Revolution Lower Class Sample essay topic, essay writing: French Revolution Lower Class - 439 words
Life from the BottomLower classes have always been treated the worst of any other people. I, being a peasant farmer during the French Revolution, have experienced this maltreatment in mankind. We made up the largest group within the Third Estate. We were forced to Comparing and Contrasting the French and American Revolutions Compare and contrast the American and French revolutions. These should include the role of the bourgeoisie/capitalist middle class, the difference in geography, the role of the international community, religion (its view of democracy, and its relationship to the state), voting habits of the two nations and their political culture.
The French Revolution was plotted by the
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The volume that a given parcel of air takes up is dependent on the Ideal Gas Law:
n=number of moles (similar to number of gas atoms)
T = temperature
According to this equation, if Temperature on the right hand side goes up then volume on the left hand side will also have to go up for them to still be equal.
To put this in simpler terms, heat is energy, when you run really fast your body heats up, your body is burning lots of energy and it creates heat. You can think of heat as the byproduct of things moving fast.
If you rub your hands together really quickly, they will be warm too. In a balloon when the temperature increases, the individual gas molecules that you can't see but that make up gases start moving really fast. When the molecules are moving fast under higher temperatures, they run into the sides of the balloon more often making the balloon bigger. Basically a warmer temperature leads to higher energy gas molecules which take up more space since they are moving faster. If you cool down the temperature, the gas molecules slow down and they take up less space.Hope that helps.
As temperature increases, so does the volume of the balloon. In fact, they are proportional to each other if pressure does not change. There is a catch though: in order to be able to perform calculations, you need to use what is known as absolute temperature. If you are using degrees Fahrenheit, you need to add 460 to get absolute temperature. These would then be called degrees Rankine (R). For example if the balloon's temperature is 73F, its absolute temperature would be 533R. If you now take the balloon outside where the air temperature is, say, 20F and therefore 480R, and you wait long enough for the air (or helium or any other gas) inside the balloon to reach that same temperature, then the balloon would shrink in the same proportion. Say the balloon's volume was 2 cubic feet when its temperature is 73F. By solving a rule of three (try the math yourself: 533 is to 2 as 480 is to x), you will get a volume of 1.8 cubic feet for the cooled down balloon. Notice that even though this is a rather extreme case where the temperature change is 53F, you only get a 10% reduction in volume. To add insult to injury, since the volume of a balloon is proportional to its diameter raised to the third power, a 10% reduction in volume means an only about 3.5% reduction in diameter which is very hard to notice just by looking at it. In our example, the diameter of the balloon would be about 18 3/4 inches initially and the reduction of diameter would be only about 5/8 inch when it cools down to 20F.
One thing you can do now that winter is approaching is the actual experiment. If you live in California or Florida, maybe you can use your freezer to cool down the balloon instead. Just make sure the balloon is not inflated too tight so the pressure inside the balloon will be about the same before and after. It would be easier to measure the circumference instead of the diameter and, since diameter is proportional to circumference, then the volume of the balloon is proportional to the third power of its circumference. Once you compute the reduction in volume as a percent, simply divide this percent by 3 to get the approximate reduction in diameter also as a percent. If you become proficient in measuring the circumference of a balloon you can even use it instead of a thermometer to measure temperatures inside freezers or in a cold outside winter. Just work your way backward:measure the circumference before and after, then find the percent reduction in circumference, multiply by 3 to get the percent reduction in volume. This will be the same percent reduction in absolute temperature which will allow you to find the absolute temperature and hence the temperature in F. You would still need to know the temperature inside your home of course.
This same procedure will work in the summer where outside temperature will be greater than temperature inside your home (let us hope). Instead of a reduction in temperature, volume, diameter and circumference referred to above, you will have an increase, with the same relationship between percent changes. Have fun!
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Scientists have discovered the largest river running through Earth's core: a 260-mile wide jet of lava that flows between Canada and Russia, reports New Scientist.
The stream of molten iron was found thanks to the combined monitoring power of the European Space Agency’s trio of satellites, called Swarm, which were launched in 2013. The system keeps an eye on Earth's magnetic field and can measure as deep as about 2000 miles below Earth's surface, which is right about where the molten river was discovered.
“It’s a remarkable discovery,” said Phil Livermore of the University of Leeds, U.K., who led the team. “We’ve known that the liquid core is moving around, but our observations haven’t been sufficient until now to see this significant jet.”
The stream flows at a pace of about 28 miles per year, westward from Canada, across Alaska and into Siberia. Its movement was tracked by studying how the liquid iron affected the behavior of the magnetic field around it.
“As the iron moves, it drags the magnetic field with it,” explained Livermore. “We can’t see the flow of iron itself, only the motion of the flux lobes.”
The scientists believe the molten river is moving faster than it used to, and that its pace is accelerating, but it's unclear why the acceleration is taking place.
Andy Coghlan over at New Scientist goes into more detail about this phenomenon, and if you want to learn more, check out the abstract from the original research. |
Animals are made up of tiny pieces called cells that are the very building blocks of life. It is important to understand the composition of these cells in order to understand how life works around us. It is first important to note that an animal cell has an outer cell membrane that protects that cell and all the tiny parts that make the cell work. Each of these parts has their own function. You can see these different parts in the color coded diagram above. Each part is clearly labeled to help you understand where everything in the cell is located.
Within the cell, you will notice that the largest part is the nucleus. This is the central part of the cell and is the area where processing occurs. Its two functions are to store DNA and coordinate the activities of all parts of the cell.
Cilia and Flagella are also components of an animal cell and are crucial to the movement of the individual organisms of a cell. They work to move fluid throughout the cell or a group of cells. The endoplasmic reticulum is a network of sacs that work to move chemic compounds throughout the cell. It creates a type of transport between the nucleus the cytoplasm which is the filler within the cell. Another important organism in transportation is the Golgi apparatus that prepares proteins and fats to be shipped outside of the cell. Alternatively, Lysosome are part of the digestion system. Other important parts of an animal cell are the Endosomes and Endocytosis, Intermediate Filaments, Microfilaments, Microtubules, Mitochondria, Peroxisomes, and Ribosomes. |
European nations formed alliances in the years prior to World War I to protect themselves and to increase their military and diplomatic power. Alliances are agreements made between states to provide an element of security for the nations involved. These agreements can either bind states to defend each other if one or more of them are attacked, or the alliance agreement can be based on members holding to a position of neutrality if and when conflicts develop.Continue Reading
The practice of forming powerful alliances that would eventually lead to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 began during the 18th century as a result of nations banding together to either promote or prevent the aims of Napoleon Bonaparte. Seven anti-Napoleon alliances were formed during the years 1797 and 1815 and involved major European powers of the time, such as England, Austria, Prussia and Spain. By the second half of the 1800s, new and shifting alliances were developing between major powers. They eventually settled into two opposing power blocs whose binding alliances meant that, if hostilities broke out between two nations, it could result in a war between all of them.
The formation of alliances between states is based on the balance of power theory. The theory's premise is that security is heightened when military strength is distributed in a manner in which no single nation has the capability of dominating the others. The practice of forming alliances is part of ancient history as pointed out by the 18th-century historian David Hume in his "Of the Balance of Power." The practice resurfaced as a foreign policy goal in Europe when the rulers of Italian city-states began to group into power blocs, such as the Italic League in the 15th century.Learn more about Modern Europe |
Sex determination is a process of development by which the sex of an individual is settled. Sex is a method of reproduction which is widespread among living things. It requires two individuals of the same species.
Usually the sexes are separate. Sex may be determined in one of two ways:
- Genetically, by genes and chromosomes the organism inherits from its parents.
- Environmentally, by some outside agent acting as a trigger to development.
Determination by the environment[change | change source]
For many species sex is determined by environmental factors experienced during development. Many reptiles have temperature-dependent sex determination. The temperature embryos experience during their development determines the sex of the organism. In some turtles, for example, males are produced at lower incubation temperatures than females; this difference in critical temperatures can be as little as 1-2 °C.
Many fish change sex over the course of their life. This phenomenon is called sequential hermaphroditism. In clownfish, smaller fish are male, and the dominant and largest fish in a group becomes female. In many wrasse the opposite is true–most fish are female at birth and become male when they reach a certain size. Sequential hermaphrodites may produce both types of gametes over the course of their lifetime, but at any given point they are either female or male.
Genetic determination[change | change source]
The most usual way to determine sex is by genes. That way, an organism's sex is determined by the genome it gets. The alleles that influence sexual development may or may not be on the same chromosome. If they are, that chromosome is called a sex chromosome, and the genes on it are called 'sex linked'. Sex is determined either by the fact that there is a sex chromosome (which can be missing), or by the number of them. Because genetic sex determination is determined by matching chromosomes, there are usually the same number of male and female offspring.
Various genetic systems[change | change source]
Humans and other mammals have an XY sex determination system: the Y chromosome carries factors responsible for male development. The default sex, in the absence of a Y chromosome, is female. XX mammals are female and XY are male. XY sex determination is also found in other organisms, including the common fruit fly and some plants. In some cases, including in the fruit fly, it is the number of X chromosomes that determines sex rather than the presence of a Y chromosome.
Birds have a system that works the other way round: It is called ZW sex-determination system. The W chromosome has factors for female development. By default (if the chromosome is missing), the organism will be male. In this case ZZ individuals are male and ZW are female. The majority of butterflies and moths also have a ZW sex-determination system. In both XY and ZW sex determination systems the sex chromosome carrying the critical factors is often significantly smaller, carrying little more than the genes necessary for triggering the development of a given sex.
Many insects use a sex determination system based on the number of sex chromosomes. This is called XX/XO sex determination–the O indicates the absence of the sex chromosome. All other chromosomes in these organisms are diploid, but organisms may inherit one or two X chromosomes. In field crickets, for example, insects with a single X chromosome develop as male, while those with two develop as female. In the nematode C. elegans most worms are self-fertilizing XX hermaphrodites, but occasionally abnormalities in chromosome inheritance regularly give rise to individuals with only one X chromosome–these XO individuals are fertile males (and half their offspring are male).
Other insects, including honey bees and ants, use a haploid-diploid sex-determination system. In this case diploid individuals are generally female, and haploid individuals (which develop from unfertilized eggs) are male. This sex-determination system results in a highly biased sex ratio, as the sex of offspring is determined by fertilization rather than the assortment of chromosomes during meiosis.
Abnormalities[change | change source]
Sometimes an organism develops the appearance of both males and females. It is then an intersex, and is rare. Even though such organisms may be called hermaphrodites, this is not correct, because in intersex individuals either the male or the female aspect is sterile.
References[change | change source]
- King R.C. Stansfield W.D. & Mulligan P.K. 2006. A dictionary of genetics, 7th ed. Oxford.
- Dellaporta SL, Calderon-Urrea A (1993). "Sex determination in flowering plants". The Plant Cell 5: 1241–1251. doi:10.2307/3869777.
- Munday, Philip L; Buston, Peter M; and Warner, Robert R. 2006. Diversity and flexibility of sex-change strategies in animals. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 21, February.
- Tanurdzic M and Banks JA (2004). "Sex-determining mechanisms in land plants". The Plant Cell 16: S61–S71. doi:10.1105/tpc.016667. PMID 15084718.
- Smith CA, Katza M, Sinclair AH (2003). "DMRT1 is upregulated in the gonads during female-to-male sex reversal in ZW Chicken Embryos". Biology of Reproduction 68: 560–570. doi:10.1095/biolreprod.102.007294. PMID 12533420.
- "Evolution of the Y chromosome". Annenberg Media. http://www.learner.org/channel/courses/biology/textbook/gender/gender_4.html. Retrieved 2008-04-01.
- Yoshimura A (2005). "Karyotypes of two American field crickets: Gryllus rubens and Gryllus sp. (Orthoptera: Gryllidae)". Entomological Science 8 (3): 219–222. doi:10.1111/j.1479-8298.2005.00118.x.
- Riddle DL, Blumenthal T, Meyer BJ, Priess JR (1997). C. Elegans II. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. ISBN 0-87969-532-3.9.II. Sexual Dimorphism
- Charlesworth B (2003). "Sex Determination in the Honeybee". Cell 114 (4): 397–398. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(03)00610-X.
- White M.J.D. 1973. The chromosomes. 6th ed, Chapman & Hall, London. |
In this lesson students discover that measurements from space can tell us the temperature of the ocean, both on an annual average and as measured on any given date. For the annual average the highest ocean temperatures are near the equator, and drop as one moves either northward or southward from the equator. Students will graph each temperature value as a function of latitude and write a linear equation that best fits the points on their graph. They can choose as data points any point at that approximate latitude because the temperature is not uniform for a certain latitude - some areas are hotter and some are cooler. They can also look at today's ocean temperatures via the link provided to see how the seasons affect whether the northern or southern oceans are warmer. Students will take ocean temperature data from a map and plot temperature versus angle from the equator.
Intended for grade levels:
Type of resource:
Adobe Acrobat reader
Cost / Copyright:
Activities are Copyright Rice University, however may be freely copied for educational use so long as headers are not changed. Teachers are encouraged to register using the registration facility so that they receive notices of new activities, etc.
DLESE Catalog ID: DLESE-000-000-007-779
Resource contact / Creator / Publisher: |
Gender bias has been a persistent issue in workplaces worldwide, and one area where its effects are profoundly felt is in the leadership landscape. In this blog post, we’ll examine the pervasive gender bias in leadership roles, its consequences, and proactive steps to address and eventually bridge the leadership gap.
Understanding Gender Bias:
Gender bias refers to the unfair treatment or judgments based on an individual’s gender. In the workplace, it often manifests as unconscious or implicit biases that affect decisions related to hiring, promotions, and leadership opportunities.
The Leadership Disparity:
Women make up a significant portion of the workforce, yet their representation in leadership roles remains disproportionately low. This leadership gap not only hampers gender equality but also deprives organizations of diverse perspectives and talent.
Consequences of Gender Bias:
1. Missed Opportunities: When gender bias limits women’s access to leadership roles, organizations miss out on a vast pool of talented individuals who could contribute significantly to their success.
2. Lack of Diverse Perspectives: Leadership teams that lack gender diversity may struggle to consider a wide range of perspectives and ideas, potentially hindering innovation and effective decision-making.
3. Organizational Culture: A culture that tolerates gender bias can negatively impact employee morale and retention rates. Women who perceive inequality may seek opportunities elsewhere.
Addressing the Leadership Gap:
1. Promoting Gender Diversity: Organizations must actively promote gender diversity in leadership roles. Implement initiatives such as leadership development programs tailored to women and set diversity targets.
2. Training and Education: Conduct bias awareness and unconscious bias training for all employees, including leadership teams. Awareness is the first step toward change.
3. Mentorship and Sponsorship: Establish mentorship and sponsorship programs that pair emerging female leaders with experienced mentors and sponsors who actively advocate for their advancement.
4. Equal Opportunities and Transparency: Ensure equal opportunities for career advancement and transparency in promotion criteria. Monitor and rectify pay disparities to create a level playing field.
Gender bias in leadership roles is a deeply rooted issue, but it’s one that can be addressed with concerted effort. By actively promoting gender diversity, providing training and education on biases, supporting mentorship and sponsorship initiatives, and ensuring equal opportunities, organizations can begin to close the leadership gap.
Leadership diversity not only aligns with principles of fairness and equality but also leads to better decision-making, increased innovation, and a more inclusive workplace culture. It’s a step toward a future where leadership roles are accessible to all, regardless of gender, and where organizations thrive with the contributions of diverse leaders. |
Industrial class structure started taking shape during British period During British period in cities a new industrial and mercantile middle class came into being. There also emerged a new bureaucratic administrative class. After independence industrial class took a new shape. The effects of industrialization have been
- The percentage of workers engaged in agricultural has come down while that of works engaged in individual activities has gone up.
- The process of social mobility has accelerated
- Trade unions have organized industrial workers to fight for their rights.
- Since industrial workers maintain continued and close and relationship with their kin-groups and castes, caste stratification has an affected class character
- The traditional and charismatic elite have been replaced by the professional elite.
Morris D. Morris has referred to two view points regarding the behaviour pattern of the industrial labour.
- One view is the labour being short in industry, employers had to scramble for their workforce and make all sorts of concessions which weakened their hold on workers. The workers frequently returned to their villages to which they were very much attached
- The other view talks of surplus of labour available villages for the urban employment Because of easy availability the employers abused workers unmercifully. Since working conditions in the factories were intolerable, the labour was forced to go back to their villages.
- Thus, in both views, it was held that workers retained their links with villages which limited the supply of labour for industrial development As a consequence, proletarian type of behaviour did not develop. It also resulted in high rates of absenteeism, labour turnover and the slow growth of trade unions.
Beside the above features, other features of industrial class workers were also visible.
- First, the employment of women and children in industries was very limited About 20 and 25 per cent of labour force consisted of women and about 5 per cent of children. This was because employment of women in night shifts was prohibited and children below 14 years could not be legally employed
- Secondly, though it is argued that industry is caste blind because no single caste can provide an adequate supply of labour and because employees are uninterested in caste affiliation, yet workers did not permit the employers to employ workers of untouchable castes.
- Thirdly, large number of workers in the industries were those who had no significant claim district in which the industry was located but were returned from different districts as well as neighbouring states. There were, thus, no geographical barriers inhibiting the flow of labour into the industry. The rural social structure (joint family system, etc.) was also not a barrier to one estimate, of the total workers in any industry, about 25 per cent are local, 10 pr cent come from within 100 kins of industry’s location, 50 per cent from 100 to 750 kins and 15 per cent from more than 750 kins. This shows a tendency for industry hands to be drawn from increasingly distant areas. All these features explain the class aspect of industrial labour force in India.
Analyzing the ‘working class’, Holmstrom has said that all workers do not share all interests; rather they share a few interests only. He has also said that it is necessary to draw a class line between the organized and the unorganized sector industrial workers.
Joshi (1976) also has said that organized and unorganized sector industrial workers are two classes with different and conflicting interests. This can be explained on the basis of difference in four factors wages, working conditions, security and social worlds.
- The wages depend upon whether the industry is big (more than1,000 workers),small (250-1,000 workers) or very small (less than 50 workers). In 1973, West Bengal laid down different minimum wages for above three types of industries.The big industries pay much more than the small industries because of the economics of scale, unions and worker’s strong bargaining position. Naturally, the interests of workers depend upon the type of industry they work in.
- The working conditions also affect the interests of workers. Workers in industries with more pleasant conditions, having safety measures and fewer accidents and less noise and monotony and fatigue, shorter hours, more space, freedom from close control or harassment, a chance of learning something more, canteens and creches and washing rooms have different interests from those which do not provide all these amenities. As such, they work as two different classes of workers.
- Security and career chances also demarcate two classes of workers. A permanent worker has not only a job but also a career while the temporary worker is bothered more about the security of the job. The permanent worker’s career extends into the future but the temporary one remains bogged down into the present The former may plan to improve his job by learning a skill and getting promotion, the latter is terrified of losing his job if he jobs a union.
- Lastly, the social worlds also divide workers in two different classes.The ‘Social world’ refers to differences in economic conditions, life chances, mutual aid and dependence etc.The factory workers in the organized sector have more solidarity ,fewer hostility and less tensions.Their interests and ideology keep them separate from the ‘outsiders’. Thus the organized sector workers form a privileged upper class.
Business Elite: Shadow of Industrial Class
An entrepreneurial class or business elite started emerging in India by the middle of the nineteenth century. Although prior to the British rule a group of enterprising business persons and traders existed in the country, but the new business elite came into prominence only during this period. Traditionally, most of the business persons belonged to the trading castes and communities. But when a new link was established between the Indian economy and that of Britain, members of some other castes also joined mercantile enterprises. As most of the business persons mainly worked as middle persons and brokers to British firms.
- These groups of business persons were primarily commercial agents and not industrial entrepreneurs. Moreover, they were located mainly in Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai regions because commercial and industrial activities were concentrated in these regions.
- The members of this group mainly belonged to the upper castes. For example,Jains, Baniyas and Kayashthas had the upper hand over others in Kolkata region, Parsis and Jains in Mumbai, and in Chennai region, Chettiars controlled such businesses.
During the early part of the twentieth century the Indian industrial entrepreneurs started competing with the British. Gujrarati, Parsis and Marwari emerged as the dominant groups among the business elite. Sociological studies have shown two major characteristics of business elite in Indian in the first place,
Most of them are the members of the traditional trading castes and in this sense there is continuity with the past tradition.
Secondly, there has been a close link of this group with the nationalist movement in India. These features, as Yogendra Singh suggests, “Influences as role that the business elite play in the modernization of Indian society”.
- The size and role of business elite has phenomenally increased after independence. It has been primarily because of the expansion of industrial activities during the last few decades.
- The industrial business groups now organized their activities on modern scientific lines and are comparable to their counterparts outside the country. Trained manager manage their organizations. Thus, a kind of bureaucratic structure has emerged giving rise to a new class of industrial bureaucrats.
- The accelerated growth of business elite suggests a significant change in the entrepreneurial motivation of the people.The group is gradually becoming broad-based as members of the diverse social group sand castes are entering into this fold The industrial development of the backward regions in the country is a pointer to this trend. |
In the realm of technology, a groundbreaking revolution is underway, promising to reshape the landscape of computation as we know it. The advent of quantum computing marks a paradigm shift that has the potential to unlock unprecedented computational power, solving complex problems that were once deemed insurmountable for classical computers. As we stand on the cusp of this transformative era, it is crucial to explore the rise of quantum computing and its implications for the future of technology.
Understanding Quantum Computing
To grasp the significance of quantum computing, it’s essential to delve into the principles that distinguish it from classical computing. Unlike classical bits, which exist in one of two states—0 or 1—quantum bits or qubits can exist in multiple states simultaneously, thanks to the phenomenon known as superposition. This unique property exponentially increases the processing power of quantum computers.
Moreover, entanglement, another fundamental principle of quantum mechanics, allows qubits to become interconnected in such a way that the state of one qubit instantaneously influences the state of another, regardless of the physical distance between them. This interconnectedness enables quantum computers to perform complex computations at speeds that were previously inconceivable.
Applications of Quantum Computing
The potential applications of quantum computing are far-reaching, touching various sectors and industries. One of the most anticipated applications is in cryptography. Quantum computers could potentially break current encryption algorithms, prompting the need for the development of quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques. On the flip side, quantum cryptography offers a new era of secure communication, leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics to ensure unbreakable encryption.
In the realm of optimization problems, quantum computing shines. Tasks such as route optimization, resource allocation, and logistical planning, which are computationally intensive for classical computers, can be solved exponentially faster with quantum algorithms. This could revolutionize industries like transportation, finance, and manufacturing by streamlining operations and reducing costs.
Drug discovery and molecular modeling are also poised to benefit from quantum computing. Simulating the behavior of molecules and understanding complex chemical reactions at the quantum level is an arduous task for classical computers. Quantum computers, however, can provide more accurate simulations, significantly accelerating the drug discovery process and advancing our understanding of molecular structures.
Challenges and Milestones
While the promise of quantum computing is immense, several challenges stand in the way of realizing its full potential. Quantum decoherence, the phenomenon where qubits lose their quantum state due to external factors, remains a significant hurdle. Researchers are actively working on error-correction techniques to mitigate decoherence and enhance the stability of quantum computations.
Another challenge is scaling up quantum computers to handle larger and more complex problems. Current quantum processors are susceptible to errors as the number of qubits increases. Achieving fault-tolerant quantum computers that can reliably perform complex calculations is a critical milestone for the field.
Despite these challenges, the field of quantum computing has witnessed remarkable milestones in recent years. Companies like IBM, Google, and Rigetti Computing have made significant strides in developing quantum processors with an increasing number of qubits and improved error rates. Google’s achievement of quantum supremacy in 2019, where their quantum processor performed a task faster than the most advanced classical supercomputers, marked a historic moment in the field.
The Quantum Supremacy Race
The race for quantum supremacy has been a driving force behind the rapid advancements in quantum computing. Quantum supremacy refers to the point at which a quantum computer can outperform the most powerful classical computers in solving a specific task. Google’s achievement was a watershed moment, showcasing that quantum computers could indeed surpass classical counterparts in certain computations.
However, it’s crucial to note that achieving quantum supremacy for a specific task does not mean that quantum computers are ready to replace classical computers entirely. Quantum computers excel in solving certain types of problems while remaining less effective for others. The ultimate goal is to develop quantum computers that can consistently outperform classical computers across a broad range of applications.
Ethical and Security Implications
The rise of quantum computing also brings forth ethical and security considerations. As quantum computers pose a potential threat to current encryption methods, the transition to quantum-resistant cryptography becomes imperative to safeguard sensitive information. Governments, organizations, and individuals must proactively adapt to the evolving landscape of cybersecurity to mitigate potential risks posed by quantum computing.
Moreover, questions arise concerning the ethical implications of quantum computing in fields like artificial intelligence. Quantum computing’s ability to process vast amounts of data in parallel could accelerate the development of advanced AI algorithms, raising concerns about privacy, bias, and the responsible use of technology. Ethical frameworks and regulations will be crucial to guide the ethical deployment of quantum computing technologies.
The Future of Quantum Computing
Looking ahead, the future of quantum computing holds both excitement and uncertainty. The ongoing research and development in this field are poised to unlock new possibilities, revolutionizing industries and solving problems that were once deemed unsolvable. Quantum computers are expected to become more powerful and accessible, leading to increased adoption across various sectors.
As quantum computing continues to mature, interdisciplinary collaboration will play a pivotal role. Researchers from diverse fields, including physics, computer science, and materials science, will join forces to tackle the challenges and explore the full potential of quantum computing. Academic institutions, industry leaders, and governments around the world are investing heavily in quantum research to position themselves at the forefront of this technological revolution.
The rise of quantum computing signifies a new era in technology, promising to reshape the boundaries of what is computationally possible. From cryptography to drug discovery, quantum computing holds the key to solving complex problems that have eluded classical computers. While challenges remain, the progress made in recent years indicates that we are on the brink of witnessing transformative advancements in the field.
As quantum computers become more powerful and accessible, their impact on society will be profound. Ethical considerations and security measures must be prioritized to ensure the responsible development and deployment of quantum technologies. The collaborative efforts of researchers, industry leaders, and policymakers will be crucial in navigating the uncharted territory of quantum computing and harnessing its full potential for the benefit of humanity. The journey into this new era of technology is both challenging and exhilarating, promising innovations that could redefine the very fabric of our digital existence. |
Gender is an important and often overlooked social determinant of health (Alcalde-Rubio et al., 2020). Factors related to gender include health system discrimination and bias, inequitable societal norms and practices, differential exposure to disease, disability, and injuries, and biases in health research.
Historically, women have been victims of bias and discrimination in medical diagnosis, treatment, and care. Compared to men, women are less likely to be diagnosed with a non-psychosomatic illness, have their pain treated, and have their symptoms taken seriously. Women were also excluded from clinical trials until the early 1990s.
Women are less likely than men to be referred for cardiovascular testing, and indigenous women in particular report perceived discrimination by clinicians as a reason for not seeking recommended cancer screening. Indigenous and non-white Hispanic women have been stereotyped as being non-compliant with clinical health recommendations, having risky health behavior, and difficulty understanding or communicating health information (Dirks et al, 2022).
There has been a long history of forced and coerced sterilization of women throughout the world. Throughout the early 20th century, countries passed laws authorizing the coerced or forced sterilization of those they believed should not be permitted to procreate. The practice targeted marginalized populations, including people diagnosed with a mental illness, disabled persons, racial minorities, poor women, and people living with specific illnesses, such as epilepsy. In the U.S., more than half of the 50 states had laws permitting the sterilization of people with specific physical illnesses, Native Americans, and African Americans (Patel, 2017).
Did You Know. . .
From the 1910s through the 1950s, and in some places into the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of American women were detained and forcibly examined for sexually transmitted infections. The program was modeled after similar ones in Europe, under which authorities stalked “suspicious” women, arresting, testing, and imprisoning them.
Inside these institutions, the women were often injected with mercury and forced to ingest arsenic-based drugs, the most common treatments for syphilis in the early part of the century. If they misbehaved, or if they failed to show “proper” ladylike deference, these women could be beaten, doused with cold water, thrown into solitary confinement—or even sterilized.
Scott W. Stern, America's Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral, 2019
Health Inequities in Perinatal Care
Recognizing the need to humanize birth, the World Health Organization and leading maternity care scholars have incorporated respectful maternity care as a central tenet of high-quality care, regardless of birth setting, technology, or resources available in the country. Person-centered maternity care is defined as “care that is respectful of and responsive to women’s preferences, needs, and values and is a core component of quality maternity care” (Ibrahim et al., 2022).
The term “higher quality maternity care” describes perinatal care that is respectful and facilitates a level of autonomy preferred by the birthing person. In keeping with the self-identification of study participants, we employ the term “women” throughout this manuscript though we recognize that not all people who give birth identify as women and have varying gender identities and preferences for language (Ibrahim et al., 2022).
Black and Indigenous women in the U.S. are significantly more likely to die within a year of giving birth and experience disproportionately higher rates of severe maternal morbidity. Nearly half of these maternal events are preventable through improving quality of care. Inequities in the quality of preconception, prenatal, intrapartum, and postpartum care may contribute to racial disparities in maternal health outcomes. Notably, when mode of delivery is disaggregated by race, Black women in the U.S. have the highest rates of cesarean birth, despite similar predisposing factors (Ibrahim et al., 2022).
Improving maternal health and health equity is a key priority of the U.S. Surgeon General, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Racism and racial discrimination are linked to poor health, and specifically, negative birth outcomes for women of color and their infants. Mistreatment during pregnancy and childbirth has been associated with both short- and long-term adverse mental health outcomes that include pain and suffering, postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, fear of birth, negative body image, and feelings of dehumanization (Ibrahim et al., 2022).
At U.N. conferences in 1994 in Cairo and in 1995 in Beijing, participants considered the status of women, population, and development. They adopted the principles of reproductive justice, i.e., that it is a fundamental right to be able to control the number and timing of childbearing. This requires access to family planning information, contraceptive services, and abortion. However, developing country surveys show that as many as a quarter of women who want to either delay or stop childbearing altogether lack access to contraception or have concerns about the safety and side effects of available methods (Speidel and Sullivan, 2023).
Reproductive justice calls for the right to have children or not have children, to choose their number and timing, and the right to live in supportive environments that provide reproductive rights, equal opportunities for women, education, fair wages, housing, and healthcare. Advocates warn against repeating the past coercive history of some family planning/population programs––notably mandatory birth limitation and forced abortions in China and involuntary sterilization in India and the U.S. (Speidel and Sullivan, 2023).
The concept of reproductive justice represents a significant shift from traditional notions of reproductive rights, specifically in its inclusion of the impact of contextual and structural factors on reproduction. As described by Ross and colleagues, “The ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is directly linked to the conditions in her community and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access. For example, a woman cannot make an individual decision about her body if she is part of a community whose human rights as a group are violated, such as through environmental dangers or insufficient quality health care” (Fleming et al, 2019).
The recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has already affected pregnancy-related healthcare for many women. It has also impacted OB/GYN training in the states that have restricted or are poised to restrict abortion services. This means hospitals will no longer offer vital training used to manage miscarriages and other pregnancy-related complications. |
What are the differences between IPv4 and IPv6?rouzbeh kalhor
IP address stands for Internet Protocol address, which is a series of regular numbers assigned to each device that is connected a network. An IP is a unique identification number used to establish a network connection that identifies different devices. Even if there are two or three computers that are supposed to form a network and communicate with each other, each of them needs to have a unique identification number. If the number of these computers increased and they spread to different parts of the world, we would have an international network like the Internet instead of an internal network.
It is also necessary to have an IP address to communicate on the Internet. Data transmission and packet transfer from one device to another via the Internet is done via IP, and without IP addresses, computers will not be able to communicate and send data to each other.
IP is generally known in both version 4 (IPv4) and version 6 (IPv6), which we will describe their features and differences in the following.
IPv4 is the underlying technology for connecting a variety of devices to the web. When a device connects to the Internet (whether a PC, Mac, smartphone, or other device), a unique IP address is assigned to that device. Initially, when defining web network standards, 32-bit numbers were used to create IP numbers, which is the IPv4 or Internet Protocol version. In this version, which is still in use, a combination of 32-bit numbers is eventually used up to 4 3.3 billion (4,294,967,296) private addresses can be created.
IPv6 is the sixth version of the Internet Protocol and the successor to IPv4. IPv6 works similarly to IPv4, providing a unique IP address for devices running on the Internet to communicate. However, there is a major difference between the two.
Due to the 32-bit IP of version 4, IPv4 can cover 2^32 or 4.29 billion IPs. At the beginning of the Internet, 4.3 billion IP addresses were a number that was not expected to reach its full potential, but over time, with the expansion of web-based activities and the need to connect different devices to the Internet, research on a new generation of IP Began. This research work was later presented in the form of version 5, which was only experimental, but with the advent of version 6 of IP, the limitation problem was solved almost forever, because in this series of IPs, numbers are based on 128 bits, which results are remarkable.
The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is in many ways hidden from users and is done by communication companies and servers. Most operating systems also support IPv6, but IPv6 is still in its infancy and has security flaws and bugs. It can lead to a huge mess in the web world. No one is sure how much this transfer will cost or how long it will take. But overall, migrating from IP-4s to IP-6s can guarantee the future of the Web. |
Few organisms illustrate the concept of prodigious reproduction as vividly as the house mouse (Mus musculus) in the intricate ballet of nature. These minuscule rodents, which are frequently unwelcome in our homes, have mastered the art of reproduction, resulting in rapid population growth that can challenge even the most vigilant pest control measures. Examining the world of mouse mothers and their young sheds light on their astounding reproduction rates and the difficulties they pose for householders.
The reproductive capabilities of house rodents are nothing short of astounding. Female house mice can attain sexual maturity as early as six weeks of age, and their estrus cycle is astonishingly brief, lasting only four to five days. This frequent cycle, coupled with their ability to mate year-round, can result in rapid population explosions.
Upon becoming pregnant, a female mouse will typically carry her developing offspring for approximately 19 to 21 days before giving birth. There can be anywhere from five to twelve puppies in a typical litter, with rare instances involving as many as fifteen or more. The infant puppies are blind, hairless, and completely reliant on their mother for food and care.
The mother mouse’s nurturing function is both impressive and resourceful. She assiduously cares for her young for up to three weeks, feeding them several times per day. As the puppies mature and become more independent, they begin to experiment with solid foods and wean themselves off their mother’s milk.
Nevertheless, the cycle continues. Female rodents are known for a phenomenon known as “postpartum estrus.” This unique trait enables a rodent female to become pregnant again within two days of giving birth. This overlapping of pregnancies is a major contributor to their accelerated reproduction rates. Consequently, a female rodent may have multiple litters within a single season.
The implications of these high reproduction rates are substantial, particularly in terms of managing populations of domestic mice. Unchecked, a single pair of mice can rapidly multiply into dozens in a matter of months. Their ability to use even the tiniest openings to enter our dwellings and their resourcefulness in locating food sources exacerbate the difficulty of controlling their population.
Infestations of house mice require a multifaceted strategy that includes prevention, detection, and intervention. Preventive measures, such as securing entry points, removing food sources, and maintaining proper sanitation, play an essential role in reducing the likelihood of infestations establishing themselves. Regular inspections can help detect early indications of activity, allowing for prompt response.
For the effective management of house rodent populations, professional pest control services are often required. Experts in pest control have the knowledge, experience, and equipment to identify entry points, implement targeted treatments, and advise on long-term prevention strategies. Their expertise is especially important in eradicating infestations that have already taken root.
The reproductive prowess of house mice is conclusive evidence of their remarkable adaptability and survival instincts. Their ability to breed year-round and produce multiple litters highlights the difficulty they present to householders and pest control efforts. Understanding the dynamics of mouse mothers and their offspring emphasizes the significance of proactive prevention and prompt intervention to ensure that these prolific breeders do not extend their unwanted stay.
Affordable, accessible, and high-quality mouse removal services in Bowmanville. We remove mice from private and commercial properties with the help of our licensed and insured technicians that have years of experience. |
Fifth graders have been busy learning about molecules! We have been exploring what causes different types of molecules to dissolve. To further understand, we first investigated the attraction between molecules of the same kind. We placed drops of water on a penny then did the same with oil to see which liquid would gather the most drops. We observed that water molecules held together better than oil molecules.
Next, we tested different emulsifiers to see which would keep two liquids, water and oil, from separating to create a stable mixture. After testing flour, cornstarch, and lecithin, we found that lecithin is the best emulsifier to keep oil and water mixed. |
Agricultural robots, also known as agribots, are increasingly being used by farmers and growers around the world to improve their farming practices. These robots are designed to perform a variety of tasks, from planting and harvesting crops to monitoring soil conditions and weather patterns. One of the most promising applications of agricultural robots is in chemical-free weeding.
Traditionally, farmers have relied on chemical herbicides to control weeds in their fields. However, the use of these chemicals can have negative environmental impacts, such as soil and water contamination, and can also harm beneficial insects and other wildlife. Agricultural robots offer a promising alternative, as they can precisely target and remove weeds without the need for chemicals.
Using machine learning and computer vision, agricultural robots can identify and differentiate between crops and weeds, allowing them to selectively remove only the unwanted plants. This not only reduces the amount of herbicides used, but also minimizes crop damage and labor costs.
In addition to weeding, agricultural robots can also perform a range of other tasks, such as planting and harvesting crops, monitoring soil and weather conditions, and collecting data to inform farming decisions. By adopting these technologies, farmers and growers can improve their productivity, efficiency, and profitability, while also reducing their environmental impact and transitioning to more sustainable farming practices.
Overall, agricultural robots have the potential to revolutionize farming practices by providing a safer, more efficient, and environmentally friendly approach to crop management. As technology continues to advance, it is likely that we will see more and more farmers and growers embracing these innovative tools to help feed a growing global population while preserving our planet’s natural resources. |
Here are the key empathetic responses and how to sharpen your skills.
Have you ever felt a joyful heart when you saw a child unwrapping a gift? Or have you experienced sorrow in a friend’s teary eyes? Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, is the invisible thread that connects us. It is how we experience kindness, compassion, and the sense that we are all in this together.
In a world of diverse experiences and perspectives, understanding the different types of empathy is akin to unlocking a treasure chest of human connection and a positive lifestyle.
Empathy is not a one-size-fits-all emotion. Instead, it is a multifaceted gem. Its various aspects can illuminate how we relate to one another.
Psychology identifies five distinct types of empathy:
- Emotional (or affective)
Each type plays a unique role in how we perceive and respond to the feelings and thoughts of those around us, contributing to the tapestry of kindness and natural wellness that enriches our lives.
Join us as we unravel the mysteries of the mind and heart, discovering the transformative power of empathy and its capacity to cultivate a world filled with kindness, understanding, and well-being.
1 – Cognitive Empathy
Cognitive empathy, aka “perspective-taking,” is the ability to understand and comprehend another person’s thoughts and feelings. It also allows us to respect viewpoints – even when we may disagree. It’s like stepping into another person’s shoes.
Of course, you do not feel what they feel. But you do feel a profound sense of it.
This form of empathy is crucial in effective communication, problem-solving, and conflict resolution. That’s because it enables us to anticipate others’ reactions and respond appropriately.
Cognitive empathy is the mental process of recognizing and understanding another person’s state of mind. It’s the intellectual identification of emotions, thoughts, and attitudes.
Besides that, it allows us to comprehend what others might be experiencing. This understanding fosters mutual respect and open-mindedness. As a result, it lays the foundation for positive and meaningful interactions.
By grasping the viewpoints of others, cognitive empathy enhances our ability to communicate effectively, navigate disagreements, and find common ground. It is a vital skill in diverse settings, from intimate relationships to professional environments. It is also the foundation of collaboration and a more harmonious coexistence.
Cognitive empathy offers numerous benefits. These include improved communication, stronger relationships, and enhanced problem-solving abilities.
However, it is essential to balance this intellectual understanding with emotional connection. Without the warmth of emotional empathy, cognitive empathy alone might come across as detached or insincere, potentially hindering the depth of human connection.
Here are some examples:
Imagine a manager addressing a team member’s concerns by acknowledging their viewpoint and adapting their approach to meet individual needs. Or consider a friend who, despite having different beliefs, listens intently and respects your perspective. These scenarios exemplify cognitive empathy in action, demonstrating its impact on building understanding and fostering positive relationships.
2 – Emotional (or Affective) Empathy
Emotional empathy, also known as affective empathy, is the ability to feel another person’s emotions physically. It’s like a heartfelt echo. Through it, we can share in the joy, sorrow, excitement, or pain of others. This form of empathy is the cornerstone of deep emotional connections, enabling us to offer genuine support and compassion.
Emotional empathy fosters a sense of shared humanity. It creates bonds that transcend words. It also allows us to be present with others in their joy and vulnerability, offering a comforting presence and a listening ear. This connection is essential in building trust and strengthening relationships. It also helps us create a nurturing environment for kindness to flourish.
The benefits of emotional empathy are profound. It lets us form deep connections, mutual support, and a sense of belonging. It enables us to respond compassionately, enhancing our ability to nurture and care. However, managing this emotional sharing is essential to avoid becoming overwhelmed or overly enmeshed in others’ feelings, which can lead to emotional fatigue and burnout.
Here are some examples:
Picture a parent feeling a surge of pride watching their child’s accomplishments or a friend sharing your laughter, their eyes sparkling with joy. Emotional empathy is at play when we feel a lump in our throats witnessing someone’s struggle or when a movie brings tears to our eyes. It’s the warmth we feel in shared experiences, the comforting embrace of understanding.
3 – Motivational Empathy
Motivational empathy is the drive that propels us into action upon recognizing another’s needs or feelings. It’s the spark that ignites our desire to help and support. It can also make a positive difference in the lives of others. This form of empathy goes beyond understanding and feeling. Instead, it’s about being moved to act, alleviate suffering, and increase well-being.
Motivational empathy fuels altruism and prosocial behavior, encouraging us to contribute to the welfare of others selflessly. It’s the force behind volunteerism, charitable giving, and everyday acts of kindness, reflecting our innate capacity for goodness and the joy of uplifting others.
The benefits of motivational empathy are far-reaching. It helps create a sense of purpose, enhance social bonds, and contribute to individual and community well-being. However, balancing the desire to help with self-care and discernment is essential. Thus, we ensure our actions are sustainable and genuinely beneficial, avoiding potential pitfalls such as burnout or unintended harm.
Here are some examples:
Consider the helping hand extended to a neighbor in need, the comforting words offered to a grieving friend, or the time and resources dedicated to supporting a charitable cause. Motivational empathy is evident in these actions, showcasing our ability to transform empathy into tangible support and positive change.
4 – Social Empathy
Social empathy helps one experience the feelings of groups, communities, or societies. It extends beyond individual interactions, encompassing a broader awareness of social dynamics, inequalities, and collective experiences. This form of empathy is instrumental in fostering social harmony.
Social empathy enables us to appreciate the diversity and complexity of collective experiences, promoting mutual respect and cooperation. It encourages community building, social engagement, and the pursuit of equitable solutions, contributing to a harmonious and just society.
Cultivating social empathy brings numerous benefits. These include strengthened community bonds and increased social awareness. However, it also requires balancing advocating for change and respecting diverse perspectives, ensuring constructive dialogue and inclusive solutions.
Here are some examples:
You see this empathy in community outreach programs, social justice initiatives, and efforts to address societal challenges. It’s the driving force behind movements that create fairer societies. Social empathy inspires community support and the shared pursuit of a better world.
5 – Parochial Empathy
Parochial empathy refers to the tendency to feel empathy predominantly or exclusively towards members of our group, community, or identity. It’s the protective embrace we extend to those we perceive as “us.”
Parochial empathy can strengthen bonds within a group and foster a sense of belonging. But it also poses challenges by potentially fueling division, bias, and intergroup conflict. Recognizing and navigating parochial empathy is essential for fostering inclusivity and mitigating its divisive aspects.
Parochial empathy can enhance group cohesion and support. But it also carries the risk of fostering division and bias. Balancing this form of empathy with a broader perspective is crucial for promoting unity and kindness.
Here are some examples:
Parochial empathy is evident in the strong solidarity within families, communities, and sports teams, where members support each other through thick and thin. However, it can also manifest in less constructive ways, such as in-group favoritism, exclusion of outsiders, and resistance to diverse perspectives.
How to Sharpen Your Empathy Skills
Empathy is like a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. Polishing your empathy skills can lead to more meaningful connections, a deeper understanding of others, and a more prosperous, kinder life experience. Here are some practical ways to enhance your empathy:
- Active Listening: Give your full attention when someone is speaking. Avoid interrupting and focus on understanding their perspective. Summarize what you’ve heard and ask clarifying questions to ensure comprehension.
- Mindfulness and Self-Awareness: Regular mindfulness meditation can increase awareness of your emotions and those of others. Consider your reactions and feelings in different situations to understand others better.
- Diverse Interactions: Seek conversations with people from various backgrounds and experiences. Educate yourself about different cultures, lifestyles, and viewpoints to broaden your understanding.
- Read Fiction: Dive into character-driven novels to explore diverse perspectives and emotions. Visualize yourself in the characters’ situations to foster a deeper emotional understanding.
- Volunteer: Offer your time and skills to help others. Volunteering can expose you to a wide range of experiences and emotions. Build relationships with those you help to understand their experiences and feelings.
- Express Curiosity: Inquire about others’ thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Approach conversations with an open mind and a willingness to learn.
- Practice Gratitude: Regularly recognize and appreciate the kindness and support of others. Verbally express your gratitude to foster positive connections.
- Seek Feedback: Ask trusted friends, family, or colleagues about your empathic interactions. Use the feedback to refine your approach and enhance your empathy skills.
You can increase your empathy skills by incorporating these practices into your daily life. You’ll also have a deeper connection with others and contribute to a kinder world.
Final Thoughts on the Five Types of Empathy and How They Build Better Relationships
The five types of empathy are cognitive, emotional, motivational, social, and parochial. Each type offers unique insights and plays a vital role in shaping our interactions and relationships. They also contribute to a kinder, more compassionate world.
The different types of empathy are not isolated. Indeed, they weave together the threads in the fabric of our human experience. Together, they form a holistic picture of how we understand, feel, and respond to the emotions and experiences of others. Thus, they foster a harmonious balance between individual connections and collective well-being.
Empathy is the heartbeat of kindness. Moreover, it is the foundation of a positive lifestyle and a better mindset. It invites us to step into the world of others, to share in their joys and sorrows, and to act with compassion and understanding. By embracing the diverse types of empathy, we cultivate a garden of human connection, where every act of understanding and kindness helps flowers of well-being bloom. |
A podcast is an episodic series of digital audio files made available on the Internet for streaming or downloading to a personal device (e.g., a computer, tablet, or smartphone). Podcasts are available on websites such as Stanford School’s In, Stanford Innovation Lab Podcasts, eCorner Stanford Podcasts, Stanford Radio website, CSET Teaching to Meet the Moment, or on streaming applications/distribution platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud.
For decades, podcasts have been used for leisure and entertainment. However, in recent years, educators have started using podcasts for teaching and learning. For example, instructors can use podcasts for lecture delivery, student assignments, or community-building around interests.
- Presents a wide range of subjects in a quick and efficient manner that is convenient for the instructors and students
- Requires minimal support for the users. Podcasts are available on almost any device
- Introduces and supports a broad array of narrative types that can improve student learning or understanding
- Low cost or free to listen
- Reduces screen time and Zoom fatigue
- Simpler to create and edit than video recordings
- Creating high-quality podcasts requires expertise in audio production
- May require additional equipment (e.g., microphone, audio editing software, and podcast hosting services)
- Low-bandwidth or storage can impede podcast creation or consumption
- May not be suitable for teaching materials that require texts or visual support
What does this look like in a classroom?
Below are several use cases demonstrating how to utilize podcasts for teaching and learning in the classroom. Instructors can utilize existing podcasts as course content (Use Case 1), and/or produce customized podcasts for different educational purposes (Use Case 2, 3, and 4).
For in-depth information on how to produce and host a podcast, please see How to Create Your Own Podcast or check out the GSE IT and Makery Workshop Getting Started with Podcasting with the presentation slides.
Use Case 1: Sharing playlists to engage learners
To help students stay engaged and better focused on course content, Professor Nicole Ardoin generated a list of podcast episodes and shared them with students. During class, Professor Ardoin encouraged students to take breaks and listen to the podcast while walking outside or sitting somewhere different. Then, when students returned to the class, she set aside time and space (e.g., in breakout rooms or in the big group) to reflect and discuss the podcasts.
Use Case 2: Using podcasts to “flip the classroom”
In a “flipped classroom,” instructors pre-record lectures, and students watch the lectures on their own time before coming to the live class session. Instead of recording video lectures, instructors can record audio-only lectures to reduce student screen time.
Using podcasts to flip the classroom is more conducive to non-visual lecture material or discourse, as opposed to dense, technical instruction. Instructors should also be cautious about the length, as long episodes can lose an audience over time. Depending on the course content and pedagogical approaches, some instructors could also consider using podcasts to do guided reading, though this practice is more commonly used in K-12. Research also shows that podcasts can help with second language learning.
Use Case 3: Students submitting podcasts as an assignment
Podcasts may be adopted in lieu of written assignments. Students might submit podcasts as responses, reflections, commentaries, peer revisions, etc. Since podcasting might be new to many students, instructors can make podcasting assignments optional or allow alternative forms of submission. Instructors should establish clear guidelines and provide tutorials to students. For example, instructors can ask students to familiarize themselves with podcast production tools and features before creating their own podcasts.
GSE Assistant Professor Sarah Levine studies the use of digital media to teach reading and writing. Instead of having students submit written assignments, Dr. Levine incorporates writing for radio, where K-12 students submit radio projects for English classes. According to Dr. Levine, podcasts can carry students’ words beyond the boundaries of the classroom into the real world. Dr. Levine emphasizes that “using radio or podcasts as a framework for the teaching of writing draws the real world into the classroom and—with the use of smartphones and Web-based tools—sends students’ voices out into the real world.”
As a simple writing for radio exercise, instructors might ask students to flesh out a chosen idea into a full narrative or story. Students will then be required to include at least 15 sensory descriptions that allow an audience to see, hear, taste, smell, or touch the experience just as the narrator did. After the exercise, students would highlight what they believe to be concrete details. By doing this follow-up activity, students will learn how to assess the extent to which they have fulfilled the assignment while also allowing instructors to assess students’ understanding of concrete imagery.
Another radio writing assignment might ask students to create an “Audio Gift” or a description of a significant memory that involves someone important in their lives. The students would then share the selected memory with the same important person, someone close to that important person, or with a larger radio audience. The assignment should follow the format of 300-350 words and a 2-minute recording with optional sound or music. The instructors would grade based on how ready the recording is for broadcast, including if students used strong descriptive words, provided concrete imagery, or produced clear readings and recordings. For more information on the “Audio Gift” assignment, please see the Teaching Writing with Radio article by Sarah Levine.
Use Case 4: Guest speakers and extended conversations
Podcasts can serve as an alternative to pre-recorded guest interviews or lectures. Instructors might also invite students to bring in guest speakers to incorporate external voices across networks to share new perspectives. Remote interviewing apps and low latency technologies like Zoom allow for rapid and scalable interviews at a distance. See more about remote interview technologies here.
In this case, there are two advantages to using podcasts instead of pre-recorded videos. First, guest interviews or lectures recorded as podcasts can be more engaging and intimate as the medium lends itself well to informal exchanges or fireside chats. Second, utilizing asynchronous podcast guest lectures and interviews can extend learning and build community beyond the classroom boundaries while not burdening synchronous class time.
What does this look like outside of the classroom?
While podcasts can be a useful tool for increasing engagement and knowledge sharing within the classroom, they can also be an innovative way to build community and continue the spirit of knowledge sharing among departments or professional organizations. Below are several use cases demonstrating how to utilize podcasts to share recent happenings or research within an organization (Use Case 1), provide informal training to members (Use Case 2), or connect typically disparate groups (Use Case 3).
Use case 1: Sharing new research or conversations
Podcasts can be a more approachable way of updating members of new research or main event takeaways as compared to school- or organization-wide emails. For example, the Service Learning and Experiential Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association has a weekly podcast that gives an engaging, deeper dive into new research projects of its scholars. Another option could be creating a regularly scheduled, “bird’s eye view” podcast in the style of NPR News, during which scholars share short, ~5-minute synopses of their work or summaries of recent academic gatherings.
If you would like to see an example of how you can use podcasts to share new research or conversations, check out Teaching to Meet the Moment, the CSET podcast series co-produced by GSE IT on connecting with student well-being.
Use case 2: Providing informal training to members
Podcasts can be an innovative opportunity for you to provide mentorship or skills training to members of a department or professional organization. Want to learn more about different approaches to coding in qualitative research? Want to learn about the potential benefits of Natural Language Processing? Want to learn about different approaches to doctoral advising? These topics, although complex, are granular enough that they can be discussed by one expert – or a panel of experts – in the span of an hour-long podcast. The beauty of the podcast is that it provides opportunities for members to access educational resources without having to look at a screen or be confined to one space. The Cult of Pedagogy is one example of how educator networks are providing skills training and professional development for other educators through podcasts.
Use case 3: Building bridges within an organization
Many professional organizations or schools can be siloed into sub-groups that may not interact with one another often (e.g., Special Interest Groups, departments, or units). Podcasts are a small yet intentional way to increase and model communication between these disparate groups, building community within the organization as a result. For example, scholars from different SIGs or departments could join on a podcast to discuss different approaches to a broad issue in education or research. Many scholarly organizations on foreign affairs, such as the European Parliamentary Research Service, have implemented podcasts to this effect.
For those interested in pursuing radio production more fully, check out Generation PRX, a network for connecting teachers and makers of radio, a resource hub for those who have questions about student-made radio, and a gateway to the Public Radio Exchange (PRX.org).
Stanford School’s In
Five Stanford Podcasts to Wake Your Brain
Stanford Innovation Lab Podcasts
eCorner Stanford Podcasts |
Have you come across people with eyes of two different colours? As per research, six out of every thousand people have this interesting trait called Heterochromia (Source). In heterochromia, the iris of the eye is partly (or completely) multicoloured. For example, one eye is brown and the other eye is blue. So what leads to heterochromia? A pigment called melanin gives colour to the iris. In some cases, heterochromia is caused by the variation in the distribution or delivery of this pigment.
In major cases, heterochromia is genetic. In rare scenarios, heterochromia can occur due to injury or it can act as a symptom of some other medical condition. Let’s look at the major causes of heterochromia along with techniques to address this eye ailment in detail.
Causes of Heterochromia
If a child is born with heterochromia then it is referred to as congenital heterochromia. In most cases of congenital heterochromia, the child does not experience any major pain.
Sometimes causes of heterochromia can be underlying conditions like:
- Von Recklinghausen disease
- Benign heterochromia
- Bourneville disease
- Parry-Romberg syndrome
- Horner’s syndrome
- Sturge Weber syndrome
- Bloch-Sulzberger syndrome
If the eye colour changes as an adult (or after infanthood), it is called Acquired Heterochromia. Acquired heterochromia can occur due to the following reasons:
- Eye injury
- Swelling in the eye
- Bleeding of the blood vessels in the eye
- Glaucoma or side-effects of its medication
- Previous eye surgeries
- Diabetes mellitus
- Eye cancer
Types of Heterochromia
Based on the distribution of melanin pigment in the iris, there are three types of heterochromia:
Complete heterochromia occurs when both eyes have completely different colours. For example, one eye is brown and the other is green.
When heterochromia is incomplete (i.e. segmental or central) it is termed as Heterochromia Iridis. Heterochromia Iridis causes only a part of the iris to be of a different colour.
In segmental heterochromia, a pie-shaped part of the iris is differently coloured. It can occur either in one or both eyes.
Central heterochromia is the most common type of heterochromia. In this type, the iris of both eyes are almost of the same colour and a ring is formed around the pupil. For example: the eyes are hazel with a golden ring around the center.
Treatments for Heterochromia
Congenital heterochromia or heterochromia by birth usually doesn’t need any treatment. If heterochromia is acquired or caused by an underlying illness or injury, the root cause has to be treated.
In case of a sudden change in the eye colour, you should immediately consult an ophthalmologist.
How Centre for Sight can help?
Centre for Sight provides specialized eye care, with highly specialised eye experts and state-of-the-art eye treatment technology. We have experts who can conduct thorough diagnosis of different types of heterochromia and provide honest clinical opinion for the best treatment.Article: Heterochromia: The Mystery Behind Different-Colored Eyes
Author: CFS Editorial Team | Feb 22, 2021 | UPDATED 01:20 IST
*The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of Centre for Sight. |
Throughout the book, we use a constant-width typeface to highlight any literal element of the HTML standard, and tags and attributes. We always use lowercase letters for HTML tags. (Although the language standard is case-insensitive with regard to tag and attribute names, this isn't so for other elements like source filenames, so be careful.) We use italic to indicate new concepts when they are defined and those elements you need to supply when creating your own documents, such as tag attributes or user-defined strings.
We discuss elements of the language throughout the book, but you'll find each one covered in depth (some might say nauseating detail) in a shorthand, quick-reference definition box that looks like the box on the following page.
The first line of the box contains the element name, followed by a brief description of its function. Next, we list the various attributes, if any, of the element: those things that you may or must specify as part of the element.
We use the following symbols to identify tags and attributes that are not in the HTML 3.2 standard (the last official version), but are additions to the language:
Netscape Navigator extension to the standard
Internet Explorer extension to the standard
The description also includes the ending tag, if any, for the tag, along with a general indication if the end tag may be safely omitted in general use.
"Contains" names the rule in the HTML grammar that defines the elements to be placed within this tag. Similarly, "Used in" lists those rules that allow this tag as part of their content. These rules are defined in Appendix A, HTML Grammar.
Finally, HTML is a fairly "intertwined" language: You will occasionally use elements in different ways depending on context, and many elements share identical attributes. Wherever possible, we place a cross-reference in the text that leads you to a related discussion elsewhere in the book. These cross-references, like the one at the end of this paragraph, serve as a crude paper model of hypertext documentation, one that would be replaced with a true hypertext link should this book be delivered in an electronic format. [the section called "The Syntax of a Tag"]
We encourage you to follow these references whenever possible. Often, we'll only cover an attribute briefly and expect you to jump to the cross-reference for a more detailed discussion. In other cases, following the link will take you to alternative uses of the element under discussion, or to style and usage suggestions that relate to the current element. |
Slavery Amendment Law and Legal Definition
Slavery amendment is an amendment to the U.S. constitution that formally abolished slavery system in the U.S. This clause still continues to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for a crime. This amendment is officially known as the thirteenth amendment to the constitution. The thirteenth amendment was ratified in 1865. This amendment is considered as the first reconstruction amendment. The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution reads as:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction”. |
Most children are fascinated by birds, and one species they might be most familiar with is the dove. The mourning dove is found in all states except for Alaska and Hawaii. Doves and pigeons both belong to the Columbidae family, and the terms are often used interchangeably. Use these familiar birds to teach your students about structural and behavioral adaptations in animals.
Food and Drink
Doves adapt to fit their habitats, and that includes how they eat and drink. The white-winged dove is found throughout the southern part of the United States, but most live primarily in the hot, desert Southwest. White-winged doves have adapted to their hot summer homes by developing the ability to fly up to 25 miles if needed to find water, which is often scarce in the desert. If the doves still can't find a good source of water, they use their beaks to drink nectar from the fruit of the saguaro cactus. The mourning dove has developed the ability to drink only once per day, which allows it to thrive almost anywhere and has contributed to its huge populations and range. Rock doves -- which are also called urban or domestic pigeons -- have adapted so well to life in big cities that they often depend on handouts for food.
Habitats and Nesting
Humans often develop land that once belonged to birds and animals. Some doves have adapted to the loss of their habitats by learning how to live in new places. White-winged doves prefer to nest in desert brush, but sometimes brush is hard to find due to people cutting it down. So, the doves have adapted and learned to nest in citrus trees instead, and their population has grown dramatically. Inca doves also have adapted to urban living and often choose to live near people. Rock doves have adapted to city life so well that they often nest on buildings, sometimes blocking vents.
Sciencing Video Vault
Migration and Flight
Doves that live in the southern parts of the United States do not usually migrate. Some that live in colder states do migrate south two times a year. But others have adapted to cold temperatures and stay put during the winter months. Rock doves are one type of dove that does not migrate. One way they adapt to winter conditions is to survive on city trash rather than seeds. They also huddle in groups to keep warm. Although they don't migrate, rock doves can find their way back to their nests, however, even if they are removed for long distances. Scientists believe that they adapted this ability to find their own nests due to the large populations of doves that build similar-looking nests.
Mating and Reproduction
Doves tend to build flimsy nests. Ground doves build nests on the ground, which are often disturbed by humans. Most other doves build their nests in shrubs or higher up in trees, but their nests aren't necessarily any safer. Dove nests are notoriously shabby, and eggs or young birds can fall out. To make up for this, doves have adapted to nest and produce eggs more frequently than other birds, raising two or three broods per nesting season. They will also often re-nest immediately if they lose their young. |
What to do with this activity?
Children today are more involved in issues to do with our environment and we as parents should encourage that. After all, this is the world they are going to inherit from us. The World Wildlife Fund recently published a report saying that "humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970". We know that nature is very complex, and that every part of it is interlinked. If one part of nature fails, it has consquences for other parts of nature. The more diversity there is in nature, the more successful it becomes and that benefits everyone. We should value even the smallest and most insignificant seeming species of plant, animal, bird or insect.
Find out more about why biodiversity is so important with this video on TedEd by Kim Preshoff.
Here's a list of things you can do to encourage biodiversity where you are.
Children gain confidence in speaking through demonstrating their knowledge to others. Chatting and listening to your child will help build their communication skills. Talking about words and their meaning in everyday life will also help build your child’s vocabulary – and your own!
Funny stories are interesting and a good excuse to get your child talking. At mealtimes, each family member could tell something interesting or something funny that happened during the day. Watching TV together can also provide a good opportunity for chat and to discuss what you are watching. Check if your child understands different things they hear and encourage your child to teach you new words and things they have learnt.
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butterfly life cycle
Transcript of butterfly life cycle
Chelsea Lewis Metamorphosis Life Cycle of a Butterfly The egg is a tiny, round, oval, or cylindrical object, usually with fine ribs and other microscopic structures. The female attaches the egg to leaves, stems, or other objects, usually on or near the intended caterpillar food. 1. Egg The caterpillar (or larva) is the long, worm-like stage of the butterfly or moth. It often has an interesting pattern of stripes or patches, and it may have spine-like hairs. It is the feeding and growth stage. As it grows, it sheds its skin four or more times so as to enclose its rapidly growing body. 2. Caterpillar (Larva) The chrysalis (or pupa) is the transformation stage within which the caterpillar tissues are broken down and the adult insect's structures are formed. The chrysalis of most species is brown or green and blends into the background. Many species overwinter in this stage. 3. Chrysalis (Pupa) -Metamorphosis
-Symmetry Vocabulary Words: The adult is colorful butterfly or moth usually seen. It is the reproductive and mobile stage for the species. The adults undergo courtship, mating, and egg-laying. The adult butterfly or moth is also the stage that migrates or colonizes new habitats. The butterfly pictured here is a Monarch, which is fairly large in size. 4. Butterfly (Adult) Activity/Guided Practice Take one of each kind of macaroni and create the life cycle of a butterfly. Make arrows to represent cycle. Label each part! Anticipatory Set |
The Treaty on Open Skies allows for states party to the treaty to conduct unarmed observation flights over the territory of other states to foster inter-military transparency and cooperation. The United States, Canada, and 22 European countries including Russia signed the treaty in Helsinki on March 24, 1992. The United States Senate ratified the treaty on November 3, 1993, and it entered into force on January 1, 2002. Today 34 states are members of the Treaty on Open Skies.
The concept for the agreement was originally suggested by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955. Believing that increased transparency between the United States and Soviet Union would reduce the risk of direct conflict between the two superpowers, he proposed cooperative aerial observation flights. Although this proposal was unpalatable to Moscow at the time, the glasnost-era Soviet Union under General Secretary Gorbachev, and later the Russian Federation, became more amenable when George H.W. Bush revived the idea in 1989.
Why it Matters
The Treaty on Open Skies increases transparency, communication, and cooperation between its members by allowing states to use unarmed aircraft to conduct observational flights over the territory of other states parties. In theory, increased openness between militaries will reduce tensions between states and limit the probability of conflict. In addition, the Treaty on Open Skies provides additional means of verifying states’ compliance with other arms control agreements.
What the Treaty Does
States Parties to the Treaty on Open Skies are assigned “passive” and “active” flight quotas, which are based loosely on the size of their territory. A state’s passive quota is the number of flights that it is required to allow over its territory, and its active quota is the number of flights it may conduct over the territory of other states. Each state’s passive and active quotas are equal. A single state may not conduct more than half of the flights another state is required to accept. For example, Spain has a flight quota of 4, so no single state can conduct more than 2 flights over Spain.
Observation flights are allowed over the entirety of a host state’s territory. An observing state must provide at least 72-hours’ notice of its plans to conduct an overflight. The observing party is required to provide a mission plan to the state it will fly over. The host state may propose changes to the flight plan for safety reasons, but may not restrict access to territory for any other reason. The mission must be completed within 96 hours of the observing party’s arrival.
The treaty regulates the types of sensors that may be used on observational flights. The technology used on Open Skies flights has a maximum resolution of 30 centimeters, which is less detailed than commercially available 25 centimeter resolution satellite imagery. A Russian Open Skies aircraft (the An-30) was certified to use digital technology in 2014, and most states are beginning to transition from film to digital technology on observation flights. Modernization largely reflects a transition to digital film, and does not introduce additional capabilities. In order to incorporate new technology on its flights, a state must have it certified by the Open Skies Consultative Commission and it must be commercially available to all states.
The Open Skies Consultative Commission (OSCC) meets monthly at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) headquarters in Vienna. The Commission is charged with responding to questions about the implementation of the treaty, and resolving concerns about compliance. The first treaty review conference was held three years after the document entered into force, and subsequent conferences are conducted every five years.
Concerns about Compliance
In 2016, Russia submitted a request to equip its Tu-154 observation aircraft with digital electro-optical sensors. Some argued that this technology would give the Russian Federation an advantage over other states by allowing it to gather more precise intelligence. Others have argued that the move towards digital technology is inevitable, and that the benefit to Russia is minimal considering that all states party to the treaty can purchase the data collected on overflights. On June 28, 2016 the United States authorized a Russian jet equipped with the technology to conduct an overflight.
Russia has also been accused of violating the spirit of the Treaty on Open Skies by restricting access to some sections of its territory. These limits include the denial of overflights over Chechnya or within 10 kilometers of its southern border with Georgia, a limitation on the maximum distances of flights over Kaliningrad, and altitude restrictions over Moscow.
Sources: Congressional Research Service, Defense One, U.S. State Department, Federation of American Scientists, Brookings Institution, Organization for Security Co-operation in Europe, CBS News, Radio Free Europe |
A wheel is a circular component that is intended to rotate on an axle bearing. The wheel is one of the key components of the wheel and axle which is one of the six simple machines. Wheels, in conjunction with axles, allow heavy objects to be moved easily facilitating movement or transportation while supporting a load, or performing labor in machines. Wheels are also used for other purposes, such as a ship’s wheel, steering wheel, potter’s wheel and flywheel.
Common examples are found in transport applications. A wheel greatly reduces friction by facilitating motion by rolling together with the use of axles. In order for wheels to rotate, a moment needs to be applied to the wheel about its axis, either by way of gravity or by the application of another external force or torque. Using the wheel, Sumerians invented a contraption that spins clay as a potter shapes it into the desired object.
The English word wheel comes from the Old English word hweol, hweogol, from Proto-Germanic *hwehwlan, *hwegwlan, from Proto-Indo-European *kwekwlo-, an extended form of the root *kwel- “to revolve, move around”. Cognates within Indo-European include Icelandic hjól “wheel, tyre”, Greek κύκλος kúklos, and Sanskrit chakra, the latter two both meaning “circle” or “wheel”.
The invention of the wheel falls into the late Neolithic, and may be seen in conjunction with other technological advances that gave rise to the early Bronze Age. This implies the passage of several wheel-less millennia even after the invention of agriculture and of pottery, during the Aceramic Neolithic.
- 4500–3300 BCE: Copper Age, invention of the potter’s wheel; earliest wooden wheels (disks with a hole for the axle); earliest wheeled vehicles, domestication of the horse
- 3300–2200 BCE: Early Bronze Age
- 2200–1550 BCE: Middle Bronze Age, invention of the spoked wheel and the chariot
The Halaf culture of 6500–5100 BCE is sometimes credited with the earliest depiction of a wheeled vehicle, but this is doubtful as there is no evidence of Halafians using either wheeled vehicles or even pottery wheels.
Precursors of wheels, known as “tournettes” or “slow wheels”, were known in the Middle East by the 5th millennium BCE (one of the earliest examples was discovered at Tepe Pardis, Iran, and dated to 5200–4700 BCE). These were made of stone or clay and secured to the ground with a peg in the center, but required significant effort to turn. True (freely-spinning) potter’s wheels were apparently in use in Mesopotamia by 3500 BCE and possibly as early as 4000 BCE, and the oldest surviving example, which was found in Ur (modern day Iraq), dates to approximately 3100 BCE.
The first evidence of wheeled vehicles appears in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (Sumerian civilization), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Eastern Europe (Cucuteni-Trypillian culture), so the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle is still unsolved.
The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon — four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BCE clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.
The oldest securely dated real wheel-axle combination, that from Stare Gmajne near Ljubljana in Slovenia (Ljubljana Marshes Wooden Wheel) is now dated within two standard deviations to 3340–3030 BCE, the axle to 3360–3045 BCE.
Two types of early Neolithic European wheel and axle are known; a circumalpine type of wagon construction (the wheel and axle rotate together, as in Ljubljana Marshes Wheel), and that of the Baden culture in Hungary (axle does not rotate). They both are dated to c. 3200–3000 BCE.
In China, the wheel was certainly present with the adoption of the chariot in c. 1200 BCE, although Barbieri-Low argues for earlier Chinese wheeled vehicles, c. 2000 BC.
In Britain, a large wooden wheel, measuring about 1 m (3.3 ft) in diameter, was uncovered at the Must Farm site in East Anglia in 2016. The specimen, dating from 1,100–800 years BCE, represents the most complete and earliest of its type found in Britain. The wheel’s hub is also present. A horse’s spine found nearby suggests the wheel may have been part of a horse-drawn cart. The wheel was found in a settlement built on stilts over wetland, indicating that the settlement had some sort of link to dry land.
Although large-scale use of wheels did not occur in the Americas prior to European contact, numerous small wheeled artifacts, identified as children’s toys, have been found in Mexican archeological sites, some dating to about 1500 BC. It is thought that the primary obstacle to large-scale development of the wheel in the Americas was the absence of domesticated large animals which could be used to pull wheeled carriages. The closest relative of cattle present in Americas in pre-Columbian times, the American Bison, is difficult to domesticate and was never domesticated by Native Americans; several horse species existed until about 12,000 years ago, but ultimately became extinct.The only large animal that was domesticated in the Western hemisphere, the llama, did not spread far beyond the Andes by the time of the arrival of Columbus.
Nubians from after about 400 BCE used wheels for spinning pottery and as water wheels. It is thought that Nubian waterwheels may have been ox-driven. It is also known that Nubians used horse-drawn chariots imported from Egypt.
The wheel was barely used, with the exception of Ethiopia and Somalia, in Sub-Saharan Africa well into the 19th century but this changed with the arrival of the Europeans.
Early wheels were simple wooden disks with a hole for the axle. Some of the earliest wheels were made from horizontal slices of tree trunks. Because of the uneven structure of wood, a wheel made from a horizontal slice of a tree trunk will tend to be inferior to one made from rounded pieces of longitudinal boards.
The spoked wheel was invented more recently, and allowed the construction of lighter and swifter vehicles. In the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley and Northwestern India, toy-cart wheels made of clay with lines which have been interpreted as spokes painted or in relief as well as a symbol interpreted as a spoked wheel in the script of the seals that date from the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE have been found. The earliest known examples of wooden spoked wheels are in the context of the Andronovo culture, dating to c. 2000 BCE. Soon after this, horse cultures of the Caucasus region used horse-drawn spoked-wheel war chariots for the greater part of three centuries. They moved deep into the Greek peninsula where they joined with the existing Mediterranean peoples to give rise, eventually, to classical Greece after the breaking of Minoan dominance and consolidations led by pre-classical Sparta and Athens. Celtic chariots introduced an iron rim around the wheel in the 1st millennium BCE.
The spoked wheel was in continued use without major modification until the 1870s, when wire-spoked wheels and pneumatic tires were invented. The wire spokes are under tension, not compression, making it possible for the wheel to be both stiff and light. Early radially-spoked wire wheels gave rise to tangentially-spoked wire wheels, which were widely used on cars into the late 20th century. Cast alloy wheels are now more commonly used; forged alloy wheels are used when weight is critical.
The invention of the wheel has also been important for technology in general, important applications including the water wheel, the cogwheel (see also antikythera mechanism), the spinning wheel, and the astrolabe or torquetum. More modern descendants of the wheel include the propeller, the jet engine, the flywheel (gyroscope) and the turbine.
Mechanics and function
The low resistance to motion (compared to dragging) is explained as follows (refer to friction):
- the normal force at the sliding interface is the same.
- the sliding distance is reduced for a given distance of travel.
- the coefficient of friction at the interface is usually lower.
Bearings are used to help reduce friction at the interface. In the simplest and oldest case the bearing is just a round hole through which the axle passes (a “plain bearing“).
- If a 100 kg object is dragged for 10 m along a surface with the coefficient of friction μ = 0.5, the normal force is 981 N and the work done (required energy) is (work=force x distance) 981 × 0.5 × 10 = 4905 joules.
- Now give the object 4 wheels. The normal force between the 4 wheels and axles is the same (in total) 981 N. Assume, for wood, μ = 0.25, and say the wheel diameter is 1000 mm and axle diameter is 50 mm. So while the object still moves 10 m the sliding frictional surfaces only slide over each other a distance of 0.5 m. The work done is 981 × 0.25 × 0.5 = 123 joules; the work done has reduced to 1/40 of that of dragging.
Additional energy is lost from the wheel-to-road interface. This is termed rolling resistance which is predominantly a deformation loss. This energy is also lowered by the use of a wheel (in comparison to dragging) because the net force on the contact point between the road and the wheel is almost perpendicular to the ground, and hence, generates an almost zero net work. This depends on the nature of the ground, of the material of the wheel, its inflation in the case of a tire, the net torque exerted by the eventual engine, and many other factors.
A wheel can also offer advantages in traversing irregular surfaces if the wheel radius is sufficiently large compared to the irregularities.
The wheel alone is not a machine, but when attached to an axle in conjunction with bearing, it forms the wheel and axle, one of the simple machines. A driven wheel is an example of a wheel and axle. Wheels pre-date driven wheels by about 6000 years, themselves an evolution of using round logs as rollers to move a heavy load—a practice going back in pre-history so far that it has not been dated.
The rim is the “outer edge of a wheel, holding the tire.” It makes up the outer circular design of the wheel on which the inside edge of the tire is mounted on vehicles such as automobiles. For example, on a bicycle wheel the rim is a large hoop attached to the outer ends of the spokes of the wheel that holds the tire and tube.
In the 1st millennium BCE an iron rim was introduced around the wooden wheels of chariots.
The hub is the center of the wheel, and typically houses a bearing, and is where the spokes meet.
A hubless wheel (also known as a rim-rider or centerless wheel) is a type of wheel with no center hub. More specifically, the hub is actually almost as big as the wheel itself. The axle is hollow, following the wheel at very close tolerances.
A spoke is one of some number of rods radiating from the center of a wheel (the hub where the axle connects), connecting the hub with the round traction surface. The term originally referred to portions of a log which had been split lengthwise into four or six sections. The radial members of a wagon wheel were made by carving a spoke (from a log) into their finished shape. A spokeshave is a tool originally developed for this purpose. Eventually, the term spoke was more commonly applied to the finished product of the wheelwright‘s work, than to the materials used.
The rims of wire wheels (or “wire spoked wheels”) are connected to their hubs by wire spokes. Although these wires are generally stiffer than a typical wire rope, they function mechanically the same as tensioned flexible wires, keeping the rim true while supporting applied loads.
Wire wheels are used on most bicycles and still used on many motorcycles. They were invented by aeronautical engineer George Cayley and first used in bicycles by James Starley. A process of assembling wire wheels is described as wheelbuilding.
A tire (in American English and Canadian English) or tyre (in some Commonwealth Nations such as UK, India, South Africa and Australia) is a ring-shaped covering that fits around a wheel rim to protect it and enable better vehicle performance by providing a flexible cushion that absorbs shock while keeping the wheel in close contact with the ground. The word itself may be derived from the word “tie,” which refers to the outer steel ring part of a wooden cart wheel that ties the wood segments together (see Etymology below).
The fundamental materials of modern tires are synthetic rubber, natural rubber, fabric and wire, along with other compound chemicals. They consist of a tread and a body. The tread provides traction while the body ensures support. Before rubber was invented, the first versions of tires were simply bands of metal that fitted around wooden wheels to prevent wear and tear. Today, the vast majority of tires are pneumaticinflatable structures, comprising a doughnut-shaped body of cords and wires encased in rubber and generally filled with compressed air to form an inflatable cushion. Pneumatic tires are used on many types of vehicles, such as cars, bicycles, motorcycles, trucks, earthmovers, and aircraft.
Patenting the wheel
To the 21st century observer, a wheel appears to be a fairly simple thing, but there have been many attempts to improve, and patent the wheel.
- Joseph Ledwinka, patent US808765 of 1906
- Manuel Herrera de Hora, patent US836578 of 1906
- Louis Mékarski, patent GB190702860 of 1907
- William Morris, patent US1159786 of 1915
In many cases, the idea was to create a resilient wheel. This function is now provided by what’s known as the pneumatic tyre.
While wheels are very widely used for ground transport, there are alternatives, some of which are suitable for terrain where wheels are ineffective. Alternative methods for ground transport without wheels include:
- Electromagnetic maglev trains
- Sled or travois
- A walking machine
- Caterpillar tracks (although it is still operated by wheels)
- Pedrail wheels, using aspects of both wheel and caterpillar track
- Spheres, as used by Dyson vacuum cleaners and hamster balls
- Screw-propelled vehicle
A recent invention is the so-called Liddiard Wheel, which claims to be a superior omnidirectional wheel.
The wheel has also become a strong cultural and spiritual metaphor for a cycle or regular repetition (see chakra, reincarnation, Yin and Yang among others). As such and because of the difficult terrain, wheeled vehicles were forbidden in old Tibet. The wheel in ancient China is seen as a symbol of health and strength and utilized by some villages as a tool to predict future health and success. The diameter of the wheel is indicator of one’s future health.
The winged wheel is a symbol of progress, seen in many contexts including the coat of arms of Panama, the logo of the Ohio State Highway Patrol and the State Railway of Thailand. The wheel is also the prominent figure on the flag of India. The wheel in this case represents law (dharma). It also appears in the flag of the Romani people, hinting to their nomadic history and their Indian origins.
The introduction of spoked (chariot) wheels in the Middle Bronze Age appears to have carried somewhat of a prestige. The sun cross appears to have a significance in Bronze Age religion, replacing the earlier concept of a Solar barge with the more ‘modern’ and technologically advanced solar chariot. The wheel was also a solar symbol for the Ancient Egyptians.
- “wheel”. Online Etymology Dictionary.
- “American Heritage Dictionary Entry: wheel”. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
- V. Gordon Childe (1928). New Light on the Most Ancient East. p. 110.
- D. T. Potts (2012). A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. p. 285.
- Moorey, Peter Roger Stuart (1999) . Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The Archaeological Evidence. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. p. 146. ISBN 9781575060422.
- Anthony, David A. (2007). The horse, the wheel, and language: how Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. p. 67. ISBN 0-691-05887-3.
- Velušček, A.; Čufar, K. and Zupančič, M. (2009) “Prazgodovinsko leseno kolo z osjo s kolišča Stare gmajne na Ljubljanskem barju”, pp. 197–222 in A. Velušček (ed.). Koliščarska naselbina Stare gmajne in njen as. Ljubljansko barje v 2. polovici 4. tisočletja pr. Kr. Opera Instituti Archaeologici Sloveniae 16. Ljubljana.
- Fowler, Chris; Harding, Jan and Hofmann, Daniela (eds.) (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe. OUP Oxford. ISBN 0191666882. p. 109.
- Dyer, Gwynne, War: the new edition, p. 159: Vintage Canada Edition, Randomhouse of Canada, Toronto, ON
- Barbieri-Low, Anthony (February 2000) “Wheeled Vehicles in the Chinese Bronze Age (c. 2000-741 B.C.)”, Sino-Platonic Papers
- “Bronze Age wheel at ‘British Pompeii’ Must Farm an ‘unprecedented find'”. BBC. Retrieved 2016-02-18.
- Ekholm, Gordon F (April 1946). “Wheeled Toys in Mexico”. American Antiquity. 11 (4): 222–228. JSTOR 275722.
- Diamond, Jared (1999). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton. p. 237. ISBN 978-0-393-31755-8.
- Singer, Ben (May 2005). A brief history of the horse in America. Canadian Geographic Magazine. Archived from the original on 19 August 2014.
- “CRAFTS – Uncovering Treasures of Ancient Nubia – NYTimes.com”. 27 February 1994.
- “What the Nubians Ate”. Discover Magazine.
- Fage, J. D.; Oliver, Roland Anthony (1975). The Cambridge History of Africa. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521215923.
- Chaves, Isaías; Engerman, Stanley L.; Robinson, James A. (2012). Reinventing the Wheel: The Economic Benefits of Wheeled Transportation in Early Colonial British West Africa (PDF). Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. p. 1. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 January 2014. Retrieved 5 January 2014.
One of the great technological puzzles of Sub-Saharan African economic history is that wheeled transportation was barely used prior to the colonial period. Instead, head porterage was the main method of transportation.
- Law, Robin C. (1980). “Wheeled Transportation in Pre-Colonial West Africa”. Africa. 50: 249–62. doi:10.2307/1159117.
- Ghosh, A. (1989). An Encyclopedia of Indian Archaeology. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. p.337; Rao, L.S. (2005–06). The Harappan Spoked Wheels Rattled Down the Streets of Bhirrana, District Fatehabad, Haryana. “Puratattva” 36. pp.59–67.
- See e.g. Molded tablet and Bull seal, Harappa.
- bookrags.com – Wheel and axle
- Jewel, Elizabeth (2006). The Pocket Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus. Oxford University Press. p. 722. ISBN 978-0-19-530715-3. Retrieved 2012-01-04.
- “Wheel Structure. Original document: US808765 (A) ― 1906-01-02”. Espacenet.
- “Vehicle – Wheel. Original document: US836578 (A) ― 1906-11-20”. Espacenet.
- “Improvements in Spring Wheels for Vehicles. Original document: GB190702860 (A) ― 1907-07-18”. Espacenet.
- “Resilient Wheel. Original document: US1159786 (A) ― 1915-11-09”. Espacenet.
- Kershaw, Jenai (March 29, 2016). “London inventor of new omni-directional wheels says his prototype is better than existing products”. London Free Press. Retrieved April 24,2016.
- “Hot Wheels”. CTV London. Retrieved April 24, 2016.
- Hall, Adelaide S. (2005). A Glossary of Important Symbols in Their Hebrew: Pagan and Christian Forms. p. 56. ISBN 9781596055933. |
We’ve all heard that coral reefs are under threat from climate change. We’ve seen the devastating photos of coral bleaching: rising ocean temperatures cause these catastrophic events. As if a warming ocean wasn’t enough, the corals are facing another hazard. Over the last 200 years, humans have released about two trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; about of a quarter of that has entered the ocean. All this carbon dioxide is slowly making the ocean more acidic – called ocean acidification.
Ocean acidification is hurting healthy coral reefs. Coral skeletons are made of aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate. When the seawater is acidic, there is less calcium carbonate in it so the corals have a harder time making their skeletons. The skeletons are thinner and less dense, making them more vulnerable to breaking. Ocean acidification also increases the rates of erosion and dissolving. For a coral reef to exist, the corals need to build their skeletons faster than they are being dissolved.
Corals aren’t the only animals feeling the affects of changing ocean chemistry. Some other animals that use calcium carbonate to build shells and skeletons also face challenges. Pteropods, free-swimming sea snails called sea butterflies, are often the dominant zooplankton at the base the food web in arctic and subarctic waters. These sea butterflies may be unable to maintain shells in waters with less available calcium carbonate. Under controlled conditions in the lab, researchers find that pteropods don’t grow perfect shells when they’re in elevated carbon dioxide. Even more alarming, scientists working in the
Arctic and Antarctic, and also along the Pacific coast, have found pteropod shells that are pitted and partially dissolved in ocean waters.
Shellfish in our food web are also affected by ocean acidification. Oysters, scallops and other shellfish need calcium carbonate to build their shells. With increasing acidity, the shells are thinner, growth is slower and death rates rise. Oyster farmers in the Pacific Northwest are already seeing problems with shell growth in young oysters.
Some marine animals can tolerate acidification more than others. Not all marine animals are negatively affected by ocean acidification: over time some may be able to adapt. Echinoderms—sea stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins – seem to be resilient, and a few may even benefit from increasing acidification based on laboratory experiments. Crustaceans –shrimp, crab and lobsters –appear to be relatively tolerant to ocean acidification and some may even increase in numbers. And some jellies are resilient to ocean acidification and may even benefit. |
Dry eye syndrome is a common condition that occurs when the tear ducts located at the top of the eyelids don’t secrete enough tears and fatty substances to provide the eye with sufficient moisture. The phenomenon is so common that it affects one in three people over the age of 65 and may be accompanied by distressing and painful symptoms. This problem, which may result from environmental conditions or medical condition, can be treated in both cases, and although the syndrome is not defined as a serious medical condition, it may cause eye scarring in extreme cases. The information below will help you understand if you’re suffering from the development of dry eye syndrome and how you can prevent and treat the problem.
What is dry eye syndrome?
Dry eye syndrome is a condition that can be caused by a variety of medical problems that cause dryness and irritation in the eyes. This may be painful, accompanied by a host of disturbing symptoms such as the false sensation of entry of a foreign object, itching, redness, accumulation of mucus in the eye or around the eyelid, sensitivity to light, chronic eye fatigue, blurry vision, and inflammation. The reasons for the development of this phenomenon may be due to damage to the makeup of the tears that protect our eyes, as a result of reducing the number of tears produced in the glands or from tears leaving the surface of the eye too quickly. Damage to tear quality and the amount produced are caused by various causes, including aging, the use of certain medications, various medical conditions, environmental conditions, use of contact lenses and the development of allergies.
Although we’re used to thinking of tears as something that is secreted from our eyes mainly when we are sad or excited, tears actually flood our eyes every time we blink. Tears are a fluid consisting mainly of water and salt, whose main function is to moisturize the eyes and prevent dehydration. Other functions include removing dirt, bacteria, pollutants and foreign bodies that penetrate the eye, creating a smooth corneal surface, and more. Tears are made up of three parts: an outer fatty layer that prevents rapid evaporation of the liquid, water, and an inner mucus layer that helps spread tears all over the eye. When there is a problem with the composition or production process of each of these parts, dry eye syndrome is caused.
What are the main environmental causes of dry eye syndrome?
Air pollution and cigarette smoke
One of the common effects on eye health is the environment in which we spend most of our time and air pollution. One of the important things to avoid when we detect signs of dry eye syndrome is cigarette smoke – and it’s important to know that smoke damage exists both for active smokers and for passive smokers. Cigarette smoke not only stimulates the syndrome for those who already have it, but it also increases the risk of developing the syndrome.
Fog, winds, fans, air conditioners, and air
In the days of fog and wind, it is recommended that people who suffer from dry eye syndrome refrain from leaving the house because these weather conditions worsen the symptoms of dry eyes. In general, dryness of the eyes requires avoiding wind or dryness and this includes avoiding exposure to fans, hair dryers, and air conditioners as much as possible. In addition to that, you should make sure to use eye drops before flights, as the compressed air inside the cabin may worsen the sense of dryness and the irritation.
Prolonged sitting in front of screens
Prolonged viewing of screens such as the TV, computer or smartphone screen, and even prolonged reading from a book, can worsen symptoms of dry eyes. This is because our blink frequency decreases when we look at and work in front of screens, and with it the level of tear regeneration and its diffusion on the corneal area decreases. Add to this the fact that we usually work in air-conditioned spaces with low humidity, which causes the evaporation of the moisture layer that protects our eyes. It is important that we take a break from using screens every few hours, step out into the clean air, and get back some of the moisture that our eyes so desperately need.
Outdoor sports and swimming in a pool
For those who engage in strenuous activities on the street or in nature, such as riding a motorcycle or bicycle and swimming in a chlorinated pool, it is important to keep your eyes protected from dust, wind and sand damage and to wear goggles or custom glasses to protect your eyes from environmental damage.
What are the ways to treat dry eye syndrome?
In order to improve the quality of the layer of fat that makes up our tears, it is recommended to place hot compresses on the eyes for a few minutes, and then wash your (closed) eyes with baby shampoo. This will help the fat in the tear glands relax and soften improving the quality of our tears. Be sure to wash all traces of shampoo from your eye to avoid irritation.
Using a humidifier
An important recommendation that people who suffer from dry eye syndrome should adopt is using a humidifier in the home which infuses the air with the missing moisture and humidity. This is especially true during the winter season when the heating systems combined with low humidity make our eyes dry faster. If you don’t have a humidifier, it is recommended to place a bowl of water near your heating device to create more moisture in the air.
Eye drops and ointments to relieve dry eyes
There are quite a few over-the-counter medications on the market that are designed to help dry and irritated eyes and bring about significant, although temporary, relief for the disturbing sensation. These products include eye drops, artificial tears, and various ointments. It is important to note that some of these products contain preservatives that our eyes may respond negatively to. If you experience such a reaction and have to use eye drops more than 4 times a day, consider switching to one without preservatives, usually stored in disposable bottles. Eye ointments are usually designed to provide coverage for the whole eyeball and allow for long-term relief. However, the problem is that they may damage visual acuity during use, so it’s best to use them at night, before bed, and in combination with eye drops during the day
According to a dry eye syndrome study, omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to reduce the symptoms of the disorder, as these acids reduce inflammation in the eye and allow for more and higher quality tears. To consume omega-3 fatty acids, you can take supplements, or combine foods rich in them such as walnuts, flax seed oil, palm oil, soybean oil, chia seeds, fatty fish like salmon, tuna, sardines, and krill.
When should you see a doctor to treat dry eyes?
If your eye care products aren’t giving you relief within a few days, it is highly recommended that you see your eye doctor. Sometimes this indicates a more serious medical problem which is causing the feeling of dryness, and should, therefore, be treated as soon as possible. If you have symptoms such as redness and swelling in the eye, unusual pain, eye injury, fluid coming out of the eye, joint pain accompanied by swelling, hardening of the organs and dry mouth – you should go for an in-depth examination of these symptoms. |
Heart attacks occur when the flow of blood to the heart is blocked. The physicians at Regional Cardiology Associates, P.L.C. are always looking for warning signs that precede heart attacks. Also called myocardial infarctions, heart attacks are usually caused by a buildup of fat or cholesterol in arteries.
During heart attacks, the heart muscle is not receiving enough oxygen and will die if blood flow is not restored quickly. Heart attacks are considered emergency events, and it is crucial to call 911 or seek emergency medical attention if you or someone you know is having a heart attack.
The most common risk factors for heart attacks are:
Heart attacks are usually treated in two stages. The first stage of treatment is to restore blood flow to your heart. The second stage of treatment will involve long-term medical intervention and lifestyle changes. Some heart attacks can be treated with minimal intervention, while some require angioplasty, stents or bypass surgery.
A healthy lifestyle and regular medical care will greatly reduce your chances of having a heart attack in the future.
Heart attacks are generally emergency events, but sometimes symptoms are present leading up the actual event. The symptoms of a heart attack include: |
Not all air pollution contributes to warming our planet. For example, sulfate aerosols, which form from industrial emissions, generally have a significant cooling effect. In some climate models, sulfate and other aerosols offset up to half of the heating from greenhouse gas emissions. This cooling effect occurs both directly, by scattering incoming solar radiation, and indirectly, by affecting cloud properties such as water-droplet size and water content that cause the clouds to reflect more sunlight away from the earth.
Still, the effect of aerosols on clouds remains one of the biggest sources of uncertainty when it comes to predicting future climate. Now, a new paper suggests that these tiny, airborne particles are not cooling the earth as much as climate scientists had previously thought (Nature 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1423-9).
A decrease in the size of water droplets in clouds caused by aerosols, known as the Twomey effect, is known to increase cloud reflectivity, but the effects of the pollution particles on changing water content are less understood. Previous attempts at quantifying cloud water changes triggered by aerosols struggled to disentangle the complexities of clouds. For example, climate scientists have wondered whether changes in aerosol levels directly cause changes in clouds, or whether an external meteorological factor affects both aerosols and clouds separately.
Nicolas Bellouin, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, and colleagues tried to reduce that uncertainty by looking directly at known sources of aerosols—such as industrial plants, wildfires, and ships—and comparing clouds downwind of them with adjacent clouds.
The team used 15 years’ worth of near-infrared imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite, manually identifying more than 2,000 “pollution tracks” from aerosol sources over that time period. Scientists have used this approach previously to study properties of ship tracks, the clouds sometimes generated in the wake of cargo ships. “The track approach is really powerful,” Bellouin says, “because in the same image, we can view both unpolluted and polluted clouds.”
Averaged over the globe, the Twomey effect is estimated to have a negative radiative forcing, meaning it cools the planet, and current climate models predict that changes in cloud water content will result in a cooling effect of a similar magnitude. However, the new study finds that changing cloud water actually leads to a positive radiative forcing, meaning it warms the planet. The net result is that the cooling effect of aerosols on clouds is nearly 25% lower than previously thought.
People have been trying for decades to resolve the uncertainty associated with cloud-aerosol interactions without much success, says Geeta Persad, a research associate with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. This paper, she says, makes a major contribution to the field of climate science by providing a “pretty comprehensive, observationally-based constraint” on the strength of the cloud-aerosol interaction.
One caveat is that clouds with visible pollution tracks make up a relatively small fraction of all clouds, Persad says. However, Bellouin notes, there’s no physical reason why clouds without discernable pollution tracks should behave differently from those with them, and therefore the results can be extrapolated to these other clouds.
Bellouin, who is also a climate modeler, says the next step is to begin to integrate these results into next-generation climate predictions. “It’s clear that some climate models overestimate the cooling by pollution particles,” he says. “The next challenge is to fix the model.”
This story was updated on Aug. 1, 2019, to to correct the description of sulfate aerosols to indicate that they're formed from industrial emissions. |
Horses are non-ruminant herbivores also known as a “hindgut fermenters.”
Their digestive tract is made up of a simple stomach, small intestine and large intestine.
The natural feeding habit of the horse is to eat small amounts of roughages often. Domestication has brought a change to this. Modern management practices of horses incorporate stabling, increased grain-based concentrate consumption, meal feeding and limited access to pasture. This has led to a myriad of problems by undermining the horses’ digestive capabilities.
By understanding the basics of their digestive tract we are better able to make more appropriate feeding and management choices.
The stomach of the horse is small in relation to the rest of the digestive tract and limits the amount of feed that can be consumed at one time. Another limitation to the stomach, compared to other species, is that the horse cannot regurgitate food if they overeat or consume something poisonous. The average-sized horse (1,100lb) has a stomach capacity of approximately four gallons. Once the stomach becomes two-thirds full it begins to empty whether the food has been sufficiently broken down or not.
In the stomach, food is mixed with pepsin (an enzyme to digest proteins) and hydrochloric acid to help break down solid particles. The rate of passage of food through the stomach is highly variable, depending on how the horse is fed. Passage time may be as short as 15 minutes when the horse is consuming a large meal.
The small intestine is made up of the duodenum, jejunum and ileum. It is approximately 70 feet in length and holds up to 11 gallons. Bile from the liver acts here, combined with enzymes from the pancreas and small intestine itself. Horses do not have a gall bladder, so bile flows constantly, an adaptation to a slow but steady supply of food.
After the food has been digested, it is absorbed through the walls of the small intestine and carried off by the blood stream to whatever cells need the nutrients. Nearly 50–70% of carbohydrate digestion and absorption and almost all amino acid absorption occur in the small intestine. It can take as little as 30 to 60 minutes for food to pass through the small intestine.
Horses are very susceptible to colic or death from toxic materials in the feed. Unlike the cow, which has bacteria in the rumen that can detoxify materials before they reach the small intestine, toxic material a horse may consume enters the intestine and is absorbed into the bloodstream before it can be detoxified. Therefore, it is very important not to feed horses moldy or spoiled feeds.
The large intestine is made up of the cecum, large colon, small colon and rectum.
The cecum is a blind sack approximately four feet long the holds up to eight gallons. The cecum is a microbial fermentation vat similar to the rumen in the cow. The microbes break down feed that was not digested in the small intestine, particularly fibrous feeds like hay and pasture. This process can take around seven hours to complete.
The microbes in the cecum produce vitamin K, B-complex vitamins, proteins, and fatty acids. The reason horses must have their diets changed slowly is so the microbes in the cecum are able to modify and adapt to the different chemical structure of new feedstuffs. Too abrupt a change in diet can cause colic, because new materials are not properly digested.
The large colon, small colon, and rectum make up the remainder of the large intestine. The large colon is about 11 feet long and holds up to 20 gallons of semi-liquid matter. Microbial digestion continues and most of the nutrients made through microbial digestion are absorbed here. Due to its many twists and turns, it is a common place for a type of horse colic called an impaction.
The small colon is also approximately 11 feet long, holds about five gallons, is the area where the majority of water is absorbed, and where fecal balls are formed. Food will stay in the large intestine for 35 to 65 hours.
For more information, please visit www.StandleeForage.com. |
HHMI investigators say that stem cells may prove to be better than viruses for delivering corrective genes to tissues throughout the body.
Stem cells may prove to be a better shuttle than viruses for delivering corrective genes to tissues throughout the body, say researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) at Children's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School.
Stem cells are immature cells that have the unique capacity to give rise to populations of mature, functioning cells. Using stem cells derived either from the bone marrow or from specific organs to carry therapeutic genes back to sites of disease might prove advantageous because it may "remodel" genetically defective organs and tissues, allowing them to permanently carry the corrective gene, say HHMI investigators Richard Mulligan and Louis Kunkel of Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, whose laboratories collaborated on this study.
Virus-based gene therapies for muscular dystrophy, for example, must be injected directly into the muscle, and they only correct the altered tissue locally, said Kunkel. "If the virus doesn't reach stem cells, the therapeutic effect is lost when the muscle degenerates naturally. Stem cell therapy has the potential to fundamentally remodel the tissue itself," said Kunkel, an expert on the molecular basis and treatment of muscular dystrophies. More importantly, said Mulligan, "the use of stem cells for transplantation appears to result in the disseminated delivery of cells, a critical requirement for the effective treatment of a disease such as muscular dystrophy, where the afflicted cells are found throughout the body."
In an article in the September 23, 1999, issue of Nature , Mulligan's and Kunkel's laboratories describe the development and testing of their approach in a mouse model of the human disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Like patients with DMD, the mice do not produce the protein dystrophin, the absence of which causes rapid and life-threatening deterioration of muscles.
The researchers first irradiated female mice to eliminate any blood-related, or hematopoietic, stem cells, which are normally found in bone marrow. The scientists then injected into the female mice, dystrophin-positive stem cells isolated from the bone marrow or muscle tissue of male mice.
To their surprise, the scientists found that the injected hematopoietic stem cells and the muscle stem cells were both able to give rise to blood cells and also provided for the engraftment of diseased muscle with healthy muscle cells expressing dystrophin.
While the researchers caution that their results are still preliminary, their findings hint that adults may harbor stem cells from a variety of organs and tissues that might be manipulated to heal genetic defects in organs and tissues throughout the body.
The scientists say, however, that the restorative effects were well below what would be required if the technique were to be used for clinical treatment. But they believe there are ways to improve the method. T
he discovery of similarities in hematopoietic and muscle stem cells also raises important questions about the origin of stem cells and their therapeutic potential, said Mulligan, an expert in the development of gene transfer technology and leader of the gene therapy efforts at Harvard.
"The muscle-derived stem cells might originate from the hematopoietic compartment or they might be present in muscle as a consequence of the natural process of development," said Mulligan. "However, it might make sense for hematopoietic stem cells to communicate with organs and tissues, since they have the capacity to traffic throughout the body," he added. "The hematopoietic system might be able to sense the need for replenishment of cells and organs or tissues," and provide the cells necessary for tissue or organ repair.
Mulligan said that it will be important to compare the properties of the adult stem cells they have isolated to embryonic stem cells, which are known to be able to give rise to a broad range of tissues. Embryonic stem cells are now being studied for use in tissue transplantation
"Perhaps such breadth is not necessary," Mulligan noted. "It might be that different adult stem cell populations will still have the capacity to give rise to cells from the organ in which they originated."
If the existence of organ-specific stem cells is confirmed, and if researchers can determine the cellular signals that control their differentiation, it might be possible to use the cells to genetically "remodel" heart, liver, pancreas or brain tissue, theorize the scientists. And if hematopoietic stem cells can be manipulated to produce organ-specific cells, they may one day prove to be a better source of therapeutic cells than the damaged organs.
Mulligan's and Kunkel's collaborators on the Nature paper were postdoctoral fellows Emanuela Gussoni and Yuko Soneoka, Corinne Strickland, Elizabeth Buzney, Mohamed Khan and Alan Flint. |
The lymphatic system is part of the body's immune system, which is responsible for keeping the body free of disease. The lymph nodes throughout the body are connected by a network of lymph vessels. Lymph is a fluid found within the lymphatic system that contains lymphocytes, infection-fighting white blood cells.
In the nodes, bacteria and other dangerous substances are filtered from lymph before fluids are returned to the bloodstream. Two types of lymphocytes are B-cells and T-cells. B-cells help the immune system by producing antibodies to eliminate infection. T-cells are important in regulating the immune system and in fighting infections.
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is a cancer that develops in the lymphocytes. The primary types of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma are classified according to the lymphocyte that is affected: B-cell lymphoma, which is most common, and T-cell lymphoma.
Cancer of the lymphocytes interferes with the normal immune process, leaving the body unable to fight infections, and allowing bacteria, viruses, and other disease causing agents to overwhelm the body.
Simple infectious agents encountered on an everyday basis that normally would not even be noticed, are now debilitating and in some cases, life-threatening. Because the lymphocytes circulate throughout the lymph system, the cancer can spread to other parts of the body, resulting in other organ function failure.
Symptoms of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma include swollen lymph nodes, fever, night sweats, chills, fatigue, unexplained weight loss, and facial swelling. Non-Hodgkin's lymphomas are described as either being aggressive, growing and spreading quickly with severe symptoms, or as indolent, slow growing with few symptoms.
Treatment depends on the stage and type of lymphoma. Standard therapy includes radiation and chemotherapy. Experimental therapies include hormonal therapy and high-dose chemotherapy with stem-cell transplant.
Most patients with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma can benefit from some type of treatment. Complete cure is possible for many patients; for others, treatment can provide relief of symptoms and extend life expectancy. |
Using what they say is the most sophisticated climate model ever created, researchers at Stanford University's School of Engineering and the University of Delaware claim that there's enough wind over land and at sea combined to produce at least half the world's power demand by 2030.
Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and
Cristina Archer, associate professor of geography and physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware, adapted the three-dimensional, atmosphere-ocean-land computer model GATOR-GCMOM to calculate the planet's theoretical maximum wind power potential. Their model takes into account the reductions in wind speed caused by turbines. It also assumes that wind turbines can be located anywhere, regardless of environmental, climatic, economic, or societal factors. Results of the team's study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (purchase or subscription required).
Researchers at Stanford University's School of Engineering and the University of Delaware claim there's enough wind over land and at sea combined to produce at least half the world's power demand by 2030.
Some earlier studies have said wind power won't live up to expectations because the technology pits each turbine against its neighbors in competition for wind. Others have cited turbines for introducing harmful climate consequences, such as modifying local wind turbulence and speed, air temperatures, and humidity to affect rainfall and other weather patterns.
But Jacobson and Archer say modeling the climate is a complex task, and their model's higher degree of resolution gives a more sophisticated view than was possible before. It separates winds in the atmosphere into hypothetical boxes, each containing its own wind speed and weather. In the model, the boxes are stacked on top of and next to each other. The researchers could then expose individual turbines to winds from more than one box at the same time, which earlier global models couldn't do.
This greater detail let the team calculate each wind turbine's exposure to winds that change in space and over time. The model also accounts for the wind claimed by each turbine, and calculates the effects of these changes in wind speed on global temperatures, moisture, clouds, and climate. They found that the potential available energy in wind runs into the hundreds of terawatts. |
3rd millennium BC
The 3rd millennium BC spans the Early to Middle Bronze Age. It represents a period of time in which imperialism, or the desire to conquer, grew to prominence, in the city-states of the Middle East, but also throughout Eurasia. The civilization of Ancient Egypt rose to a peak with the Old Kingdom. World population is estimated to have doubled in the course of the millennium, to some 30 million people.
Near East (c. 3300–1200 BC)
South Asia (c. 3000–1200 BC)
Europe (c. 3200–600 BC)
China (c. 3000–700 BC)
The Bronze Age occurred roughly between 3000 BC and 2500 BC. The previous millennium had seen the emergence of advanced, urbanized civilizations, new bronze metallurgy extending the productivity of agricultural work, and highly developed ways of communication in the form of writing. In the 3rd millennium BC, the growth of these riches, both intellectually and physically, became a source of contention on a political stage, and rulers sought the accumulation of more wealth and more power. Along with this came the first appearances of mega architecture, imperialism, organized absolutism and internal revolution.
The civilizations of Sumer and Akkad in Mesopotamia became a collection of volatile city-states in which warfare was common. Uninterrupted conflicts drained all available resources, energies and populations. In this millennium, larger empires succeeded the last, and conquerors grew in stature until the great Sargon of Akkad pushed his empire to the whole of Mesopotamia and beyond. It would not be surpassed in size until Assyrian times 1,500 years later.
In the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Egyptian pyramids were constructed and would remain the tallest and largest human constructions for thousands of years. Also in Egypt, pharaohs began to posture themselves as living gods made of an essence different from that of other human beings. Even in Europe, which was still largely neolithic during the same period of time, the builders of megaliths were constructing giant monuments of their own. In the Near East and the Occident during the 3rd millennium BC, limits were being pushed by architects and rulers.
Towards the close of the millennium, Egypt became the stage of the first popular revolution recorded in history. After lengthy wars, the Sumerians recognized the benefits of unification into a stable form of national government and became a relatively peaceful, well-organized, complex technocratic state called the 3rd dynasty of Ur. This dynasty was later to become involved with a wave of nomadic invaders known as the Amorites, who were to play a major role in the region during the following centuries.
- c. 3650 BC–3000 BC: Minoan culture appeared on Crete.
- c. 3200 BC/3100 BC: Helladic culture and Cycladic culture both emerge in Greece.
- c. 3000 BC: First evidence of gold being used in the Middle East.
- c. 3000 BC: Nubian A-Group, Ta-Seeti "kingdom" came to an end, possibly due to raids by Egypt.
- c. 3000 BC–2000 BC: Vessels from Denmark are made; they are now at National Museum, Copenhagen.
- c. 2890 BC: Second Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Hotepsekhemwy.
- Syria: Foundation of the city of Mari (29th century BC).
- Semitic tribes occupy Assyria in northern part of the plain of Shinar and Akkad.
- Phoenicians settle on Syrian coast, with centers at Tyre and Sidon.
- Beginning of the period of the Sage Kings in China, also known as the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.
- c. 2879 BC: Rise of the Văn Lang Kingdom and the Hồng Bàng Dynasty in northern Viet Nam.
- c. 2800 BC–2700 BC: Harp Player, from Keros, Cyclades, was made. It is now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
- Iran: Creation of the Kingdom of Elam.
- Germination of the Bristlecone pine tree "Methuselah" about 2700 BC, the oldest known tree still living now.
- c. 2686 BC: Third Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Sanakhte.
- c. 2613 BC: Fourth Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Sneferu.
- c. 2600 BC: Founding of the Chalcolithic Iberian civilizations of Los Millares and Zambujal.
- c. 2500 BC: Excavation and development of the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni at Paola, Malta, a subterranean temple complex subsequently used as a necropolis.
- c. 2498 BC: Fifth Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Userkaf.
- c. 2492 BC: The Armenian patriarch Hayk defeats the Babylonian king Bel (legendary account).
- c. 2345 BC: Sixth Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Teti.
- c. 2070 BC–1600 BC: Xia Dynasty, first Chinese dynasty and government system established
- c. 2500 BC–2200 BC: Incised panel "Frying pan", from Syros, Cyclades is made; it is now at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
- c. 2500 BC–2200 BC: Two figures of women, from the Cyclades, are made; they are now at Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens.
- Dynasty of Lagash in Sumer.
- 2474 BC–2398 BC: Golden age of Ur in Mesopotamia.
- 2600 BC: Unified Indus Valley Civilisation.
- 2334 BC: Sargon of Akkad conquers Mesopotamia, establishing the Akkadian Empire
- c. 2300 BC: C-Group pastoralists arrive in Nubia.
- c. 2181 BC: Seventh and Eighth Dynasty of Egypt (2181-2160).
- c. 2160 BC: Ninth Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Akhtoy Meryibtowe.
- c. 2130 BC: Tenth Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Meryhathor.
- c. 2134 BC: Eleventh Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Mentuhotep I.
- Megalithic, Corded Ware culture and the Beaker flourish in Europe.
- Sumerian poetry, lamenting the death of Tammuz, the shepherd god.
- Sumerian cuneiform writing reduces pictographs still in use to about 550 BC.
- Major religious festival in Sumeria celebrates victory of god of spring over goddess of chaos.
- Earliest Trojan culture.
- Glass beads in Egypt.
- Beginning of the Pengtoushan culture in China.
- Major migration of Central Saharans into West Africa possibly due to climate change starting in 4th millennium BC.
- The Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors of China.
- Djoser, king of Egypt, commissions the Step Pyramid at Saqqara.
- Gilgamesh, fifth king of the First Dynasty of Uruk, immortalized in the world's first literary work the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 26th century BC).
- Khufu, king of Egypt, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
- Urukagina, king of Lagash, creates the first known judicial code (24th century BC).
- Lugalsaggizi, king of Uruk and Umma conquers Lagash (2371 BC–2347 BC).
- Sargon the Great, founder of the empire of Akkad and Sumer (2371 BC–2316 BC middle chronology).
- Ur-Nammu founder of the 3rd dynasty of Ur (2112 BC–2095 BC middle chronology).
- c. 3650 BC–3000 BC: Minoan culture on the island of Crete.
- c. 3200 BC: Cycladic culture in Aegean islands of Greece.
- c. 3200 BC–3100 BC: Helladic culture in mainland Greece.
- c. 3000 BC: Nubian A-Group Culture comes to an end.
- c. 2700 BC–1600 BC: Old Elamite period.
- 3250 BC–1750 BC: Indus Valley Civilisation.
- c. 2300 BC: Nubian C-Group culture.
- Corded Ware culture (also Battle-axe culture, or Single Grave culture).
- Norte Chico civilization.
- Late Maikop culture.
- Late Vinca culture.
- Butmir culture.
- Late Funnelbeaker culture.
- Baden culture.
- Globular Amphora culture.
- Early Beaker culture.
- Yamna culture, Catacomb culture, likely loci of Indo-European Satemization.
- The Sintashta-Petrovka-Arkaim culture emerges from the Catacomb culture from about 2200 BC, likely locus of Proto-Indo-Iranian.
- c. 2500 BC: Austronesian peoples from Formosa have colonised Luzon in northern Philippines
Inventions, discoveries, introductions
- Pottery develops in Americas (30th century BC).
- c. 3000 BC: Potter's wheel appears in Mesopotamia.
- 2900 BC—2400 BC: Sumerians invent phonogram (linguistics).
- c. 2300 BC: Metals are used in Northern Europe.
- Chinese record a comet.
- Building of the Great Pyramid of Giza (26th century BC).
- Sails used on ships (20th century BC).
- First ziggurats built in Sumer.
- Near East civilizations enter Bronze Age around 3000 BC.
- Oldest known medicine wheel constructed in the Americas.
- First Copper (~2500 BC) and then Bronze (~2000 BC) and other types of metallurgy are introduced to Ireland.
- Domestication of the horse with the coming of Indo-Europeans in central Eurasia.
- The chariot emerges in Central Asia just before 2000 BC.
- The camel (dromedary) domesticated (though widespread use took until mid-to-late 2nd millennium BC).
- Indoor plumbing and sewage in the Indus Valley Civilization.
- Sumerian medicine discovers the healing qualities of mineral springs.
- Weaving loom known in Europe.
- Sumerian numerical system based on multiples of 6 and 12.
- Egyptians discover use of papyrus.
- Bow and arrow used in warfare.
- Austronesian peoples have developed lanteen sail, and the out-rigger as well as extensive development of celestial navigation systems.
- Oldest known evidence of the inhalation of cannabis smoke, as indicated by charred cannabis seeds found in a ritual brazier at a burial site in present-day Romania.
- c. 3000 BC—2500 BC: Tomb, Newgrange, Ireland, was built.
- c. 2750 BC—1500 BC: Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, is built.
- Completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
- Completion of first phase of Stonehenge monument in England.
- Era of Buena Vista pyramid/observatory in Peru.
- 30th century BC
- 29th century BC
- 28th century BC
- 27th century BC
- 26th century BC
- 25th century BC
- 24th century BC
- 23rd century BC
- 22nd century BC
- 21st century BC
- Eckholm, Erik (10 November 2000). "In China, Ancient History Kindles Modern Doubts". The New York Times.
- "Early Helladic I". The Bronze Age on the Greek Mainland: Early Bronze Age. Athens: Foundation of the Hellenic World. 1999–2000.
- Scarre, Chris (1993). Smithsonian Timelines of the Ancient World. p. 176. ISBN 978-1-56458-305-5. "Both the dromedary (the one-humped camel of Arabia) and the Bactrian camel (the two-humped camel of Central Asia) had been domesticated since before 2000 BC."
- Bulliet, Richard W. (1990) . The Camel and the Wheel. Morningside Book Series. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 183. ISBN 978-0-231-07235-9. "As has already been mentioned, this type of utilization [camels pulling wagons] goes back to the earliest known period of two-humped camel domestication in the third millennium BC."
- Rudgley, Richard (2000) . Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age. New York: Touchstone (Simon and Schuster). p. 138. ISBN 978-0-684-85580-6. |
Primary (Pre-K – Grade 3)
Smoking Prevention Education for preschool through grade 3. Fun activities illustrate the importance of lung power and the damages of cigarette smoke
Tobacco Free Printables and activity ideas for primary and junior students
Junior (Grade 4-Grade 6)
Anti-Smoking Activities and Printables For many grade levels. Includes lesson plans and activities
Badvertising and More Lesson ideas and activities for the Great Smokeout from Education World
Intermediate (Grade 7-Grade 9)
Thinking Like a Tobacco Company Excellent theme unit that has kids thinking about the images and lessons they learn about tobacco from the media
Rapping about Tobacco A great theme unit for intermediate learners. Students study the effects of smoking, and create a rap song about it
Clearing the Air A NY Times lesson plan for two grade levels – 6-8 and 9-12.
MediaSharp Teachers’ Guide Designed for use with MediaSharp video from Center for Disease Control, but a valuable standalone resource as well. Included integrated lesson plans and discussions
stop loss dvd Senior (Grade 10-Grade 12)
Viewpoints, Rights, Tobacco and Me A very well-organized and creative thematic unit that has students examining the effects of smoking on themselves, their loved ones and the world as a whole
Making Choices About Tobacco Use An extremely well-organized and thought-provoking unit about making choices, regulating choices and the legal system. Designed to inspire discussion about peer pressure and other teen issues.
Smoking Prevention Program from PBS. Students create a schoolwide anti-smoking program. Includes lesson plans and resources
The Biology Project Toxicology and Lung Toxicology lessons for students focusing on the toxicity of cigarette smoke.
Great for background info provided by www.tobacco.org with curriculum that fits the standards for British Columbia
Lungs Are For Life Order free teaching modules for use with award-winning smoking prevention program. Delivered by email in PDF format – available in French or English, for grade levels from Pre-K to 12.
ruins the movie download Improving The Odds An educators’ resource for teachers working with grades 5-12. Includes advice on preparing lessons and several sample lesson plans, including Tobacco and Young Women
National Clearinghouse on Tobacco and Health Excellent resource for research and understanding for both teachers and older students
Free Stuff for schools and teachers from the Center for Disease Control. Posters, PSAs for use in broadcasts and more |
Degrees Fahrenheit, (developed in the early 1700's by G. Daniel Fahrenheit), are used to record surface temperature measurements by meteorologists in the United States. However, since most of the rest of the world uses degrees Celsius (developed in the 18th Century), it is important to be able to convert from units of degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius:
Kelvin is another unit of temperature that is very handy for many scientific calculations, since it begins at absolute zero, meaning it has no negative numbers. (Note...the word "degrees" is NOT used with Kelvin.) The way to convert from degrees Celsius to Kelvin is:
The three different temperature scales have been placed side-by-side in the chart below for comparison. |
Silicon is the workhorse of the electronics industry, serving as the base material for the tiny transistors that make it possible for digital clocks to tick and computers to calculate. Now researchers have succeeded in creating near-atomically flat silicon, of the orientation used by the electronics industry, in a room temperature reaction. The flat silicon might one day serve as the base for new biological and chemical sensors. The researchers will present their work at the AVS 59th International Symposium and Exhibition, held Oct. 28 – Nov. 2 in Tampa, Fla.
"In essence, we have made perfect silicon surfaces in a beaker," says team leader Melissa Hines, a chemist at Cornell University. Researchers had made perfectly flat silicon before, but the prior work focused on silicon surfaces cut along a plane of the crystal that is not used in the electronics industry. Hines' team has created the flat surfaces along the industry-standard crystal orientation.
The creation of the team's first near-atomically flat surface came as a bit of a surprise. It was widely believed that the dissolving process the team used to clean the silicon left rough, bumpy surfaces. Hines was working on a review paper and had asked one of her graduate students to take an picture of the surface using an instrument called a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) that can image surfaces to atomic-level detail. "When we looked at the surface, we unexpectedly realized, 'Hey, this actually looks very flat,'" Hines says.
The microscope images showed a surface with alternating single-atom-wide rows. Using the additional tools of computer simulations and infrared spectroscopy the researchers determined that the silicon atoms in the rows were bonded to hydrogen atoms that acted like a wax, preventing the surface from further reacting once it was set out in the air. "What that means is that if you take this perfectly flat surface, pull it out of the aqueous reactants, and rinse it off, you can leave it lying around in room air on the order of 10-20 minutes without it starting to react," says Hines. "If you had told me as a graduate student that you could have a clean surface that could just hang out in air for 10 minutes, I would have thought you were crazy."
The team believes that part of the reason their silicon surfaces are so flat is that they dip the wafers in and out of solution approximately every 15 seconds, preventing bubbles from the reaction from building up and causing uneven etching. However, they also credit the STM images for helping them to realize just how flat the surfaces were. The team built off the information from the images by using computer simulations and other tools to reveal the exact chemical reaction steps that took place in solution. "Experimentally, this is very simple experiment: you take a piece of silicon, you swirl it in a beaker with solution, and then you pull it out and look at it. To be honest, there is no reason to think that Bell Labs did not make a surface as good as ours twenty years ago, but they did not look at it with STM, so they did not know," says Hines.
Hines' team is now working on adding molecules to the atomically smooth, hydrogen-terminated silicon surface in the hopes of building new chemical or biological sensors. "At this point, I can't tell you exactly how we will accomplish this, but we have promising results and hope to be able to report more soon," says Hines.
For more information visit www.aip.org. |
Dolphins communicate with one another in a number of different ways by creating sounds, making physical contact with one another and through the use of body language.
Vocally dolphins communicate using high-pitched clicking sounds and whistles.
Each dolphin communicates at a slightly different vocal pitch which allows them to understand which dolphin is speaking.
This is especially important when traveling in pods that contain multiple dolphins where a mother may lose sight of her child or when two friends cannot find one another.
As stated earlier body language is also important for dolphins and their survival.
Body language can be used to indicate a number of thing such as a nearby predator, to indicate to other dolphins that they have found food, to demonstrate their level of fitness and prospect for a mating partner among other things.
How does a dolphins echolocation work?
Echolocation works by creating high or low-pitched sounds and measuring the time it takes those sounds to bounce off of nearby objects and back to the host.
By using echolocation dolphins can determine how far an object is, what direction it is traveling in, if it is above or below them, how large it is and whether it is a dense or hollow object.
This is extremely vital and important for dolphins because their vision is often limited underwater and they need to be able to locate food and avoid threats while traveling in the sometimes pitch black ocean.
Without it dolphins would have a much more difficult time trying to find food and avoiding threats in the ocean.
How dolphins use body language to communicate
Dolphins use a variety of different body language signals to communicate with one another and maintain observation of their surroundings.
Some of these signals or action may include spy hopping, tail slapping, jumping/leaping and bumping into each other.
Spy hopping occurs when a dolphin surfaces partially above the water for an extended amount of time exposing its head and keeping its eyes slightly above or below the water so that it can observe its surroundings.
Spy hopping is believed to be used to watch out for predators and to keep the dolphin alert of its surroundings.
Tail and flipper slapping
Tail slapping occurs when a dolphin lifts its tail or flippers out of the water and slaps it hard against the water creating a loud slapping noise.
Tail/flipper slapping may be used to show aggression, warn nearby dolphins of a potential danger, and as a sign of playful communication among dolphins.
The meaning of a dolphin’s tail or flipper slapping may be dependent upon how loud and repetitively the dolphin slaps its tail or flippers against the water.
Dolphins have also been trained by humans to slap their tails/flippers as a way to communicate a specific desire or need such as a desire to eat or play.
Bumping and physical contact
Dolphins are extremely social creatures and part of their communication involves physical contact with one another.
Harsh bumping or charging can be a sign of aggression such as to fend off competing dolphins during mating periods.
Light bumping or touching can indicate a friendly loving gesture or to indicate a specific desirable response.
Jumping and leaping
Dolphins can often be seen jumping or leaping out of the ocean, especially when in a pod with other active dolphins.
Jumping can be both used as a playful gesture when a dolphin wants to show off their youthfulness and as a way to watch out for potential predators in the distance.
Jumping can also be used as a way to conserve energy since it requires less energy to jump through the ocean than it does to continually swim through the ocean.
How man-made sounds may be affecting the dolphins environment
Sound is extremely important to the survival of the dolphin species.
Dolphins have a very acute sense of hearing which they use to communicate with one another, listen out for predators or threats in the area and find food.
In addition to having an acute sense of hearing dolphins also use echolocation to locate objects in their surroundings and navigate the ocean.
Over the years man-made technology has been steadily advancing and with these advancements in technology there are new sounds being created and emitted in the ocean which can affect, impair and/or confuse a dolphins sense of hearing and direction.
One possible example of artificial man-made sound is the use of sonar which humans use to locate objects underwater and navigate the ocean.
Although sonar is a great invention that has helped many people safely travel through the ocean studies have shown that there is the possibility that sonar may end up confusing dolphins and whales causing them to lose their sense of direction.
While further research has to be done in order to find out exactly what sounds are affecting dolphins some scientists and marine biologists have already expressed concerns regarding the effects of man-made sounds on the oceans ecosystem.
Some of these man-made sounds include large motors from ships, sonar, loud planes and a variety of marine tools which may interfere with a dolphins sense of hearing and ability to echo-locate. |
Thus, when the Northern Hemisphere is exposed to sunlight, it experiences summer while the Southern Hemisphere which receives less heat and light experiences winter. The vice versa happens when the Southern Hemisphere is exposed to the rays of sun.
Generally a year is divided into four seasons :-
Summer is that part of the year which experiences the scorching heat of the sun, extreme dry and humid conditions as the sun remains at the highest angle. Summer commences from June and ends in the month of September in the Northern Hemisphere while in the Southern Hemisphere summer starts from December and ends in the month of March.
Winter is the season that has the shortest duration. It is characterized by low temperature and short days. The regions situated far away from the equator experience very cold winters. Generally winter begins in the month of November and continues till February in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, winter stays from June to August. |
A password (also called a passphrase, passcode or PIN) is used to prevent someone from accessing or using your personal information. Having a solid password is your first line of defense, and perhaps the most important security control you have. A poorly chosen, easy-to-guess password could mean that your sensitive personal information is compromised.
So how do you create a secure password? Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Passwords should be a minimum of eight characters.
- Passwords should be comprised of a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters (punctuation marks and symbols).
- Passwords should not be comprised of, or otherwise use, words that can be found in a dictionary.
- Passwords should not be comprised of an obvious keyboard sequence (e.g., qwerty, 12345).
- Passwords should not include "guessable" data such as personal information about yourself, your spouse, your pet, your children, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, locations, etc.
An example of a sound password that is easy to remember is a passphrase. This allows you to create something you will remember, but adds the necessary complexity to be secure. By replacing letters with similar-looking symbols or numbers, an easy-to-remember phrase like CreditUnionsAreGreat becomes Cr3d!tUn!0n$@r3Gr3@t.
Of course, it doesn't matter how carefully you choose a password if you aren't equally diligent about keeping it protected and secure. Use these guidelines to secure your passwords:
- Do not disclose your passwords to anyone.
- Do not write down your passwords or leave them unsecured.
- Do not check the "save password" box when signing in to online accounts or applications.
- Do not use the same password for different systems and/or accounts.
- Never send your passwords via email or provide a password over the phone.
- Consider using a password manager app. There are many so research them carefully to find one you’re comfortable with and that will best meet your needs.
By using these tips, you should feel confident that your passwords are secure. |
Restriction of foreign immigration during the 1920s marked a significant change in U.S. policy. Immigration had soared in the late 19th century and peaked in the early 20th century. Between 1900 and 1915, for example, more than 13 million people came to the United States, with the preponderance from Southern and Eastern Europe. Many of these people were Jewish or Catholic, a fact that alarmed many older Americans who were predominately Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Some resented the newcomers because they competed for low-wage jobs, others because the new immigrants maintained Old World customs, often lived in urban ethnic enclaves, and seemed to resist assimilation into the larger American culture.
As a result of this immigrant surge after World War I, nativist appeals intensified. A reorganized Ku Klux Klan emerged calling for "100-percent Americanism." Unlike the Klan of Reconstruction, the new Klan restricted its membership to native-born white Protestants, and campaigned against Catholics, Jews and immigrants as well as African Americans. By redefining its enemies, the Klan broadened its appeal to parts of the North and Midwest, and for a time, its membership swelled.
Anti-immigration sentiment was codified in a series of measures, culminating in the Immigration Quota Law of 1924 and a 1929 act. These laws limited the annual number of immigrants to 150,000, to be distributed among peoples of various nationalities in proportion to the number of their compatriots already in the United States in 1920. One result of these restrictions was to reduce the appeal of nativist organizations; the Great Depression of the 1930s also caused a sharp drop in immigration.
Source: U.S. Department of State |
Just look at the features that the Earth reveals. Often the historical interpretations of geologic features based on uniformity do not adequately match the field data. (1). Formation of granite, (2). Origin of petroleum, (3). Origin of mineral deposits, (4). Origin of coal, (5). Origin of salt beds, (6). Canyons, (7). Volcanoes and lava, (8). Metamorphic rock, (9). Geothermal heat, (10). Major mountain ranges, (11). Ocean trenches and submarine canyons, (12). Mechanics of overthrusting. One such feature the Mid-Oceanic Ridge is one of our planet's most dramatic feature. It was discovered in the 1950s. It wraps around the earth and is the world's longest mountain range at 46,000 miles. The portion that is located in the Atlantic Ocean is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Another feature is the other major mountain ranges of the world. How did mountain ranges form? Major mountains are often crumpled like an accordion. Just look at the Himalayan Mountains. If it took millions of years to form them, how come they still have sharp features? Also why do they find fossilized sea life at the tops of these and other mountains? These mountains are far above sea level and far from the nearest body of water. Attempts to explain "shells on mountain tops" have generated controversy for centuries.
The Grand Canyon, which is probably the most spectacular of the seven wonders of the natural world. It is awesome when seen from its rim, but even more so from the air. For example, have you ever wondered how the Grand Canyon formed? The standard answer has been that primarily the Colorado River carved out the Grand Canyon over millions of years. If that happened, wouldn't you expect to find a gigantic river delta where the Colorado River enters the Gulf of California? There is no delta there. Plus look at the canyon itself. Why does the sides of the canyon still have the knife-edge look to it. If it took millions of years to form, where is the erosion? There is none.
Rapid burial over a short period of time is what produced the rock layers. Fossils give evidence to this rapid burial. To say that fossils formed over millions of years could not possibly happen. Just look at fossilized trees (polystrate trees) that were discovered in many layers of rock. If hundreds of millions of years had passed between depositional events, this could not be, since a tree in the lower layer would have died and rotted away before the next layer could encase it. Perhaps the most obvious polystrates are found in coal regions, where supposedly terrestrial swamp deposits are found intermingled with marine sediments, often, upright stumps can be seen penetrating through several layers of coal, shale, siltstone, and limestone, all of which are thought to take a long time to accumulate and require totally different environments of deposition.
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, said that scoffers are willing ignorant what caused the Earth to look the way it does. They deny that the worldwide cataclysmic flood in Noah's day was what cause this. "For this they willing are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water perished" (2 Peter 3:5-6). |
HSB: hue, saturation, and brightness
This scheme provides a device-independent way to describe color. HSB may be the most complex scheme to visualize, especially since color selection software has to reduce its three descriptive dimensions to two dimensions on the monitor screen. But once learned, it can be useful in many instances.
The easiest way to visualize this scheme is to think of the H, S, and B values representing points within an upside-down cone. At the edge of the cone base, think of the visible light spectrum (preceeding page), cut from the page and pasted into a circle with shading added to smooth the transition between the (now joined) red and magenta ends.
• Hue is the actual color. It is measured in angular degrees counter-clockwise around the cone starting and ending at red = 0 or 360 (so yellow = 60, green = 120, etc.).
• Saturation is the purity of the color, measured in percent from the center of the cone (0) to the surface (100). At 0% saturation, hue is meaningless.
• Brightness is measured in percent from black (0) to white (100). At 0% brightness, both hue and saturation are meaningless.
Brightness as it is described here refers only to relative values within a source that we are looking at (for example, a display screen or printed document). It is also called value or luminance. The distinction between levels of brightness is actually logarithmic, not linear as the HSB scale would imply.
Color (luminance) contrast
The “B” scale of HSB is used to determine the contrast between two colors, regardless of hue; this is usually called the luminance ratio. It is important to Web designers, since a ratio of less than 5:1 between text and background (10:1 for small text) can be very difficult for many people to read.
We now offer a “Color Tutor” Java application that will let you experiment with how both the HSB and RGB systems work, as well as determining the contrast between colors. Please see the Tutor page or follow the Tutor link at left.
Remember that the HSB system describes color independently of whatever physical system we are talking about. No two computer monitors can produce exactly the same colors; nor can two printers—and the colors you see on a monitor can be very different from those you see in print and those you see in “real life.”
The actual set of colors that a given device can reproduce is called the color gamut of the device. Important to professional graphic artists and photographers, gamut information is probably beyond the needs of most Web developers. For detailed information, you might refer to the Wikipedia article on this topic (opens in a new window). |
SALIVARY STONES-a patient's guide
- There are three main salivary glands in the head and neck and hundreds of tiny ones. Stones usually occur in the submandibular glands, less frequently in the parotid gland and very rarely in the sublingual and minor salivary glands.
- Stones form from mineral deposits in the gland ducts, causing swelling and pain and sometimes becoming infected.
- Diagnosis is by x-ray, ultrasound or injection of dye into the affected gland. Treatment methods range from prevention by massage and changes to lifestyle, through to removal of the stone or gland.
What are salivary glands and stones?
Salivary glands produce saliva in response to food being placed in the mouth. Even the thought or smell of food can stimulate salivary flow and most people make about one litre of saliva per day. As well being 99.5% water, saliva has minerals and proteins that aid digestion and keep the mouth and teeth healthy.Salivary Stones known as Calculi, form within the salivary glands or ducts.
Where are the salivary glands?
There are three main paired glands in the head and neck producing saliva. They are the:
- parotid glands
- submandibular glands
- sublingual glands
The parotid glands are the largest and overlie the angle of the jaw in front of the ear. A tube, known as Stensens duct, drains saliva from the glands into the mouth. The openings are inside the cheek opposite the upper molar teeth.
The submandibular glands lie deep to the horizontal part of the lower jaw. Their ducts are the longest and narrowest of all the salivary glands, and enter the mouth under the front of the tongue.
The sublingual glands lie deep in the lining of the mouth on each side of the tongue. These glands have many short ducts entering the mouth directly through the mouth lining.
In addition to these major glands there are hundreds of minor salivary glands throughout the lining of the mouth and throat, with most on the lips and soft palate.
How do salivary stones form?
Stones usually form in response to poor salivary flow. Good flow washes debris out, but with poor flow debris becomes a place for minerals to attach to. In over 90% of cases this occurs in the submandibular gland, probably because of the shape and length of the duct and the chemical makeup of its saliva. The parotid gland is next most commonly affected (6% of cases), whereas the sublingual and minor salivary glands are only rarely affected.
What are the symptoms of a salivary stone?
Stones in the affected gland or duct cause obstruction to the flow of saliva, resulting in swelling of the gland. The swelling can be painful and usually occurs during eating or when thinking about food. It usually settles slowly after finishing a meal and can be aided by massaging the gland, which will feel firm and be tender.
Sometimes the swelling remains and occasionally the gland can become infected and abscessed resulting in fever, severe pain and inflammation in the overlying skin.
How are stones diagnosed?
The majority (80%) of these stones are visible on plain x-ray, however some are not seen on x-ray so are investigated using ultrasound or a sialogram:
An ultrasound scan is a painless procedure using high frequency echoes where the gland and duct can be identified by probe. Stones may be seen as shadows within the gland or duct.
A sialogram involves using a dye injected through the mouth into the duct opening. The dye passes back up the duct into the gland. An x-ray is then taken showing where the dye fills the duct and gland. Stones are seen as "holes" in the dye. This procedure can sometimes cause discomfort.
It is possible to have more than one salivary stone or a group of them. Sometimes one stone is not seen, however "sludge" (multiple small stones) is present in the duct system.
In some cases no stones are seen but the sialogram shows a stricture (narrowing) of the duct. Strictures usually result from previous stones which may have passed out of the duct spontaneously, leaving a scar.
What is the treatment for salivary stones?
Stones in the submandibular duct can usually be removed under local anaesthetic. A cut is made in the floor of the mouth and the duct opened. Sometimes a stitch is placed in the floor of mouth first, to stop the stone(s) slipping back up the duct.
If the stone is further back in the submandibular gland itself, the gland usually needs to be removed. This is done through an external cut on the neck 2- 3cm below the jawline. During this procedure a nerve called the marginal mandibular nerve is at risk of being cut or stretched, and occasionally there can be some weakness in the lower lip. If this occurs it is usually temporary.
Stones in the distal parotid duct are dealt with by either dilating or opening the duct from inside the mouth, or by making a cut over the stone through the cheek skin, just below the cheekbone. Repeated problems with the parotid gland, or stones within the gland itself occasionally lead to removal of the gland. This procedure involves an S-shaped incision passing in front of the ear, around behind the ear lobe and then down into the neck.
How can stones be prevented?
If swellings are caused by sludging or stricture and there are no particular stones, the problem can be helped by dilating (stretching) the duct opening, regular massage of the gland, drinking plenty of fluids, improving dental hygiene and quitting smoking. |
Generating Static Electricity
by Ron Kurtus (revised 28 January 2009)
You can generate static electricity on a simple level by rubbing certain materials together. Rubbing a cloth on a plastic rod is a good example of this. However, there are devices that can generate static electricity that can then be used in applications, demonstrations and experiments.
The electrophorus uses electrostatic induction to repeatedly charge a metal plate. The Wimshurst Electrostatic Generator uses rotating plastic plates and wire brushes to generate static electricity and is used in many schools. The Van de Graaff Generator uses a high-speed belt to create high power static electricity, sufficient to shoot sparks, cause the hair on your head to rise and light fluorescent bulbs.
Questions your may have include:
- What is an electrophorus?
- How does the Wimshurst Electrostatic Generator work?
- How does the Van de Graaff Generator work?
This lesson will answer those questions. Useful tool: Units Conversion
An electrophorus is a clever device that combines simple creation of static electricity along with electrostatic induction to repeatedly charge a metal plate. It was invented in the 1764 by Swedish professor Johan Carl Wilcke and improved a few years later by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta.
How it works
The way it works is that you first create static electricity charges on a plate or disk made of a dielectric or non-conducting material, such as plastic, by rubbing it with wool, cloth or fur. Then you place a metal plate into contact with the charged non-conducting plate.
The static electric charges on the nonconductor draw opposite charges to the surface of the metal plate through electrostatic induction. In other words, negative (−) charges on the nonconductor cause positive (+) charges to gather on the metal plate.
Metal plate charged through electrostatic induction in electrophorus
When you pull the plates apart, the metal plate has static electric charges which can then be used to create sparks or demonstrate static electricity.
Can repeat process
Once the charges in the metal plate are depleted, it can be recharged by putting it in contact with the nonconductor or dielectric plate again. This process can be repeated many times before the charges on the dielectric are all gone.
The Wimshurst electrostatic generator was invented in the 1880s. The modern version consists of two plastic discs that are rotated in opposite directions by a hand-crank and drive belt mechanism.
Wimshurst Electrostatic Generator
How it works
The way it works is that a number of metal foil sectors are cemented onto two discs. As the discs turn, each metal foil sector accumulates the charges through contact with brushes on bars near the front and back of the discs. Two additional pairs of brushes collect the accumulated charges and transmit them to the storage capacitor, such as a Leyden jar
The brushes also are connected to spark gap electrodes. As the discs revolve, a high voltage spark can jump between the electrodes if they are gradually brought together.
Generates 75,000 volts
The Wimshurst electrostatic generator can generate up to 75,000 volts. Since the current is very low, there is little danger from the high voltage, but yet it is effective for creating sparks and performing interesting static electricity experiments.
Van de Graaff generator
The Van de Graaff generator can develop potential energy of as high as 400,000 volts, and it will develop sparks up to 15 inches (38 centimeters) in length.
It is relatively safe to use though, since the current is only 10 microamps (10/1,000,000 amps). This is because electrical power equals the voltage times the amperage. 400,000 volts times 10 microamps equal only 4 wattsthe energy to light a flashlight bulb.
Person touching a Van de Graaff Generator
How it works
The Van de Graaff generator is powered by a high speed electric motor. It has a belt running on two pulleys. The lower pulley is made of an insulating material and the upper pulley is made of metal. There is a grounded comb close to the belt in front of the lower pulley, and another inside the terminal, close to the belt in front of the upper pulley, connected to the terminal.
Adhesion between the belt and the lower pulley charges the pulley, and it attracts opposite charges to the outer surface of the belt from the grounded comb. The belt then transports these charges to the terminal, where they are collected by the upper comb and transferred to the terminal. The shielding provided by the terminal allows the continuation of the process even if the terminal is already strongly charged. The high speed of the belt, along with the large discharge electrode, allows the continuous buildup of charges and great voltages to be achieved.
The Van de Graaff generator in the picture is about 35 inches (90 cm) high. Some scientific laboratories have such generators several stories high. They can develop sparks that go all the way across the room. But still that doesn't compare to the power of lightning, which can be several miles long.
The electrophorus, Wimshurst and Van de Graaff generators are good sources for generating static electricity. The electrophorus can repeatedly charge a metal plate. The Wimshurst and Van de Graaff generators use high-speed nonconductors and brushes to create the static electricity. They can provide extremely high voltages, but since the current or amperage is very low, they are still safe to use.
Shock others with your knowledge of science
Resources and references
Static Electricity Generator with PVC Pipe - Simple generator
Wimshurst Electrostatic Generator - $64.95
Questions and comments
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Generating Static Electricity |
HTML stands for hyper text markup language which is generally used to create web pages. While creating web pages formation of frames is also a vital part to know. Basically, a framed document divides a browser window into multiple panes or smaller window frames. Each frame can contain a different document. The benefit of making frames are user can view information in one frame while keeping another frame open for reference instead of moving back and forth between pages. The contents of one frame can be manipulated or linked to the contents of other. This enables the web page designer to build sophisticated interfaces.
1Know what it is. The floating frame is used to create an inline framed region or window that acts similarly to any other embedded object insofar as text can be flowed around it.
2Define it. With in the<body> of an HTML element an inline frame is defined by the iframe element.
3To create an<iframe> tag the major attributes required is src,height and width.
4The Src is set to the URL of the file to load while the height and width are set either to the pixel or percentage value of the screen that the floating frame region should consume.
5Floating frames also supports the align attribute for basic positioning within the flow of the text like the tag.
6The <iframe> element also supports the marginheight and marginwidth attributes to control the margins on framed content.
- All browsers does not support the iframe element.
- Browsers like Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7 render the floating frame.
- Internet Explorer supports the addition of the hspace and vspace attributes (horizontal space and vertical space).
In other languages:
Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read 10,752 times. |
Those most disastrous have usually followed general
injudicious speculation in lands or inflated securities.
The crisis of 1816-1819 in the United States, it is
claimed was due to the speculation and disorder
following the War of 1812. The next occurred in 1825. A
very memorable panic was that of 1837.
The few years preceding had been marked by extraordinary
speculation, carried on with an unsound banking system.
Jackson's "specie circular" caused many banks to
suspend, and credit was generally impaired throughout
the country. Governmental aid was invoked by many
financial institutions, but without avail, as Van Buren,
who had succeeded to the Presidency, insisted upon
individuals righting their own affairs. In 1857 another
period of inflation was followed by another panic. Again
in 1873 there was a severe monetary crisis. Just 20
years later occurred the last panic from which the
country has suffered. (See also Black Friday).
Massive collapse of the economy that normally follows a
period of prosperity. A depression is usually
accompanied by a financial panic or a crash of the stock
market as investors lose confidence and refuse to buy
stocks or make loans. A staggering level of unemployment
is the most immediate and debilitating result. Not all
crashes reach the level of national depression, however.
If the down turn in the economy is short lived and
relatively mild, it is called a "recession." Three major
depressions, so defined because of the depth and
duration of the collapse have occurred in American
history: 1837, 1893, and 1929. Some historians add to
the list the downturns in 1857, 1873, and 1907. There is
a lot of dispute among economic historians and
economists as to the causes of economic depressions.
A term employed by economic writers somewhat loosely to
designate either the acute phase or the whole course of
the disturbances in economic life which have
characterized the last century, and which have recurred
with such frequency as to make them appear inevitable
results of the modern industrial order. The phenomena
involved are so complex that they must be described
rather than defined.
The salient fact in the economic history of recent times
is the alternation of prosperity and depression, of good
times and bad. A period of prosperity with expanding
business, great activity in production and commerce, is
brought suddenly to a close, generally by the failure of
a prominent banking house, bringing with it the fall of
other financial and mercantile concerns.
Business is paralyzed, creditors demand the payment of
claims, and debtors find it next to impossible to secure
the means of payment. Panic rules, and for a time the
whole mercantile structure threatens to collapse. From
such a shock business recovers but slowly, its activity
is reduced to the lowest ebb, and some time elapses
before the restoration of confidence takes place.
This period of depression is much more prolonged than
the acuter phase which precedes it. After a time
business revives and begins to expand. Prices rise and
activity becomes greater. A wave of prosperity again
appears which seems to carry everything before it until
it, in turn, is checked suddenly, and a new "crisis" is
at hand. Lord Overstone, in an oft-quoted passage,
describes these successive phases as follows: "State of
quiescence, improvement, growing confidence, prosperity,
excitement, overtrading, convulsions, pressure,
stagnation, distress ending again in quiescence."
In the absence of any general term to designate this
related sequence of phenomena, the term crisis has
frequently been used to embrace them all. Strictly
speaking, it should doubtless be confined to the acute
stage when the collapse which has been slowly preparing
actually takes place. In like manner, the term panic
applies to the same movement, but expresses it more
subjectively, emphasizing how men feel and act rather
than the conditions which give birth to those feelings
and actions. But as we cannot well break the sequence
and discuss in isolated fashion one of its members, it
will not be deemed inappropriate to discuss in this
article crises, their antecedents, and their
[Continue on next page] |
Citrus trees provide delicious sweet and tart fruit fresh from your backyard. Citrus grow in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 9 to 12, depending on the species. Citrus trees are no strangers to problems and when its leaves begin to yellow, you know something is amiss with the tree.
Alternaria brown spot is a fungal disease that affects young leaves and shoots of various citrus trees. Leaves infected with this disease develop brown blotches or spots surrounded by yellowish halos. These discolorations can also appear on fruits of infected citrus trees. Copper fungicides applied in spring when the leaves are about half expanded, and a second treatment applied when the foliage is fully expanded, will help control alternaria brown spot. Regular applications of copper fungicide from April through June may be needed to control alternaria, depending on the amount of rainfall. This disease can be prevented by ensuring each citrus tree has the proper spacing and thinning crowded plants. This helps to promote faster drying of the foliage and reduces the chance of future fungal problems.
A soil-borne disease, phytophthora has symptoms, including root rot, bark peeling, resin oozing from infected areas, girdling, fruit drop, stem dieback, leaf drop and yellow leaves. In extreme cases, phytophthora can lead to the death of the citrus tree. There is no chemical control for phytophthora and proper watering and care will keep this disease from threatening the life of the tree. Trees planted in soggy, poorly drained soil are more susceptible to phytophthora attacks than citrus trees growing in well-drained soils. When watering, do so in the morning to allow enough time for the bark and foliage to dry before the sun sets. Also, keep the area around the tree free of weeds and grass which can increase pest and disease problems for the citrus tree.
When the citrus tree is not getting the proper nutrients, its leaves can begin to yellow. Nitrogen deficiency shows as light yellow-green leaves with veins slightly lighter than the foliage. New leaves are smaller and thin, and mature leaves begin to develop mottled, irregular yellow blotches. This yellowing can cover entire leaves, which then fall from the branches. When the citrus tree has a magnesium deficiency, yellow irregularly shaped blotches appear at the base of the leaves growing close to the fruit. These blotches will enlarge and eventually cover all but the tip of the leaf. Leaves retaining their greenish color will drop when the tree is water stressed or the weather turns cold. In soil pH levels below 5, use dolomite to raise the pH to between 6.0 and 6.5 and increase the magnesium readily available in the soil. Because each species of citrus tree has its own specific fertilizer balance requirements and soil composition is different, it is best to regularly test the soil with a soil test kit and adjust the nutrient level based on the soil and the citrus’s mineral requirements.
Several other causes and circumstances can leave the citrus tree leaves yellow. Sunburned leaves and fruit develop yellow or brown leathery areas. These discolorations generally appear on either the west or south sides of the canopy. To prevent sunburn, provide occasional shade to trees that have previously shown signs of sunburn. California Rare Fruit Growers recommendeds whitewashing the bark of trees that have shown signs of sunburn. The whitewashing -- which consists of white, water-based interior latex pained thinned with 50 percent water -- will act as a sunscreen and protect the citrus tree bark from damaged caused by the sun. Another cause of yellowing leaves is improper use of growth regulators -- such as 2,4-D -- used to manage premature fruit drop and increase small fruit size. When these chemicals are used incorrectly, the citrus tree leaves will curl or cup and discolor to a yellowish hue. The trees plant growth may be stunted and necrotic areas appear on new fruit.
- UC IPM Online: Citrus
- University of Florida IFAS: Citrus Problems In The Home Landscape
- UC IPM Online: Citrus Diseases and Disorders of Leaves and Twigs
- University of Arizone College of Agriculture: Irrigating Citrus Trees
- California Rare Fruit Growers: Citrus Pruning
- UC IPM Online: Citrus Plant Growth Regulators
- Brand X Pictures/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images |
“The longer children engage in meaningful investigation of an idea the deeper their understanding of the topic grows.”
- Pam Oken-Wright
Children are born explorers, inquirers and investigators. They display a fearlessness and creativity that often become restrained as they grow older. Traditional education, running against these natural inclinations, imposed a learning model built on conformity and repetition, one that erroneously applied principles of the Industrial Revolution. Yet modern research into both child development and neuroscience has increasingly supported educational standards based in play, discovery and experimentation.
Schools of the past expected students to learn the same content at the same pace in the same manner. Motivation existed in extrinsic punishments and grades, and specialization necessarily took a central role as children prepared to enter particular trades. This approach simply doesn’t suit the modern context or our understanding of learning. Students—and young children in particular—thrive in less structured settings that provide boundaries, but allow a degree of freedom.
This open approach to learning enables students to follow their own agendas during play and exploration, meaning that they have the highest level of engagement as they make decisions and follow their own interests. Meanwhile, they are still learning all the foundational skills to prepare them for ongoing learning, including communication skills, social skills, problem solving and even basic curricula knowledge such as math concepts, written language practice and scientific theories. Engaging children in this manner taps into the most fundamental fact of learning: we learn the most when we are internally motivated to do so.
By allowing children the freedom to frame their learning through inquiry and play, schools benefit not only from higher student interest and motivation, but also more effective learning. Longitudinal studies of play-based schools indicate that their students attach greater meaning to tasks they freely initiate and ultimately perform higher over the long term. The burden is thus on educators to help children develop a love of learning. Engagement through inquiry and play has proven to be successful in accomplishing this, and we must acknowledge that students learn best when they are free to be children. |
Waters of the United States and the Clean Water Act
On June 22, 1969, The Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and national attention. This was at least the 13th time since 1868 that the river has caught fire as a result of point source pollution of the river by manufacturers along its banks. Dumping flammable materials, along with other chemicals and human waste, was simply more economical than treating the waste in a responsible manner.
For the manufacturers, it was a matter of dollars and cents that they did not have to spend in the disposal of these waste products, even though the cost to people who lived on the river and the value of the loss of fisheries was borne by other people. As economists, we describe that sort of economic behavior as externalizing costs—the costs are not carried on the offending firm's profit and loss statement, but by other firms who cannot draw fresh water from the river, and the public in general.
The result of the fire and similar problems across the country resulted in the passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, which amended a 1948 law. In 1977, previous law was ended with the passage of the Clean Water Act (CWA). Further amendments were made in 1987.
Under federal statutes, groundwater contamination is governed by the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Superfund Act, while the CWA covers the surface waters of the US, variously called the "Waters of the US" or the navigable waters of the US. The question is where does the "waters" end and an intermittent stream or dry ditch begin. To what extend are the marshes and wetlands that are adjacent to a covered waterway also fall under the jurisdiction of the CWA that is governed jointly by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers (COE)?
Several recent Supreme Court rulings have set the stage for the need for a systematic clarification of what is covered by the CWA. On Monday, April 21, 2014, the EPA and the ACE issued a proposed rule titled "Definition of "Waters of the United States" Under the Clean Water Act" (http://tinyurl.com/mk5a7nb).
As the rule states, "The purposes of the proposed rule are to ensure protection of our nation's aquatic resources and make the process of identifying ''waters of the United States'' less complicated and more efficient. The rule achieves these goals by increasing CWA program transparency, predictability, and consistency. This rule will result in more effective and efficient CWA permit evaluations with increased certainty and less litigation. This rule provides increased clarity regarding the CWA regulatory definition of ''waters of the United States'' and associated definitions and concepts."
- Ag markets diverged Tuesday morning
- Breakthrough in the understanding of plant growth, development
- Monsanto sells Desert Durum Wheat Research Program
- Midco Global, Inc. and DuBois Engineering sign joint venture
- Fargo selected for National Agricultural Genotyping Center
- Pinnacle Agriculture Holdings acquires Kerman Ag Resources |
William Faulkner (1897-1962) was the foremost literary chronicler of the American South during a painful, difficult time in the region’s history – the period between the Civil War and the civil rights era, when racial tensions simmered, the economy faltered, and the old southern aristocracy faded into irrelevance.
Faulkner himself was a product of the old south. His family dated back generations in Mississippi, counting politicians and Civil War heroes amond its ranks. Though an unmotivated student, Faulkner loved reading; by his teens, he had started to try his hand at writing poems and stories. During the 1920s, while traveling and working at various odd jobs, he dreamed up the fictional setting – Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi – that would form the landscape for most of his works.
Faulkner’s first major novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), is generally regarded as his masterpiece. A tale about the once-storied southern family into moral and financial ruin, the novel introduced readers to Faulkner’s masterful stream-of-consciousness prose – his attempt to record characters’ thoughts exactly and completely, often in jumbled fashion. In several more landmark novels – As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalon! (1936) – Faulkner continued to explore the collapse of the old South and its struggle to reconcile itself with the modern world.
Rife with lengthy sentences, unreliable narrative, and stories that unfold without any semblance of chronological order, Faulkner’s novels are generally not easy reads. Nonetheless, they tell poignant, unforgettable stories and explore the ghosts of the South’s past with lyricism and piercing insight. Though most of the crises that the South faced on Faulkner’s day are now long gone, his works still serve as stark reminders of the lingering power of the past to shape the circumstances of the present.
From The Intellectual Devotional – Modern Culture by David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim |
1 Answer | Add Yours
Elizabethan Drama evolved from the Miracle. Mystery, and Morality plays of the Middle Ages. Perhaps the most famous of these plays is Everyman.
The biggest step came with the so called "school dramas". The first tragedy was by two school friends, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton called Gorboduc. The first two comedies were Ralph Roister Doister by Nicklas Udal and Gammer Gurton's Needle, playwright unknown. These plays are all in verse which is rather awkward and clumsy.
It was left up to the University Wits (Lyly, Lodge, Greene, Nashe, and Marlowe) to further develop both the form and the verse. The most influential of this group was Christopher Marlowe who took blank verse which was already being experimented with by some of his peers and used it better and more eloquently.
Quit simply, blank verse aka iambic pentameter is a rhythm, de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM. It was used for several very practical reasons. Earlier verse forms were clumsy whereas blank verse most closely mirrors the rhythm of everyday English speech. (IE I asked for coffee but you gave tea.) It also mirrors the heart beat and finally verse is easier to memorize than prose because of the rhythm. (It is interesting to note that the rhythm is called iambic pentameter. In Greek iam means to throw, meaning the verse is always being thrown forward.)
Marlowe also used the closet dramas of Seneca as his model rather than the more rigid Greek. Both Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (The Spanish Tragedy) brought the violence right onto the stage to the delight of the Elizabethan audiences. In Elizabethan tragedies, the bodies pile up on stage.
Unfortunately, Marlowe died young in a bar room brawl or who knows what he would have accomplished as a playwright? Fortunately, William Shakespeare was there to pick up the mantel of "master of the verse". Shakespeare continued the development of blank verse and used it effectively in all of his plays.
He also used prose. Often prose is the language of the lower class but not always. It can also be used among friends. For example King Lear opens with two nobleman "having a chat". They are speaking in prose. When the king enters and the occasion turns formal, so does their language. They speak verse.
The play, Much Ado About Nothing is more than half prose whereas in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio speaks in prose but few other characters do. Here Shakespeare used a lot of rhyming couplets which is an indication of wrapping up an idea/thought.
Shakespeare can give you a good picture of a character's state of mind by how he uses verse. If the language is smooth and flowing, this is a mentally calm and in control character. If the language is short and choppy with lots of punctuation, the mind is in turmoil.
Shakespeare seemed to choose the language, whether it was verse, prose, or a combination of the two for each character according to need and situation. Not every line is in the 5 stress/5 unstressed pattern. Sometimes the rhythm is a troke. Key words are always in the stress position. It must be remembered that seemingly unimportant words like if or and can be in the stress position.
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Water Supply and Sanitation
Globally, almost 1 billion people lack clean drinking water. 2.4 billion people have no access to hygienic sanitation facilities; 1.2 billion lack any sanitation facilities at all. Each day, an average of 5,000 children die due to water and sanitation related diseases, many easily preventable. In 2000, through the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), the international community committed to halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015. Overall, the world is on track to meet the water MDG, but there are major gaps in many regions and countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. On current trends, the world will miss the sanitation target by a staggering 1 billion people.
Meeting the MDG water and sanitation targets is more than a health and dignity issue. The evidence is compelling that achieving the water and sanitation goals would trigger a major leap forward in human development:
- Water and sanitation are essential to achieving all of the MDGs
- Investment in water supply yields an average economic return of $4.4 to $1
- Investment in sanitation yields an average economic return of $9.1 to $1
- Human Development is more closely linked to access to water and sanitation than other development drivers UNDP has examined, including spending on health or education, and access to energy services.
The crisis in water and sanitation overwhelmingly affects the poor. Availability of water is certainly a concern for some countries. But the global water and sanitation crisis is mainly rooted in poverty, power and inequality, not in physical availability. It is, first and foremost, a crisis of governance and thus governance reform must be a key pillar of any strategic approach to addressing the crisis.
Through programmes like MDG GoAL-WaSH, CapNet, the Community Water Initiative, Every Drop Matters, Gender and Water, Human Rights Based Approach, and others, UNDP promotes and facilitates equitable access to Water and Sanitation services as a fundamental contribution to enhancing human development.
UNDP works together with government, civil society, private sector and other development partners to bring about the necessary improvements in water governance to scale up water and sanitation services for the poor. UNDP supports:
- Coordination of country assistance by UN and other development partners
- Incorporation of water and sanitation into national development planning
- Governance and policy reform for enhanced water supply and sanitation access
- Capacity building of institutions and practitioners
- Special attention to fragile states, where water and sanitation challenges are greatest
- Local delivery of water supply and sanitation services through community-based initiatives
Recent Publications in Water and Ocean GovernanceRead More
Water Supply and Sanitation UpdatesView More
- Every Drop Matters
- Global Water Solidarity
- Sanitation and Water for All
- International Year of Sanitation Review
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- UNICEF Water, Sanitation and Hygiene
- World Water Day
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Aphids are small, soft-bodied insects with long, slender mouth parts with which they pierce stems, leaves, and other tender plant parts to suck out plant fluids. Almost every plant has one or more aphid species, which occasionally feed on it. Many aphid species are difficult to distinguish from one another; however, identification to species is not necessary to control aphids in most situations. Aphids may be green, yellow, brown, red or black depending on the species and the plants they feed on. A few species appear waxy or woolly due to the secretion of a waxy white or gray substance over their body surface. All are small, pear-shaped insects with long legs and antennae. Adult aphids are generally wingless, but most species also occur in winged forms, especially when populations are high or during spring and fall. The ability to produce winged individuals provides the pest with a way to disperse to other plants when the food source gets scarce. Left untreated, Aphids can cause serious damage to ornamental plants.
Bagworms disfigure evergreen trees and shrubs by feeding on leaves and needles and girdling twigs. As worm-like larvae they spin silken bags around themselves, to which they attach pieces of the leaves they are eating. They carry this bag with them as they feed. A fully developed bag is about two inches long. These tough, spindle-shaped bags hang from the branches of infested trees like holiday ornaments, so they are easy to spot. Bagworms are the larvae of moths. Full-grown, these worms measure 1 to 1 1/4 inches. Their bodies are brown with that portion inside the bag lighter than the rest. Adult male moths have black wings, but the females are wingless. The females lay their eggs in fall, and the eggs hatch the following May or June. As the young worms begin to feed, they start doing their damage to tree and shrub foliage. They will continue eating for several months, maybe as late as August in the North. Proper insecticide use will effectively control their damage.
Emerald Ash Borers
Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) – Emerald Ash Borers are exotic beetles that have been wreaking havoc in the Midwest region since 2002, primarily in Michigan but have now found their way to Illinois. The adult beetles are a slender, elongated insect about 1/3 – 1/2 inch long and nibble on ash foliage but cause little damage. However, the larvae feed on the inner bark of ash trees, disrupting the tree’s ability to transport water and nutrients. Without intervention these very destructive insects will disrupt the tree’s circulatory system and cause the premature death of the infected trees due to the loss of water and nutrient flow throughout the tree. These pests can only be controlled by a systemic insecticide injected directly into the base of the tree using an Arborjet pump system. These injections can be done throughout the year whenever the need arises.
Fall Webworms create white hair-covered egg masses contain several hundred light yellow eggs. Young larvae are pale yellow with 2 rows of black marks along their bodies. When fully grown, they are covered with whitish hairs that originate from black and orange warts. Larvae vary as to their coloring and markings, but are usually greenish with a broad, dusky stripe along the back with a yellow stripe along the side. The pupal stage is brown. Adult coloration varies considerably from pure white to white with black spots with a wingspread of about 32 mm. This pest over winters as a pupa in a cocoon that is concealed in ground litter, cracks and crevices, or in the soil. Adults first appear in mid-June but may continue to emerge in small numbers during most of the summer. Females usually deposit their egg masses on the undersurface of the leaves. Larvae hatch in approximately 7 days. They immediately begin to spin a small silken web over the foliage on which they feed. As they grow, they enlarge the web to enclose more and more foliage (Image 2). The remains of these nests may persist through winter. These webs may sometimes surround 2-3 feet of infested branch. Larvae are gregarious and feed together until the last molt, after which they may feed independently. Larvae mature in about 6 weeks. Mature larvae leave the web and pupate on or in the soil. There may be one or two generations each year, depending on the geographic location. Proper insecticide use will help to control these type of insects.
Japanese Beetles as an adult are a colorful beetle 1/3 – 1/2 inch long with a shiny metallic green color and coppery brown wing covers. There is a row of five tufts of white hair along each side of the abdomen and two additional tufts on the top of the abdomen tip. The larvae are white grubs that take on a grayish cast from the accumulation of soil and fecal matter in the hindgut. They have a characteristic “C”-shaped form, grow to about one inch long, and may be separated from other turfgrass feeding grubs by their characteristic “V”-shaped pattern of spines on the underside tip of the abdomen. The bottom of the V points toward the head and may be seen with a hand lens. The Japanese beetle has a one year life cycle, spending about 10 months as a grub in the soil. In late June, the first adults emerge with most present in July and August. Some may still be found in early September. Throughout the summer, adult beetles feed on a wide range of plants and deposit eggs in the soil. Eggs hatch about two weeks later and grubs feed on decaying matter and roots until temperatures cool in the fall. They move downward and over-winter as a partially grown grub and resume some feeding activity in spring. Pupation occurs in late spring and adults begin emerging in late June. Japanese beetles are chewing insects that destroy leaves, flowers and fruits of more than 276 plants. These beetles can completely skeletonize leaves, feed on corn silk and corn ear tips and are especially destructive to grapes, peaches and other members of the rose family. The grubs feed on grass roots in lawns, and repeat the life cycle until properly controlled.
Lace Bugs (Plant Bugs) use their sucking mouth parts to feed on plant sap. Damage ranges from many small white spots on the leaves to distortion or destruction of plant tissue, depending on the pest and host plant. Some feed on many different types of plants while others feed only on a narrow range or single species. Fourlined plant bugs feed on many herbaceous and woody ornamentals including currant, rose, forsythia, sumac, and viburnum. The nymphs are bright red or yellow, adults is yellow to yellow green. Both stages have four distinct black lines running the length of the body, hence their name. This plant bug can be very destructive, especially to herbs and mint. It feeds first on the upper, tender foliage leaving distinct reddish-brown spots. These spots, the plant’s reaction to enzymes injected into the leaf by the insect, can range from white to almost black depending on the host. Feeding by large numbers of plant bugs can produce large brown blotches and/or leaf distortion. Females cut slits into the host plant and lay six to eight eggs inside. There is one generation a year. It occurs during a six-week period from late May through June. Honey locust plant bugs, are 3/16″ long, light green insects that cause honey locust and black locust foliage to become discolored, stunted, or deformed. These insects do their damage early in the spring but the symptoms persist through the season. Severe infestation can even cause twig dieback. Adults occur from late May to early July. There is one generation occurs per year, eggs are laid in the woody tissue and overwinter there. On problem trees, watch carefully for signs of activity in the spring. Examine terminal foliage for presence of the insects. Treatment when leaves first open with the proper control will achieve the best results.
Leaf Hoppers consist of any of the small, slender, often beautifully colored and marked sap-sucking insects of the large family Cicadellidae (Jassidae) of the order Homoptera. They are found on almost all types of plants; however, individual species are host specific. Although a single leafhopper does no damage to a plant, collectively they can be serious economic pests. Their feeding may injure the plant in any of several ways: by removing sap, destroying chlorophyll, transmitting diseases, or curling leaves. The host plant is also punctured during egg laying. Most leafhoppers are several millimeters long; some may grow to 15 mm. They excrete honeydew, a sweet by-product of digestion, and are responsible for hopperburn, a diseased condition caused by the insects’ injection of a toxin into the plant as they feed. Control is best achieved with the proper treatment of a contact insecticides applied at the correct time.
Scale Insects are parasites of plants, feeding on sap drawn directly from the plant’s vascular system. A few species feed on fungal mats and fungi, e.g., some species in the genus Newsteadia in the family Ortheziidae. Scale insects vary dramatically in their appearance from very small organisms (1–2 mm) that occur under wax covers (some look like oyster shells), to shiny pearl-like objects (about 5 mm), to creatures covered with mealy wax. Adult female scales are almost always immobile (aside from mealybugs) and permanently attached to the plant they have parasitized. They secrete a waxy coating for defense; this coating causes them to resemble reptilian scales or fish scales, hence the name. Scale insects feed on a wide variety of plants, and many scale species are considered pests. Scale insects’ waxy covering makes them quite resistant to pesticides, which are only effective against the first-instar nymph crawler stage. However, scales are often controlled with horticultural oils, which suffocate them, or through biological control. Proper identification and early intervention is the key to controlling these pests.
Spider Mites are common plant pests. Symptoms of injury include flecking, discoloration (bronzing) and scorching of leaves. Injury can lead to leaf loss and even plant death. Natural enemies include small lady beetles, predatory mites, minute pirate bugs, big-eyed bugs and predatory thrips. One reason that spider mites become a problem is insecticides that kill their natural predators. Irrigation and moisture management can be important cultural controls for spider mites. Spider mites develop from eggs, which usually are laid near the veins of leaves during the growing season. Most spider mite eggs are round and extremely large in proportion to the size of the mother. After egg hatch, the old egg shells remain and can be useful in diagnosing spider mite problems. There is some variation in the habits of the different mites that attack garden plants, trees and shrubs. Outdoors, the two spotted spider mite and honey locust spider mite survive winter as adults hidden in protected areas such as bark cracks, bud scales or under debris around the garden. Other mites survive the cool season in the egg stage. As winter approaches, most mites change color, often turning more red or orange. This habit may be why they are sometimes called “red spiders.” Most spider mite activity peaks during the warmer months. They can develop rapidly during this time, becoming full-grown in as little as a week after eggs hatch. After mating, mature females may produce a dozen eggs daily for a couple of weeks. The fast development rate and high egg production can lead to extremely rapid increases in mite populations. Other species of spider mites are most active during the cooler periods of the growing season, in spring and fall. This includes the spruce spider mite and most of the mites that can damage turfgrass. These cool-season spider mites may cease development and produce dormant eggs to survive hot summer weather. Dry conditions greatly favor all spider mites, an important reason why they are so important in the more arid areas of the country. They feed more under dry conditions, as the lower humidity allows them to evaporate excess water they excrete. At the same time, most of their natural enemies require more humid conditions and are stressed by arid conditions. Furthermore, plants stressed by drought can produce changes in their chemistry that make them more nutritious to spider mites. Regular plant monitoring and miticide applications are crucial to controlling these pests.
Tent Caterpillars attack several kinds of broadleaf trees and shrubs and produce unsightly webs, or tents, which detract from the home landscape. Trees with substantial defoliation will have reduced growth and vigor. Caterpillars also can be very common and thus a nuisance as they move around the exterior of a home. The key to eliminating tent caterpillar problems is early detection and use of appropriate cultural or chemical control measures. In late spring or early summer, female moths deposit an egg mass encircling small twigs or on tree trunks. Egg masses are present on trees during most of the summer, fall and winter. The adult moth uses a sticky, frothy substance called spumaline as an adhesive to attach eggs to bark or twigs. Spumaline also is used as a hard protective covering around the egg mass. Caterpillars, or larvae, hatch from the eggs in early spring about the time host plants leaf out. The eastern tent caterpillar and western tent caterpillar feed on new leaves, forming small webs within a few days after hatching and enlarging the webs as they grow. The web or tent is most often in a crotch of small limbs, and serves as a refuge for the larvae during the night and during rainy spells. Larvae move from the tents to feed on leaves, so damage can be found for some distance around the web. Tent caterpillars feed in groups, and thus concentrate their defoliation. |
Smallest Galaxies Give Insight Into Dark Matter
PASADENA, Calif.--An unusual population of the darkest, most lightweight galaxies known has shed new light on a cosmic conundrum. Astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to show that the recently uncovered dwarf galaxies each contain 99 percent of a mysterious type of matter known as dark matter. Dark matter has gravitational effects on ordinary atoms but does not produce any light. It accounts for the majority of the mass in the universe.
New observations of eight of these galaxies now suggest that the "Missing Dwarf Galaxy" problem--a discrepancy between the number of extremely small, faint galaxies that cosmological theories predict should exist near the Milky Way, and the number that have actually been observed--is not as severe as previously thought, and may have been solved completely.
"These new dwarf galaxies are fascinating systems, not only because of their major contribution to the Missing Dwarf problem, but also as individual galaxies," says Josh Simon, a Millikan Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of the study. "We had no idea that such small galaxies could even exist until these objects were discovered last year."
The Missing Dwarf Galaxy puzzle comes from a prediction of the "Cold Dark Matter" model, which explains the growth and evolution of the universe. The theory predicts that large galaxies like the Milky Way should be surrounded by a swarm of up to several hundred smaller galaxies, known as "dwarf galaxies" because of their diminutive size. But until recently, only 11 such companions were known to be orbiting the Milky Way. To explain why the missing dwarfs were not seen, theorists suggested that although hundreds of the galaxies indeed may exist near the Milky Way, most have few, if any, stars. If so, they would be comprised almost entirely of dark matter.
In the past two years, researchers struggling to prove the existence of nearly invisible galaxies were aided by images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that revealed as many as 12 additional very faint dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way. The new systems are unusually small, even compared to other dwarf galaxies; the least massive among them contain only 1 percent as many stars as the most minuscule galaxies previously known.
"When they were discovered, we didn't know if all of these ultrafaint objects were actually galaxies," says Marla Geha, a Plaskett Research Fellow at the National Research Council Canada's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. "We thought some of them might simply be globular star clusters, or that they could be the shredded remnants of ancient galaxies torn apart by the Milky Way long ago. To test these possibilities, we needed to measure their masses."
Simon and Geha used the DEIMOS spectrograph on the 10-meter Keck II telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to conduct follow-up studies of eight of the new galaxies. The duo used the Doppler effect--a shift in the wavelength of the light coming from the galaxies caused by their motion with respect to the earth--to determine the speeds of stars within the dwarf galaxies. "Because stars in galaxies move only under the influence of gravity, their speeds are determined by the total mass of the galaxy," says Simon. To the researchers' surprise, each system was among the smallest ever measured, more than 10,000 times less massive than the Milky Way.
"It seems that very small, ultrafaint galaxies are far more plentiful than we thought. I'm astonished that so many tiny, dark matter-dominated galaxies have now been discovered," says Geha.
"The formation of such small galaxies is not very well understood from a theoretical perspective," adds Simon. "Explaining how stars form inside these remarkably tiny galaxies is difficult, and so it is hard to predict exactly how many star-containing dwarfs we should find near the Milky Way. Our work narrows the gap between the Cold Dark Matter theory and observations by significantly increasing the number of Milky Way dwarf galaxies and telling us more about the properties of these galaxies."
Numerous, repeated measurements of 814 stars in the eight dwarf galaxies were obtained at W. M. Keck Observatory. The speeds of the stars, ranging from about 4 to 7 km/s, were much slower than the stellar velocities in any other known galaxy. For comparison, the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at about 220 km/s. The astronomers measured precise speeds for 18 to 214 stars in each galaxy, three times more stars per galaxy than any previous study.
"This is a significant paper," says Taft Armandroff, director of the W. M. Keck Observatory, whose research includes the study of dwarf galaxies. "It is a compelling example of how large, ground-based telescopes can precisely measure the orbits of distant stars on the sky to just a few kilometers per second. I expect DEIMOS will soon tell us about the chemical composition of these stars to help us better understand how star formation takes place in such small galaxies."
Some parameters of the Cold Dark Matter theory can now be updated to match observed conditions in the local universe. Based on the masses measured for the new dwarf galaxies, Simon and Geha conclude that the fierce ultraviolet radiation given off by the first stars, born just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, may have blown away all of the hydrogen gas from dwarf galaxies also forming at that time. The loss of gas prevented the galaxies from creating new stars, leaving them very faint, or, in many cases, completely dark. When this effect is included in theoretical models, the number of expected dwarf galaxies agrees with the number of observed dwarf galaxies.
"One implication of our results is that up to a few hundred completely dark galaxies really should exist in the Milky Way's cosmic neighborhood," says Geha. "If the Cold Dark Matter model is correct they have to be out there, and the next challenge for astronomers will be finding a way to detect their presence."
Although the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was successful in finding a dozen ultrafaint dwarfs, it covered only about 25 percent of the sky. Future surveys that scan the remainder of the sky are expected to discover as many as 50 additional dark matter-dominated dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Telescopes for one such effort, the Pan-STARRS project on Maui, are now under construction.
The paper, "Kinematics of the Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellites: Solving the Missing Satellite Problem," will be published in the November 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Funding for the project was provided by Caltech under the Millikan Fellowship program and by the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics of the National Research Council Canada, and through a grant from the National Science Foundation (AST 0071048).
# # # |
As kids enter their school years, they become increasingly independent, spending much of their days outside the home in school and with peers. But talking with your child is still essential to bonding, so share ideas, opinions, and information.
Here are a few suggestions to aid communication:
As kids progress in school, their comprehension and use of language will become more sophisticated. Usually, kids will understand more vocabulary words and concepts than they can express. Your child should be able to engage in narrative discourse and share ideas and opinions in clear speech.
You should have ongoing communication with your child's teacher about overall language skills and progress. Kids with language comprehension and usage problems are at risk for academic difficulties.
A child who has a specific communication difficulty, such as persistent stuttering or a lisp, should be referred to the school speech-language pathologist (an expert who evaluates and treats speech and language disorders). Stay in touch with the therapist about therapy goals, language activities to practice at home, and your child's progress.
If your child's teacher suspects a language-based learning disability, comprehensive testing will be done. This can include a hearing test, psychoeducational assessment (standardized testing to evaluate your child's learning style as well as cognitive processes), and speech-language evaluation.
Problems in communication skills may include:
Medical professionals, such as speech pathologists, therapists, and your doctor, can help your child overcome communication problems.
Reviewed by: Mary L. Gavin, MD
Date reviewed: August 2014
|FRIENDS: The Association of Young People Who Stutter FRIENDS is a national organization that provides a supportive network for children and teens. It offers bimonthly digest, books, posters, and an annual convention. Call: (866) 866-8335|
|American Speech-Language-Hearing Association This group provides services for professionals in audiology, speech-language pathology, and speech and hearing science, and advocates for people with communication disabilities.|
|American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) The AAP is committed to the health and well-being of infants, adolescents, and young adults. The website offers news articles and tips on health for families.|
|Medical Care and Your 6- to 12-Year-Old Regular well-child exams are essential to keep kids healthy and up-to-date with immunizations. Find out what to expect at the doctor's office.|
|Speech-Language Therapy Working with a certified speech-language pathologist can help a child with speech or language difficulties.|
|Talking to Your Parents Sometimes you really need to talk with mom or dad. But it's not always easy. Get tips for how to have a good talk.|
|What's Hearing Loss? Hearing loss happens when there is a problem with one or more parts of the ear or ears. Someone who has hearing loss may be able to hear some sounds or nothing at all. To learn more, read this article for kids.|
|Hearing Evaluation in Children Hearing problems can be treated if they're caught early, so it's important to get your child's hearing screened early and evaluated regularly.|
|Stuttering Do you or does someone you know ever have a hard time getting words out? Get the whole story on stuttering and other speech problems in this article for kids.|
|Going to a Speech Therapist You might visit a speech therapist if you're having trouble speaking or understanding others. Find out more in this article for kids.|
|Stuttering Many young kids go through a stage when they stutter. Stuttering usually goes away on its own but in some cases lasts longer.|
|Growth and Your 6- to 12-Year-Old As kids grow from grade-schoolers to preteens, there continues to be a wide range of "normal" as far as height, weight, and shape.|
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The objective of a sample survey is to make an inference about the population from information contained in a sample and to obtain a specified amount of information about a population parameter at minimum cost.
Types of Surveys
1. Cross-sectional Surveys
• surveys a specific population at a given point in time
• will have one or more of the design components example: stratification (stratified random sampling), clustering with multistage sampling (cluster random sampling)
2. Longitudinal Surveys
• surveys a specific population repeatedly over a period of time, example: panel, rotating samples
Two factors affect the quantity of information contained in the sample and hence affect the precision of our inference making-procedure. The first is the size of the sample selected from the population. The second is the amount of variation in the data; variation can frequently be controlled by the method of selecting the sample. The procedure for selecting the sample is called the sample survey design.
Type of probability sampling:
1. Simple random sampling
2. Stratified Random Sampling
3. Systematic Random Sampling
4. Cluster Random Sampling
1. Simple Random Sampling
The basic design of sampling technique is sampling random design. The procedure of simple random sampling: if a sample of size n drawn from a population of size N in such a way that every possible sample of size n has the same chance of being selected. To draw a simple random sample from the population of interest is not as trivial as it may first appear. A simple random sample is obtained by choosing elementary units in search a way that each unit in the population has an equal chance of being selected. A simple random sample is free from sampling bias. However, using a random number table to choose the elementary units can be cumbersome. If the sample is to be collected by a person untrained in statistics, then instructions may be misinterpreted and selections may be made improperly. Instead of using a least of random numbers, data collection can be simplified by selecting say every 10th or 100th unit after the first unit has been chosen randomly as discussed below. such a procedure is called systematic random sampling.
Simple random sampling is the basic sampling technique where we select a group of subjects (a sample) for study from a larger group (a population). Each individual is chosen entirely by chance and each member of the population has an equal chance of being included in the sample. Every possible sample of a given size has the same chance of selection.
(Definition taken from Valerie J. Easton and John H. McColl's Statistics Glossary v1.1)
In simple random sampling, each sampling unit has equal and known probability of being selected.
How can we draw a sample from population in simple random sampling methods ? We might use our own judgment to “randomly” select the sample. This technique called haphazard sampling. Another technique called representative sampling, involves choosing a sample that we consider to be typical or representative of the population. Both haphazard and representative sampling are subject to investigator bias and they lead to estimates who properties cannot be evaluated.
This design does not attempt to reduce the effect of variation on the error of estimation. A simple random sample of size n occurs if each sample of n elements from population has the same chance of being selected. Random number tables are quite useful in determining the elements that are to be included in a simple random sample.
Scheme of Simple Random Sampling
*. Blue circle show us selected sample
-. Richard L. Scheaffer, William Mendenhall, Lyman Ott; Elementary Survey Sampling, 4-th, PWS-Kent Publishing Company, 1990, Boston
-. Mugo Fridah W, Sampling in Research
Seminar Statistik STIS - 3 Oktober 2011
6 years ago |
(Protozoan) Cryptosporidium parvum
Cryptosporidiosis was first recognized in 1907 by Edward Tyzzer
in the gastric glands of asymptomatic laboratory mice. For nearly 50
years after Tyzzer's initial discovery the protozoan was considered a
benign commensal organism. It was not until 1955, when
Cryptosporidiosis was discovered in fowl with fatal enteritis that
the protozoan was considered a parasite. Since the 1970s,
Cryptosporidiosis has been identified in the gastrointestinal or
respiratory tract of most species of animals, including mammals,
reptiles, birds and fish. Cryptosporidiosis has now entered the
forefront of public attention as it has become a lethal threat to
immunosuppressed individuals. In the case of HIV, cryptosporidiosis
plays the role of an opportunistic infection as it may cause severe
dehydration and malnutrition, which may be fatal to the HIV positive
The symptoms of a Cryptosporidia infection are diarrhea,
abdominal pain, weight loss, slight fever and nausea. These symptoms
usually manifest themselves in the individual within 2-10 days of
exposure to the parasite.
Cryptosporidiosis has a large reservoir, which includes
cattle, deer, mice, dogs, cats, and poultry. Cryptosporidia live in
the intestine of infected humans or animals. These parasites are
passed on through contact with infected feces or through contact with
contaminated water, food, soil. There is no documented animal vector
for this parasite.
The diagnosis of cryptosporidiosis is performed through
two methods: intestinal biopsy or examination of stool samples to
detect the oocysts.
The usual method of therapy is to allow the infection to
run its course. The patient is encouraged to ingest a lot of water in
order to combat the effects of diarrhea. The parasitic infection
usually disappears from the body of a healthy adult within at most
2 weeks. In the case of immunosuppressed individuals, pregnant women
and young children, there are several courses of therapy to speed up
the recovery process. The drugs paromomycin, azythromycin and
nitazoxonide are used as treatments, even though their efficacy
rates have not been impressive.
Contact with human and animal feces should be entirely avoided and if such interaction is necessary as in diaper changing, litter box cleaning, the individual should wear protective gloves. If contact occurs the individual should immediately wash and disinfect exposed area. Ingestion of water from rivers, lakes, swimming pools or other such open bodies of water should be avoided. Water used for drinking should be filtered or boiled for at least 1 minute. |
Seizures are the result of episodes of involuntary electrical activity within the brain and can take many forms, ranging from loss of consciousness and leg paddling to subtle, intermittent changes in behavior. Many different diseases can cause seizures in dogs. Problems that originate outside of the brain, such as low blood sugar, hypothyroidism, severe liver and kidney disease, or certain poisons are sometimes to blame. On the other hand, infections, trauma, tumors, inflammation, and other disorders that are limited to the brain itself can all also disrupt normal brain function and bring about a seizure.
In some cases, even after a thorough health work up no underlying cause for a dog’s seizures can be found. If they become a reoccurring problem, veterinarians call the condition “idiopathic epilepsy.” The mechanism that causes certain animals to develop epilepsy is not fully understood, but genetics certainly plays a role. Breeds that are at a higher than average risk for developing the condition include schnauzers, basset hounds, collies, German shepherds, keeshonds, Belgian tervurens, beagles, Irish setters, Saint Bernards, poodles, wirehaired fox terriers, cocker spaniels, and Labrador and golden retrievers.
When many people think of a “typical” seizure they are picturing a generalized or grand mal seizure. During one of these episodes, an affected dog will fall down, usually paddle or intermittently stretch out its legs, may lose bladder and bowel control, and is completely unaware of its surroundings. But less dramatic types of seizures exist as well. These may be called partial, focal or petit mal seizures and develop when only a limited portion of a dog’s brain is affected by abnormal electrical activity. Dogs undergoing a focal seizure remain conscious and exhibit abnormal motions that are restricted to only a portion of their body (e.g. involuntary movement of a leg) or unusual behaviors, such as snapping at the air as if they are trying to catch an imaginary fly.
Because seizures can take so many forms, dog owners are often unsure whether or not their pets have actually had a seizure after a suspicious incident has occurred. True seizures have three distinct phases. The aura or prodromal phase occurs in the minutes before seizure activity begins. Dogs may act restless or behave in an odd manner, but this stage is subtle and often missed by owners. The ictal stage is the time during which a dog is actively seizing. The most important phase to watch for when trying to determine whether or not an episode was actually a seizure is the post-ictal stage. This is the period after the seizure has ended when dogs appear confused and cannot walk or behave normally. The post-ictal stage may last for only a few minutes or for several hours. Pets that have lost consciousness for reasons other than a seizure (e.g. fainting) generally do not act confused after they have recovered.
In some cases, seizures can be life threatening. Dogs should be taken to a veterinarian immediately if any of the following symptoms are noted:
- an individual seizure lasts longer than five minutes (not including the aura and post-ictal phase).
- seizures cluster together so that the dog does not have time to fully recover between episodes
- more than three seizures in a 24-hour period are observed
Permanent neurologic damage can occur if such severe episodes are not treated aggressively.
One of the most important things that a pet owner can do when faced with a dog that is having seizures is to write down the dates and times when the episodes occur, what they look like, how long they last, and if the dog seemed normal in between events. If at all possible, time seizures using a clock. To a worried pet owner, a seizure that actually lasts only 20 seconds may seem to drag on for many minutes. This information will be invaluable to the veterinarian when it comes to deciding what potential underlying causes are likely and how to proceed with treatment.
Before diagnosing a dog with idiopathic epilepsy, the veterinarian will try determine if any other disease might be present that could be causing the seizures. The doctor will start by performing a thorough physical and neurological exam, usually followed by blood work, a urinalysis, and a fecal exam. If infection or inflammation of the brain is a likely culprit, the veterinarian may want to obtain and analyze a sample of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), or if signs are pointing towards a tumor or other lesion within the brain, he or she can recommend a CT scan or MRI. Once additional testing is unlikely to reveal an underlying cause for a dog’s seizures, a diagnosis of idiopathic epilepsy can be made.
Treatment and Prevention
Whenever possible, treatment is aimed at any potential causes for seizures that have been discovered during the diagnostic work-up. If the therapy is effective and no significant brain damage has occurred, the seizures should resolve. The situation is very different with a diagnosis of idiopathic epilepsy. This is a disease that can usually be managed but cannot be cured. If seizures are mild and infrequent, many veterinarians will take a “wait and see” approach before starting treatment, but if a dog’s health is at risk from the seizures themselves, many anticonvulsant medications are available that can help control them.
Two drugs that are commonly used are phenobarbital and potassium bromide. These medications, either alone or in combination, can reduce the frequency and severity of seizures to a safe and manageable level for many epileptic dogs even if the episodes are not completely eliminated. If control is still not adequate, other drugs are available, but they tend to be expensive and/or need to be given frequently throughout the day. For emergencies, many veterinarians will also provide owners with a dose of liquid diazepam in a needless syringe that can be squirted into the dog’s rectum to help stop a seizure that is lasting long enough to be dangerous to the animal. If such an emergency occurs, owners must contact their veterinarian immediately.
Dogs that are being treated for epilepsy require close monitoring. Pet owners should keep a seizure diary. By looking at changes in the frequency and severity of seizures over time, a veterinarian can determine whether a dog’s medications should be changed. Blood work needs to be checked on a regular basis to determine if drugs are being dosed correctly and not causing any damage to internal organs.
With appropriate treatment and monitoring and a dedicated owner, many epileptic dogs enjoy a long and full life. Medications can usually decrease seizure frequency and severity to the point where epilepsy does not significantly affect the dog’s, or the owner’s, quality of life.
Jennifer Coates, DVM graduated with honors from the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine in 1999. In the years since, she has practiced veterinary medicine in Virginia, Wyoming, and Colorado and is the author of several short stories and books, including the Dictionary of Veterinary Terms, Vet-Speak Deciphered for the Non-Veterinarian. Dr. Coates lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with her husband, daughter, and a menagerie of pets. |
- Historic Sites
Indians In The Land
Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment—or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.
August/September 1986 | Volume 37, Issue 5
RW Most historians would now agree that when the Europeans arrived, the Indian population of North America was between ten and twelve million (the old estimate was about one million). By the early twentieth century it had fallen to less than five hundred thousand. At the same time, Indian populations were also under stress from warfare. Their seasonal cycles were being broken up, and they were inadequately nourished as a result. All these things contributed to the tremendous mortality they suffered.
WC Part of the problem was biological; part of it was cultural. If a disease arrived in mid-summer, it had quite different effects from one that arrived in the middle of the winter, when people’s nutrition levels were low and they were more susceptible to disease. A disease that arrived in spring, when crops had to be planted, could disrupt the food supply for the entire year. Nutrition levels would be down for the whole subsequent year, and new diseases would find readier victims as a result.
RW The effects extended well beyond the original epidemic—a whole series of changes occurred. If Indian peoples in fact shaped the North American landscape, this enormous drop in their population changed the way the land looked. For example, as the Indians of the Southeast died in what had once been a densely populated region with a lot of farmland, cleared areas reverted to grassy woodland. Deer and other animal populations increased in response. When whites arrived, they saw the abundance of animals as somehow natural, but it was nothing of the sort.
Disease also dramatically altered relationships among Indian peoples. In the 178Os and 179Os the most powerful and prosperous peoples on the Great Plains margins were the Mandans, the Arikaras, the Hidatsas, the Pawnees, all of whom raised corn as part of their subsistence cycles. Nomadic, nonagricultural groups like the Sioux were small and poor. Smallpox changed all that. Those peoples living in large, populous farming villages were precisely those who suffered the greatest death rates. So the group that had once controlled the region went into decline, while another fairly marginal group rose to historical prominence.
WC That’s a perfect example of biological and cultural interaction, of how complex it is. A dense population is more susceptible to disease than a less dense one: that’s a biological observation true of any animal species. But which Indian communities are dense and which are not, which ones are living in clustered settlements and which ones are scattered thinly on the ground—these aren’t biological phenomena but cultural ones.
RW Perhaps the best example of this is the way different Plains Indians responded to the horse, which, along with disease, actually preceded the arrival of significant numbers of Europeans in the region. The older conception of what happened is that when the horse arrived, it transformed the world. That may have been true for the Sioux, but not for the Pawnees. The Sioux became horse nomads; the Pawnees didn’t. They were not willing to give up the security of raising crops. For them, the horse provided an ability to hunt buffalo more efficiently, but they were not about to rely solely on buffalo. If the buffalo hunt failed, and they had neglected their crops, they would be in great trouble. As far as I know, there is no agricultural group, with the exception of the Crows and perhaps the Cheyennes, that willingly gave up agriculture to rely solely on the buffalo. The people like the Sioux who became Plains nomads had always been hunters and gatherers, and for them horses represented a more secure subsistence, not a less secure one.
WC It’s the ecological safety net again. People who practiced agriculture were reluctant to abandon it, because it was one of their strongest nets.
RW And they didn’t. When given a choice, even under harsh circumstances, people tried to integrate the horse into their existing economy, not transform themselves.
The horse came to the Sioux at a time when they were in trouble. Their subsistence base had grown precarious: the buffalo and beavers they’d hunted farther east were declining, and the decline of the farming villages from disease meant the Sioux could no longer raid or trade with them for food. The horse was a godsend: buffalo hunting became more efficient, and the buffalo began to replace other food sources. Having adopted the horse, the Sioux moved farther out onto the Plains. By the time they had their famous conflicts with the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, they were the dominant people of the Great Plains. Their way of life was unimaginable without the horse and buffalo. |
The weather is warming up, the spring rain showers are coming, and that means the people of Northwest Arkansas are going outside to play in full force. But the beautiful weather also means one of our least-favorite critters is making the rounds: the tick. Today, we are going to take a look at how ticks spread disease, what to look out for if you start feeling sick, and some good ways to avoid bites.
How do ticks spread disease?
Animals that have a pathogen are known as reservoirs. Common animal reservoirs for tick-borne diseases are deer, rodents such as wild rabbits and mice, and dogs. Ticks are known as vectors, meaning they pass pathogens from one organism to the next. Only a tick infected with a certain pathogen can spread that disease, and these pathogens are transmitted to humans and animals through the process of feeding. If the host animal has the pathogen, the tick will ingest it in the blood and pass it along through its saliva to the next host.
What kinds of disease do disease spread?
There are more than a dozen common diseases that ticks can spread, but the most common found in Arkansas are human monocyte ehrlichiosis (HME), Rock Mountain spotted fever (RMSF), and tularemia. Another recently diagnosed disease is southern tick-associated rash illness (STARI).
Symptoms of Tick-Borne Diseases
Each disease has its own particular symptoms, but they do share many in common. Most people feel like they are getting the flu and complain of fever, malaise, headaches, body aches, and chills. A rash is common in many tick-borne diseases, and it may be found somewhere on the body other than around the site of the tick bite. STARI is associated with a “bulls-eye” rash around the bite area.
Tularemia has a number of forms and is most often associated with ulcers and/or swelling of the lymph glands, particularly in the groin, armpit, and neck. The most serious form infects the lungs, and symptoms may include coughing, chest pain, and difficulty breathing.
If you have any of these symptoms and think you may have been bitten by a tick within the last few days, contact your physician as soon as possible. Left untreated, many tick-borne diseases can have serious and even fatal side effects.
Treatment for Tick-Borne Diseases
Your physician may do blood tests to determine if you have a tick-borne disease. Because these diseases are caused by bacteria, your physician will prescribe an antibiotic. Depending on the severity of the disease, you may require hospitalization for appropriate treatment, so it is important to talk to your physician as soon as you start to feel sick.
Avoiding Tick Bites
There are some simple and effective strategies to avoid getting bit. These include:
- Avoiding areas where ticks are abundant, such as thick brush and tall grass
- Checking your body and clothing for and removing ticks during and after outdoor activities
- Bathing after outdoor activities where ticks are abundant, which may wash off ticks that have not yet attached, help find ticks on dirty skin, and reduce exposure to ticks still in clothing
- Wearing protective clothing, such as light-colored clothes to make finding ticks easier, as well as long sleeves with tight wrists and long pants tucked into light socks
- Using tick repellent on skin and clothing
- Clothing and gear treated with permethrin
- Using a DEET repellent spray on clothing and skin
Read our article, “Tick Bite Prevention.” for more tips on avoiding and safely removing ticks.
Keeping Pets Safe from Ticks
Having pets that go outside regularly can increase your risk of tick bites. Dogs are very susceptible to tick bites and tick-borne diseases. There aren’t vaccines for every tick-borne disease that dogs can get, and even those won’t prevent ticks from getting on you or into your home. Tick bites are also hard to detect on dogs, and it may take one to three weeks before the disease appears; watch your dog closely for behavior or appetite changes if you think your pet has been bitten.
There are two main strategies for avoiding tick bites on your pets: killing and repelling. Killing ticks on your pets is done with a pesticide called an acaricide. Examples of acaricides are fipronil, permethrin, and amitraz. Some kill on contact, while others absorb into the dog’s bloodstream and kill attached, feeding ticks. These are found in certain powders, impregnated collars, sprays, and topical treatments. Repellents, such as permethrin, will help prevent your pet from coming into contact with ticks.
Note: Cats are very sensitive to many chemicals; consult your veterinarian before you use any of these products on them.
For more detailed information regarding ticks and the diseases they can spread, visit www.cdc.gov/ticks/index.html. |
The Composition Of Nacre
Nacre is composed primarily of crystallized calcium carbonate (CaCo3) and conchiolin. Conchiolin is a dark-colored substance secreted by the mollusk during the initial phases of pearl formation. Conchiolin is an organic protein that acts as a form of glue or adhesive. Generally it is the first layer deposited by the pearl sac; conchiolin surrounds the bead nucleus or irritant and functions as a base coat that will cause the pursuant nacre layers to bind together. The brownish material does not always confine itself to the initial coating, and may be observed throughout the nacreous stratum in cultured pearls that have been cross-sectioned.
A Mollusk Secretes Nacre To Form A Pearl
The mollusk continues to secrete concentric layers of nacre around the nucleus at irregular intervals; microns-thin sheets of crystalline material are laid down in starts and stops and do not fit perfectly together, resulting in a delicate lacework of ridges and swirls similar to a topographical map detailing mountainous regions and valleys. These patterns are often referred to as the pearl’s own fingerprint; each layer is singularly unique in composition and has no equal.
Nacre Is The Beauty Of A Pearl
The exact shape and size of the aragonite platelets are ultimately what influences a pearl’s two most important quality attributes: luster and orient. The platelets’ own thinness and transparency is comparable to a wavelength of white light, which makes the transmission and refraction of light rays possible throughout the crystalline layers. Upon coming into contact with the surface of the pearl, a significant percentage of white light is able to penetrate the top layer and work its way through the nacre strata. Each platelet that the light comes into contact with acts as a tiny prism, breaking up the beam and refracting back a subtle rainbow of color that is visible on the surface of the pearl. |
Assisi embroidery is a form of counted-thread embroidery based on an ancient Italian needlework tradition in which the background is filled with embroidery stitches and the main motifs are outlined but not stitched. The name is derived from the Italian town of Assisi where the modern form of the craft originated.
Assisi work uses a method known as voiding in which cross-stitch fills the background while the motif itself is left blank. Holbein stitch, a style of linear blackwork, is used to outline and emphasize the motif and to create surrounding decorative scrollwork Traditionally, Assisi embroidery was rarely executed in cross-stitch but was most often in long-armed cross-stitch. Examples employing other stitches, such as Italian cross-stitch and Algerian plait stitch, are also known. The colours of thread used were red, blue, green or gold for the background and black or brown for the outlines. Traditional motifs were largely heraldic, especially heraldic beasts, and typically featured symmetrically arranged pairs of animals and birds surrounded by ornate filigree borders.
In the oldest pieces, the figures were drawn freehand on the fabric and surrounded with Holbein stitch. The background, often cream linen, was filled as well as possible. For more modern pieces the pattern was constructed carefully on a paper grid in much the same way as counted cross-stitch patterns are created. Today Assisi embroidery is nearly always done this way.
Historically, Italy has had a long tradition of bright and colourful embroidery. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries monastic embroideries developed a simpler style where designs and motifs were voided on fine linen cloth with the outlines and background embroidered in coloured silk. Motifs were strongly influenced by traditional designs of bird or animal pairs surrounded by elaborate scrollwork. These early articles were most often used for religious purposes, e.g., altar cloths and chasubles.
By the sixteenth century Assisi work had become more popular and employed a wider range of motifs, many based on Renaissance imagery of satyrs, demons and ancient mythical creatures.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, this form of embroidery fell into decline and many of the designs and motifs were lost. It was only at the turn of the twentieth century that the practice was revived in the Italian town of Assisi from which this form of embroidery gets its name. St. Anne’s Convent in October 1902 established the Laboratorio Ricreativo Festivo Femminile San Francesco di Assisi.The aim of this handicrafts workshop was to revive traditional local handicrafts and provide employment to poor women to supplement their incomes. This cottage industry flourished and these designs using the counted thread technique quickly spread throughout Italy, Europe and further abroad.
Charts for assisi embroidery:
See also Free blackwork designs
Don’t miss new cross-stitch design Christmas toys
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|Lloyd Sealy Library John Jay College of Criminal Justice|
An outline presents a picture of the main ideas and the subsidiary ideas of any subject. Some typical uses of outlining are: a class reading assignment, an essay, a term paper, a book review or a speech. For any of these, an outline will show a basic overview and important details.
Some professors will require an outline in sentence form, or require the main points to be in chronological order, or have other specific requirements. A studentís first responsibility, of course, is to follow the requirements of the particular assignment. What follows illustrates only the basics of outlining. The library presents it as a quick reminder because students often ask about outlining, and the information is not easy to find quickly in various reference books.
Below is a synopsis of the outline form. The main ideas take roman numerals. Sub-points under each main idea take capital letters and are indented. Sub-points under the capital letters, if any, take italic numbers and are further indented.
I. MAIN IDEA
II. MAIN IDEA
III. MAIN IDEA
It is up to the writer to decide on how many main ideas and supporting ideas adequately describe the subject. However, if there is a I in the outline, there has to be a II; if there is an A, there has to be a B; if there is a 1, there has to be a 2, and so forth.
Suppose you are outlining a speech on AIDS, and these are some of the ideas you feel should be included: AZT, Transmittal, AIDS babies, Teenagers, Safe sex, Epidemic numbers, Research.
To put these ideas into outline form, decide first on the main encompassing ideas. These might be: I. Transmittal, II. Societal Consequences, III. Research.
Next, decide where the rest of the important ideas fit in. Are they part of AIDS transmittal or AIDS societal consequences or AIDS research solutions? The complete outline might look like this:
Major Aspects of Aids
I. Transmittal of AIDS
II. Societal Consequences of AIDS
III. Research Solutions to AIDS
It is only possible to make an outline if you have familiarity with the subject. Not only in the initial outline, but during the course of the research, the writer may find it necessary to add, subtract or change the position of various ideas. This is acceptable as long as the logical relationship among ideas is preserved.
Campbell, W. G. (1954). Form and style in thesis writing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Ellis, B. L. (1971). How to write themes and terms papers. New York: Barronís
Gibaldi, J. & Achtert, W. S. (1984). MLA handbook for writers of research papers. |
Stands for "Arithmetic Logic Unit." An ALU is an integrated circuit within a CPU or GPU that performs arithmetic and logic operations. Arithmetic instructions include addition, subtraction, and shifting operations, while logic instructions include boolean comparisons, such as AND, OR, XOR, and NOT operations.
ALUs are designed to perform integer calculations. Therefore, besides adding and subtracting numbers, ALUs often handle the multiplication of two integers, since the result is also an integer. However, ALUs typically do not perform division operations, since the result may be a fraction, or a "floating point" number. Instead, division operations are usually handled by the floating-point unit (FPU), which also performs other non-integer calculations.
While the ALU is a fundamental component of all processors, the design and function of an ALU may vary between different processor models. For example, some ALUs only perform integer calculations, while others are designed to handle floating point operations as well. Some processors contain a single ALU, while others include several arithmetic logic units that work together to perform calculations. Regardless of the way an ALU is designed, its primary job is to handle integer operations. Therefore, a computer's integer performance is tied directly to the processing speed of the ALU. |
Support for Student Success Grade 3 - ELAThird Grade ELA Focus SkillsHave daily reading experiences – child reads aloud and silently for extended periods of time. Talk about the reading experiences – describe the characters in the story, the problems the characters experience and tell how the problem is solved or discuss the information presented in a nonfiction book. Use strategies when reading to help understand what is read (use clues in the passage to help with unknown words, reread a part of the story that is confusing or unclear, make predictions about what will happen next and determine if predictions come true or use text features such asStudy and practice weekly spelling lists (Hear the word, See the word - look at the word and then close your eyes and imagine it, Say the word, Say the letters in the word aloud, Write the word as you say the letters).
Identify relationships among words such as synonyms - words with similar meanings (run - sprint), antonyms - words with opposite meanings (easy - hard), homonyms - words that sound the same but have different meanings and sometimes different spellings (bear-bare) and multiple meaning words - words with more than one meaning (round – something that is shaped like a circle or ball/ a section of a game or sport).Use writing as a way to tell a story to another person. The story should have an interesting beginning (not “Hi, my name is . . .”), tell the events in the order that they happened and end with a closing sentence – (not the words “the end”).Write a variety of sentence types – ask a question, make a statement, make a command, show enthusiasm, join two complete sentences with “and, but, or” to form a compound sentence and include these types of sentences when appropriate in writing stories or reports.The Parent Guide to Grade 3 http://www.education.com/grade/third-grade/Reading Tips for Parents of Third Graders http://www.readingrockets.org/article/7837
Student Websites:Third Grade Reading Activities http://www.abcya.com/third_grade_computers.htmWord Games http://www.funbrain.com/FBSearch.php?Grade=3 |
See biography by C. S. Forester (1927) and works of D. M. Smith.
Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy (Vittorio Emanuele II; March 14, 1820 – January 9, 1878) was the King of Piedmont, Savoy, and Sardinia from 1849 to 1861. On February 18, 1861, he assumed the title King of Italy to become the first king of a united Italy, a title he held until his death in 1878.
Victor Emmanuel was born in Turin, the eldest son of Charles Albert of Sardinia and Maria Theresa of Austria and Tuscany. His father was King of Piedmont-Sardinia. He lived for some years of his youth in Florence, and showed an early interest in politics, the military, and sports.
He became King of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1849 when his father had abdicated the throne after a humiliating military defeat by the Austrians at Novara. Victor Emmanuel was immediately able to obtain a rather favourable armistice at Vignale by the Austrian commander, Radetzky. The treaty, however, was not ratified by the Piedmontese chamber, and Victor Emmanuel retaliated by firing Prime Minister Claudio Gabriele de Launay, replacing him with Massimo D'Azeglio. After new elections, the peace with Austria was accepted by the new Chamber of Deputies. In 1849 he also fiercely suppressed the revolt in Genoa, defining the rebels as a "vile and infected race of canailles".
In 1852, Victor Emmanuel II gave Count Camillo di Cavour the title of Prime Minister. This turned out to be a wise choice because Cavour was a political mastermind and was a major player in Italian unification in his own right. Victor Emmanuel II soon became the symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement. He was especially popular in the Kingdom of Sardinia because of his respect for the new constitution and his liberal reforms.
Following Victor Emmanuel's advice, Cavour joined Britain and France in the Crimean War against Russia. Cavour was cautious to go to war due to the power of Russia at the time and the expense of doing so. Victor Emmanuel, however was convinced of the rewards which would be gained from the alliance which would be created between Britain and more importantly with France. After successfully seeking British support and ingratiating himself with France and Napoleon III at the Congress of Paris in 1856, following the end of the war, Count Cavour arranged a secret meeting with the French emperor. In 1858, they met at Plombières-les-Bains (in the Lorraine), where they agreed that if the French were to help Piedmont combat Austria, still occupying the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia in northern Italy, France would be awarded Nice and Savoy.
At the time Victor Emmanuel had become a universal symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, the movement pushing towards the unification of Italy.
Later that same year, he sent his forces to fight the papal army at Castelfidardo and drove the Pope into Vatican City. Victor Emmanuel II’s success at these goals got him excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Then, plebiscites in Naples and Sicily called for union with Sardinia-Piedmont and Italy grew even larger. On February 18, 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was officially established and Victor Emmanuel II became its king. Later, in 1866, Italy was given Venetia as part of the peace settlement after the Seven Weeks War. Five years after that (1871), the Papal States, protected by Napoleon III (an action motivated by his need to please Catholics in France), fell to Italian troops and Rome became the capital city.
Victor Emmanuel supported Giuseppe Garibaldi's Expedition of Thousand (1860-1861), which resulted in the quick fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in southern Italy. However, the King halted Garibaldi when he appeared ready to attack Rome, still under the Papal States, as it was under French protection. In 1860, through local plebiscites, Tuscany, Modena, Parma and Romagna decided to side with Sardinia-Piedmont. Victor Emmanuel then marched victoriously in the Marche and Umbria after the victorious battle of Castelfidardo (1860) over the Papal forces, after which he gained a Papal excommunication.
The King subsequently met with Garibaldi at Teano, receiving from him the control of southern Italy. Another series of plebiscites in the occupied lands resulted in the proclamation of Victor Emmanuel as the first King of Italy by the new Parliament of unified Italy, on March 17 1861. Turin became the capital of the new state. Only Rome, Veneto, Trentino and Dalmatia remained to be conquered.
The rest of Victor Emmanuel II’s reign was much quieter. After the Kingdom of Italy was established he decided to continue on as King Victor Emmanuel II instead of Victor Emmanuel I of Italy. This was a terrible move as far as public relations went as it was not indicative of the fresh start that the Italian people wanted and suggested that Sardinia-Piedmont had taken over the Italian Peninsula, rather than unifying it. Despite this mishap, the remainder of Victor Emmanuel II’s reign was consumed by wrapping up loose ends and dealing with economical and cultural issues.
In 1869 he married morganatically his principal mistress Rosa Teresa Vercellana Guerrieri (3 June 1833–26 December 1885). Popularly known in Piedmontese as “Bela Rosin”, she was born a commoner but made Countess of Mirafiori and Fontanafredda in 1858. Their offspring were:
Further offspring from other mistresses included:
Laura Bon at Stupinigi:
Virginia Rho at Turin:
Unknown Mistress at Mondovì:
Message issued by Umberto I immediately after his death: |
This lesson begins with a simulation of just how quickly an infectious disease can spread through a population, examines the spread of a sexually transmitted disease documented by the video "The Lost Children of Rockdale County," and ends with a survey of the role of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Estimated Time: 1 to 3 class periods of 90 minutes each (Dependent on discussion and analysis time)
Correlation to National Health Standards
Health Education Standard 1:
Health Education Standard 3:
* To make 100 ml of 0.1M sodium hydroxide, add 0.4 grams of sodium hydroxide to 100 ml of distilled water OR add 10 ml of 1.0 M solution of sodium hydroxide to 90 ml of distilled water.
1. Before students arrive in class, half-fill a clear plastic cup with water for each student in the class. To one of the cups, instead of water, add diluted sodium hydroxide solution. Provide each student with one cup of clear liquid and one empty cup.
Tell students that the class will be doing a little role playing to start off the day. They are going to pretend that they are all at a party and they are going to "make contact" with three other people at this party. But the rules for "making contact" are very specific. Explain these rules carefully, and quiz them for understanding before you begin.
2. Allow the students to "make contact" with three other students in the class. This will work best if movement is allowed and students interact with students from the other side of the class. Be sure they keep a list of with whom and in what order they made contact.
3. After the exchange has taken place, have students return to their seats, and announce that it is a week later, and the health department is concerned. Several students have contracted a disease, and all students who attended "the party" must be tested for this disease.
To determine if an individual has been "infected," a drop of phenolphthalein is added to each exchange cup. If the solution turns pink, the person in control of that cup is infected. If the color does not change, the student is not "infected." Depending on class size and how much "mingling" actually occurred, the results should be fairly dramatic, with twenty-five percent to possibly more than fifty percent of the class ending up infected.
4. Inform the class that only one infected person came to the party, and now it's time to try to determine who that was. Make a class chart on the blackboard or overhead as indicated below:
A "+" indicates a positive response (color change), a "-" indicates a negative (no change). Each student should be listed and then each of his or her contacts in order.
Eliminate the "un-infected" individuals and try to trace the transmission of the disease back to the original infected person. Once the class has guessed who started the disease, you can verify the results with a drop of phenolphthalein in the cups containing the original liquid.
5. Discuss the results or have students respond to written questions. Possible questions could include:
6. After discussion or collection of written responses, introduce "The Lost Children of Rockdale County" as a real-life story of the spread of a sexually transmitted disease that affected teenagers. Show the video from the beginning to 09:15. Have students take notes or answer specific questions about the video. Pause the video when it shows the chart constructed by the health department (approximately 05:40) and ask the students how the chart differs from the class's representation of its epidemic. Challenge the students to create their own diagram from the class data collected from the epidemic simulation. Possible questions to ask about the video include:
Have students research the various health organizations available in their own community. What local city, county or state health department services are available? Are there any private or not-for-profit agencies that focus on communicable diseases? How accessible to teens are these agencies or groups? |
Usable Water on Earth
About 30 minutes.SCIENCE INFORMATION:
Even though most of the Earth's surface is water, only 1% of it is fresh usable water. Ninety-seven percent of the Earth's water is saltwater, which contains too many minerals for humans to use untreated. Two percent of our water is "locked up" in ice caps and glaciers, leaving only one percent as usable fresh water.PURPOSE:
To provide the students with an understanding there is a very limited amount of usable water on Earth (water quantity).OBJECTIVES:
The learner will be able to:
1. Identify the percent of salt water, fresh water, and fresh usable water on Earth from a model.
2. Infer there is a very limited amount of usable water on Earth.
3. Model the percent of salt water, fresh water, and fresh, usable water on Earth.PROCESS SKILLS: N
umbering, predicting, forming models.
What to Use:
1 globe of the Earth
100 pennies for each cooperative learning group (suggest 4 students per group)
Divide class into cooperative groups. The number in each cooperative group is your decision as a teacher. However, three or four students per group seems to work well.
Engage: Display a globe of the Earth in front of the class. Rotate it slowly as the class observes. Think about the land space and the water space. Ask the questions: How much of the Earth's surface is water? Approximately 75% of the Earth's surface is water. How much of the total water on Earth is fresh, usable water? Only 1% of it is fresh usable water.
Explore: Each group gets 100 pennies, representing all the water on Earth. Considering all the water on Earth, how many pennies would represent the fresh, usable water? Each group must come to a consensus and report the number to the class.
Explain: Each group will report their number to the class as a recorder lists the amounts on the board. Discuss the findings and lead the students to the fact that one penny of the one hundred represents all the fresh water on Earth.
salt water fresh, usable water
ice caps glacier
WHAT DID YOU LEARN?
1. How may pennies represent salt water?
Ninety-seven pennies (or 97%) represent salt water.
2. How many pennies represent all the fresh water in the world?
Three pennies (or 3%) represent all the fresh water.
3. How many pennies represent ice caps and glaciers?
Two pennies (or 2%) represent the ice caps and glaciers.
4. How many pennies represent all of the rest of the fresh, usable water on Earth?
One penny (or 1%) represents all the fresh, usable water on Earth.
5. What is the total number of pennies you have and what do the pennies represent?
The total number of pennies is 100 (or 100%). The pennies represent 100% of the water on planet Earth.
1. If one penny represents all the fresh water on the Earth, what would be the quantity for Colorado?
Colorado, being only a small percent of the Earth, would have only a small percent of the Earth's fresh water.
2. What is the purpose of taking care of the water we have?
There is a very limited amount of usable water on Earth, and it is important to maintain water quality through wise use and good water conservation practices.
As a student-assisted demonstration, have a student measure 1000 ml of clean tap water into the transparent containers. Encourage the students to suggest what this water quantity might indicate (all the water on the Earth's surface).
Encourage another student to pour 970 ml of the water into another clear container. Have students suggest what this amount of water indicates (all the salt water on the Earth's surface).
Have the students suggest what should be added to the 970 ml of water to make the model more real(salt). Have the students suggest what should happen to the remaining 30 ml of water.
A logical suggestion would be to pour 20 ml of water into a clear plastic container and freeze the water. The remaining 10 ml of water indicates usable water.
You may wish to pour 5 ml of water into a small clear plastic vial and pollute the water with soil, chalk dust, oil, alcohol and other classroom materials. Encourage the students to recognize the polluted water and discuss the importance of keeping usable water clean. |
Creating your own terrarium is an interactive way to add some indoor greenery to your home. Not only do indoor plants help improve air quality naturally, but a homemade terrarium is an exciting family project that teaches kids about sustainability.
What Is A Terrarium?
Making a terrarium is like designing your own miniature ecosystem. By completely enclosing plants in a glass container, or having just a small opening, you create a greenhouse effect, trapping in some heat from the sun and moisture. This is a great science project to teach kids about the environment and how it can sustain itself. As you work, explain how all the components work together in a constant cycle with heat, causing moisture in the soil to evaporate and create droplets on the glass that then fall right back to the plant to repeat the process.
Picking Your Plants
Terrariums usually function best with plants that require minimal care and that can thrive indoors without large amounts of direct sunlight. Succulents are great option and so are small cacti. Ferns, mosses, and other traditional indoor green plants are also ideal choices. Try to pick a few small plants to mix together and create a small garden. When blending plants though, it’s important to keep similar types together. It’s not a good idea to blend ferns and succulents, for example, since they have different needs when it comes to watering.
What You Need
The container you pick for your homemade terrarium will depend on the plants you’re using. For succulents and cacti you need a container that has at least a small opening, like an old fish bowl or a vase, so that the plants can get plenty of air. For ferns and mossy plants it’s better to have a container that’s enclosed to trap the moisture inside. Make sure it’s a lid that you can open though, so you can access the plants if needed. No matter what container you choose, try to find one you already have to reuse (another great lesson in recycling and minimizing waste).
Besides the container you’ll also need small rocks, activated charcoal to help filter the water and prevent mold from growing, and potting soil.
Putting It All Together
To begin, line the bottom of your container with the rocks and add a ½-inch layer of charcoal (this part can be messy).
Next add the soil, filling the container about halfway. Leave enough room for some open space above the plants.
Last, arrange your plants in the soil. This is where little hands can come on handy, especially if you have a smaller jar or container.
Give it some water, and place the terrarium near a window or spot where it will get some indirect natural light.
Besides having a beautiful display, your family will have a constant reminder of how an ecosystem works and why it’s important that the environment maintains its natural, self-sustaining balance. When you’re all done, show off your terrarium making skills and share pics of your plants on Twitter.
Image source: Sher Warkentin
This article was brought to you by Tom’s of Maine. The views and opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the position of Tom’s of Maine. |
The spectacular Horsehead Nebula in the Orion constellation is not only a favourite object of astronomy photographers all over the world, but apparently also a cosmic petroleum refinery.What sounds like science fiction is actually reality: using the 30m-telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy for astronomical observations in the millimetre range of wavelengths, astronomers have detected, for the first time, the interstellar molecule C3H+, in our galaxy, which belongs to the hydrocarbon family and is thus part of major energy resources of our planet, i.e. petroleum and natural gas.
The question of how life began on a molecular level has been a longstanding problem in science. However, recent mathematical research sheds light on a possible mechanism by which life may have gotten a foothold in the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth. Researchers have proposed several competing theories for how life on Earth could have gotten its start, even before the first genes or living cells came to be. Despite differences between various proposed scenarios, one theme they all have in common is a network of molecules that have the ability to work together to jumpstart and speed up their own replication — two necessary ingredients for life. However, many researchers find it hard to imagine how such a molecular network could have formed spontaneously — with no precursors —from the chemical environment of early Earth.
Three hundred billion ultradense cosmic cannonballs used to tear around the universe, punching through regular galaxies like a bullet through a cloud , going their own way and scientists don't know where they are now. Because of the speed of light staring into space is essentially looking back in time, and scientists have seen ultra-intense galaxies zipping around the first five billion years of existence. Similar in principle to the intense density of neutron stars ( a collapsed star with a core so dense that a single spoonful would weigh 200 billion pounds) these galaxies were a thousand times denser than regular star-scatterings, packing as much mass as the Milky Way into 0.1% of the volume and far before regular galaxies had time to form.
Join the 235,000 Daily Galaxy fans around the world who follow us via their Twitter page. Our followers include many of the planet's leading astronomers and scientists, astronauts, space observatories, news organizations, universities and governmental space organizations such as NASA, JPL, ESO, SETI, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and Royal Astronomy Society members. Follow us daily at twitter.com/dailygalaxy
The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a galaxy located approximately 320 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus, the River, which is, most likely, a cosmic fossil – the aftermath of an enormous multi-galactic pile-up, where the carnage of collision after collision has built up a brilliant giant elliptical galaxy far outshining typical galaxies.
The Milky Way's ancient stars once belonged to other galaxies instead of being the earliest stars born inside the galaxy when it began to form about 10 billion years ago. Many of the Milky Way's ancient stars are remnants of other smaller galaxies ripped asunder by violent galactic collisions around five billion years ago, according to research that was part of the Aquarius Project, which uses the largest supercomputer simulations to study the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way.
Justo Gallego Martínez (also known as Don Justo) has built this beautiful cathedral of trash in Madrid over the past 50-odd years. Don Justo, a former monk, has been building the cathedral (modelled on St. Peter's in Italy) in the Spanish village of Mejorada del Campo (near Madrid) since 1961.The cathederal is 131-feet high, and needs to add a roof and a few windows to complete the edifice. Most of his building matter came from salvaged materials and recycled junk -the columns for example have been built with old oil drums. He uses both everyday objects and excess construction materials donated by construction companies and a nearby brick factory.
NASA's John Grotzinger, principal investigator for the rover mission, announced in an interview with NPR the Mars' Curiosity rover has made a discovery that "is gonna be one for the history books. This data is ... looking really good," he said. Grotzinger told NPR it would be several weeks before NASA would release its discovery. What we doi know is that the discovery was made by SAM, the Sample Analysis at Mars suite of three instruments. The Curiosity chemistry set is equipped to look for compounds of carbon, such as methane, as well as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. These would suggest at least the possibility that life could have once existed there.
The shredded remains of of one of the estimated seven trillion dwarf galaxies in the observable Universe has been located buried within our Milky Way Galaxy. Some astronomers think that the largest globular cluster in the Milky Way, Omega Centauri, might have once been a dwarf galaxy that had its outer stars stripped away. The massive swarm of stars is known as the Aquarius Stream. |
As the panic industry gears up to make its obligatory buck or two off the Ebola epidemic, the bastion of empirical sanity, PopMec, chimes in with some common public health sense:
However, despite its severity, Ebola is an unlikely candidate to cause widespread epidemics. Ebola outbreaks in humans begin with direct contact with an infected animal. In Africa, fruit bats are considered to be natural reservoirs for the disease, but chimps, gorillas, and antelopes are also known to carry the infection. Currently there are no natural reservoirs for Ebola outside of Africa, which means it’s a lot less likely that Ebola could establish itself anywhere else, says epidemiologist Stephen Morse, from Columbia University.
After the initial transmission from animal to person, the disease spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, saliva, and other bodily fluids of infected people. Compared to airborne diseases, which have pandemic potential, the spread of Ebola is slow because it relies on direct contact. And because it kills its victims so quickly, there isn’t much time to spread the disease to others.
In developed countries, the spread of Ebola can be thwarted by isolating infected patients and wearing protective clothing. “Standard hospital hygiene goes a long way,” says Matthias Borchert, an epidemiologist at Berlin’s Charité University of Medicine.
The bad news? US hospitals are bad enough at “hospital hygiene” that 75,000 people a year die of more mundane, less panic-worthy infections – Strep, C-Diff and an array of others deadly but less newsworthy bugs.
Read the whole thing, though, and pass it on to some of your less-informed friends.
This country is at less risk of a “zombie apocalypse” from any virus than from the news coverage about the virus. |
CDC would like to thank Scott Weese, DVM, DVSc Diplomat of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine for his careful review of these pages.
Horse nuzzles girl's hand.
Visit Storybook Farms, a therapeutic riding center for mentally, physically, and emotionally handicapped children of all ages.
From pulling a plow over a farmer's field to carrying a cowboy across the open range, horses have always had an important role in society. Today, horses are generally considered companion animals, with close to 2 million U.S. households reporting horse ownership. Riding and working around horses have been shown to increase balance, self-confidence, and self-esteem. However, as with any animal, you must be aware of the risk for diseases passed between horses and people.
Although rare, germs from horses can cause a variety of illnesses in people, from minor skin infections to serious illnesses. Besides owning or touching a horse, common chores such as cleaning stalls and grooming might put you at risk. To protect yourself and your family from getting sick:
- Seek routine veterinary care for your horse and
- Always wash your hands and the hands of children with running water and soap after contact with horses or their manure.
Click the tabs above to learn more about preventing zoonotic diseases associated with horses.
Human illness from horses in the United States is rare, but it can happen.
The most common diseases associated with horses that can cause human illness are:
Salmonella are bacteria that spread to people through contaminated food (eggs and meat) or contact with the stool of certain animals, including horses. Horses infected with Salmonella might show no signs of the disease or could have watery diarrhea, depression, and severe dehydration.
People infected with Salmonella might have diarrhea, vomiting, fever, or abdominal cramps. Infants, elderly persons, and those with weakened immune systems are more likely than others to develop severe illness.
Ringworm is a condition caused by a fungus that can infect the skin, hair, and nails of both humans and animals. Ringworm is spread from animals to humans through direct contact with an infected animal's skin or hair or through contact with contaminated equipment, such as brushes.
Ringworm in horses usually begins as a small raised bump that is hairless. The bump can become thick and scaly. Sometimes ringworm infection in horses causes circular, bald, scaly patches with broken hairs. Ringworm infection in horses is particularly common in cold climates where animals are stabled for long periods of time.
Ringworm infections in people can appear on almost any area of the body. These infections are usually itchy. Redness, scaling, cracking of the skin, or a ring-shaped rash may occur. If the infection involves the scalp or beard, hair may fall out. Infected nails become discolored or thick and may possibly crumble.
Less common diseases that are associated with horses and can cause human illness are:
Anthrax is a naturally occurring disease of animals caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. People and animals can get anthrax when they accidentally breathe in or swallow spores in contaminated soil, food, or water. Anthrax can also get into open wounds. People who live in areas where anthrax has occurred should consider vaccinating their livestock against the disease.
Anthrax is a serious but rare disease in the United States. The symptoms of anthrax depend on the type of infection and can take anywhere from 1 day to more than 2 months to appear. All types of anthrax have the potential, if untreated, to spread throughout the body and cause severe illness and even death.
Brucellosis is a bacterial disease that causes a condition called fistulous withers, or "poll evil," in horses and can affect the ability of animals to reproduce. The bacteria affect the bursa of ligaments at the withers or poll, causing inflammation and swelling. The inflamed tissue might eventually burst, resulting in drainage of pus and further infection of the surrounding tissue. Brucellosis rarely causes miscarriage in horses.
People can get the disease when they are in contact with infected animals or animal products contaminated with the bacteria. It is rare for people to get brucellosis from horses. One of the most common ways people become infected is through drinking unpasteurized (raw) milk. People who are infected with brucellosis will usually become sick within 6-8 weeks of exposure. Sick people will have flu-like symptoms that last 2-4 weeks. Sometimes brucellosis can become a chronic illness that can be difficult to treat.
Cryptosporidiosis is a parasitic disease that is spread to humans and animals through contaminated food or water or contact with an infected person or animal. The risk of Cryptosporidium from animals is hard to predict, because many animals carry the parasite without showing any signs of illness. Horses that do become sick might have abdominal pain and profuse watery diarrhea.
In people, Cryptosporidium causes profuse, watery diarrhea with cramping, abdominal pain, and nausea. Illness is usually self-limiting and typically resolves within 2–3 weeks. People with weakened immune systems might develop chronic or severe diarrhea.
Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), Western Equine Encephalitis (WEE), St. Louis Encephalitis Virus (SLEV), and Venezuelan Encephalitis (VEE)
EEE, WEE, SLEV, and VEE are viruses carried by wild birds and transmitted by mosquitoes to horses and humans. Symptoms in horses can range from no signs of disease to depression, trouble walking or paralysis, convulsions, or other neurologic signs and death. Horses are dead-end hosts to EEE, WEE, and SLEV, which means that they usually do not spread these viruses to other animals or humans. Horses with a certain type of VEE infection, however, may be able to spread the virus through mosquitos.
People develop these diseases by being bitten by an infected mosquito. Most people have no symptoms, but for those who become sick, symptoms can range from mild flu-like symptoms to arthritis, respiratory distress, gastrointestinal upset, encephalitis, shock, or death. Very young or elderly patients are more likely to develop severe infections.
Human cases of SLEV have decreased from 13 cases in 2008 to 3 cases in 2012. Sporadic cases of EEE were reported in horses in 2012, but no cases of WEE were reported. VEE has not been seen in the United States since 1971.
Ehrlichiosis is a bacterial disease that affects animals and humans, and is transmitted by ticks. Infected horses might have fever, swollen limbs, trouble walking, loss of stamina, and yellowing of the skin, mucous membranes, and whites of the eyes.
Humans infected with ehrlichiosis might have fever, headache, chills, muscle pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and rash. In 2011, 850 cases of ehrlichiosis were reported in humans.
Leptospirosis is a bacterial disease of humans and animals that is spread through contaminated water and urine or other body fluids from an infected animal. In horses, the disease is most often associated with uveitis (inflammation in the eye) and miscarriage. It has also been reported to cause kidney failure in foals. The prevalence of leptospirosis in horses is unknown, although it is responsible for 2%-4% of all equine miscarriages annually.
People who become infected with leptospirosis might not have any signs of the disease. Others will have nonspecific flu-like signs within 2-7 days after exposure. These symptoms usually resolve without medical treatment, but can reappear and lead to more severe disease.
Lyme disease is a bacterial disease of humans and animals transmitted by ticks. In horses, the most common clinical sign is arthritis, but horses can also experience lameness, neurologic disease, eye disease, and dermatitis. Because Lyme disease can mimic so many other illnesses, it is very difficult to diagnose. This disease does not occur nationwide and is concentrated heavily in the Northeast and upper Midwest. In these areas, as many as 75% of adult horses are thought to have been exposed to the disease at least once in their lifetimes.
Infected people will typically have a red "bull's eye" rash at the site of the tick bite that appears about 7 days after being bitten. Flu-like symptoms quickly follow the rash. If not treated, this disease can spread to other parts of the body and cause symptoms such as arthritis and loss of facial muscle tone (Bell's palsy). Lyme disease can be fatal.
Staphylococcus aureus is a common bacterium normally found on the skin of humans and animals. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the same bacterium that has become resistant some antibiotics. Horses carrying MRSA might not necessarily show clinical signs, but MRSA can cause skin and wound infections, respiratory tract infections, and septic arthritis. Horses are more likely to carry MRSA if they live on a farm with more than 20 horses.
MRSA can be transmitted back and forth between people and animals through direct contact. In people, MRSA most often causes skin infections that can range from mild to severe. If left untreated, MRSA can spread to the bloodstream or lungs and cause life-threatening infections.
Rabies is a virus that causes a fatal neurologic disease in animals and people. Bites from rabid animals or contact with infected saliva can spread the infection. Horses with rabies might have a variety of signs that rapidly worsen. Most frequently, rabid horses will have abrupt changes in their behavior (depression, agitation, aggressiveness) and might slowly develop paralysis. Rabid horses are often very dangerous and have attacked people. Though rabies is very rare in horses, it is still a concern. Horse owners should vaccinate their animals against this deadly disease.
It is rare for a person to contract rabies from a horse. The first symptoms in people can start days to months after exposure and include generalized weakness, fever, and headache. Within a few days symptoms will progress to confusion, anxiety, behavioral changes, and delirium. If you have been bitten by a dog or other animal and feel that there is a risk for rabies, contact your health care provider right away. Once symptoms appear, it is almost always too late for treatment.
West Nile virus (WNV) is carried by birds and transmitted by mosquitos. People, birds, and horses get WNV by being bitten by an infected mosquito. Horses infected with WNV might not show any signs or might have muscle spasms and trouble walking, fever, or more severe neurologic deficits and death. Horses are not a source of WNV for mosquitoes; therefore, infected horses should not pose a risk to the people who take care of them.
In people, WNV might cause a wide range of symptoms from flu-like symptoms to seizures or more serious disease. WNV infection can be fatal in people. Most human infections have no symptoms, with approximately 20% of infected people developing West Nile fever and fewer than 1% developing a disease that affects the nervous system. Serious illness is more likely to occur in people over the age of 50. More than 2,500 cases of WNV disease are typically reported in the United States each year.
In this section
Person washing their hands with soap and water.
CDC recommends hand washing whenever you work around or with horses.
- Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and running water after doing common chores with horses—especially after touching horse manure or urine, saliva, or blood.
- Wash your hands before eating, drinking, or smoking after handling horses.
- Cover any open wounds or cuts when visiting or working around horses.
- Seek routine veterinary care, vaccinations and deworming for your horse.
Tips for preventing horse-associated diseases and injuries
Before choosing a horse
- Learn about the different types of horses and temperaments before you bring one home. Find out what types of horses are suitable for your family. Certain types of horses, such as young or untrained horses, might not be suitable for young children or people with very little riding experience who are living in the household.
- Research how to properly care for your horse before purchase. Ask your veterinarian about the proper food, care, and stall or pasture environment for the horse you are selecting.
- Be aware of the potential for your horse to spread certain diseases to people at risk of being infected.
Choosing a horse
A veterinarian examines a horse.
- Match the horse's attitude, temperament, size, and training or activity level with your family and the purpose (e.g., showing, trail riding, teaching) for which you are buying the horse.
- Consider having the horse thoroughly examined by a veterinarian before purchase to make sure the animal is healthy and is not carrying infectious diseases that could pass to people. The veterinarian will evaluate the horse's eyes, heart, lungs, legs and hooves, digestive system, and skin.
- If you are bringing the horse into a herd setting, you might need to keep the horse separate for a short time to prevent any diseases from spreading to the other horses. Some general guidelines for choosing to separate a newly purchased horse are if they have:
- an unknown medical history or are coming from an unknown source, sale barn, or horse show where they have been in contact with unknown horses.
- traveled a long distance and are stressed or showing signs of disease, such as a cough, runny nose, swollen lymph nodes, fever or diarrhea.
For more information on separating newly acquired horses, contact your local veterinarian.
For more information on choosing a horse, read the American Veterinary Medical Association Selecting a Horse brochure.
Man cleaning a horse stall.
- Horses are usually housed either in a stall or out on pasture, or in a combination of both. If they are out on pasture, they should have some kind of shelter in case of inclement weather.
- Make sure your horse always has access to fresh clean water, whether in a stall or out on pasture.
- Keeping the stall cleaned regularly is important to prevent build-up of manure that could potentially spread disease to your horse or to other people.
Monitoring your horse's health
- Have your veterinarian come to the stables to routinely evaluate and care for your horse's health. Talk to your veterinarian about vaccinations for rabies, West Nile, and other viruses causing equine encephalitis.
- If possible, keep horses in an enclosed area at night to decrease their exposure to wild animals that could be carrying rabies.
- Use elevated feeders to reduce attracting wild animals.
- Clean horse enclosures and stalls daily to prevent build-up of manure.
- Properly dispose of soiled bedding, manure, and uneaten food.
Preventing bites and kicks
A horse with ears flattened.
- Avoid bites and kicks from horses.
- Be careful around horses. Always be aware of your surroundings and know where the animals are at all times.
- Approach a horse's head from the side—not the front—where they can see you better.
- Watch their ears—if flattened, the horse might bite.
- Don't stand directly behind a horse.
- Don't approach a horse from its rear end.
- Do not leave young children unsupervised around horses.
What to do if injured by a horse
Germs can spread from horse bites or kicks even if the wound does not seem deep or serious. If you are injured, you should:
- Wash wounds with warm soapy water immediately.
- Seek medical attention if:
- Vaccination status of the horse is unknown.
- The horse might have been exposed to a rabid wild animal. (Make sure a veterinarian checks your horse if it becomes sick or dies within 6 months of a bite from another animal.)
- The horse appears sick.
- The injury is serious (uncontrolled bleeding, loss of function, extreme pain, and muscle or bone exposure).
- The wound becomes red, painful, warm, or swollen.
- Your or your child's last tetanus shot was more than 5 years ago.
- You are concerned about your or your child's health.
Publications and Materials
Selecting a Horse
American Veterinary Medical Association
Activity Card: Horseback Riding
BAM! Body and Mind, CDC
Vesicular Stomatitis [PDF - 2 pages]
U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. (2007).
Helpful books and references
Blunden, A. S., Smith, K. C., Neal, H. N., & Dugdale, D. J. (2006). Enteritis associated with infection by Campylobacter jejuni in two Thoroughbred foals. Equine Vet. Educ. 18(1), 8-10.
Compendium of Measures to Prevent Disease Associated with Animals in a Public Setting [PDF - 19 pages]
J Am Vet Med Assoc 2013:243(9) 1270-1288
West Nile Virus and Other Arboviral Diseases – United States, 2010.
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). August 5, 2011 / 60(30);1009-1013
Langley, R. & Morris, T. (2009). That Horse Bit Me: Zoonotic Infections of Equines to Consider after Exposure Through the Bite or the Oral/Nasal Secretions. Journal of Agromedicine 14, 370–381
Weese, J. S. (2002). A Review of Equine Zoonotic Diseases: Risks in Veterinary Medicine. American Association of Equine Practitioners Proceedings 48, 362-369.
- Page last reviewed: June 2, 2014
- Page last updated: June 2, 2014
- Content source: |
Nuclear Stability 13,045 views
Nuclear stability is what makes certain isotopes radioactive. An isotope is unstable if it has a ratio of protons to neutrons that isn t within what is called the band of stability. Elements with atomic numbers greater than 70 are never stable. Unstable isotopes generally undergo transmutation, alpha decay or beta decay.
Alright so how do you know if something is going to be radioactive or not? How do you know of an atom or a particle is actually going to emit and be unstable enough to emit some alpha particles, gamma particles or beta particles. We're going to talk about nucleus stability and what makes something stable and what makes something a nuc- a nucleus unstable.
We have to talk about the there's there's a slight balance between electrostatic charges within the nucleus and a strong nuclear force within the nucleus we'll get to what that means in just a second, so we just think about it, we have a nucleus, inside the nucleus we have lot of protons and neutrons so let's talk about the protons.
All the protons are positively charged and we know that when two part two charges that come together that are like charges, when they come close they're going to repel each other so how is it that the the nucleus has all these particles of all these protons that are positively charged so packed closely together? Well that's because there's this something called the strong nuclear force and it doesn't have really a fancy name but this is what it's called but it's not really known a lot known about it quite yet but what this this force is, is that it acts on subatomic particles that are extremely close together and these this much stronger than our portion of these protons feeling from each other so this strong nuclear force is actually when they get really really close that repulsion is actually eliminated and they're actually going to be like [IB] together and if you think about it, there's a neutrons in there also, so the neutrons are have no charge so when they get close to protons that's okay but when so we like that connection that is [IB] strongly put together. When two protons come together we have they have to it's going to be negated the strong nuclear force is going to be a little bit less because they have to negate the fact that they're being pulled together they're being repelled I'm sorry because they have opposite charges.
So the nucleus, the neutrons also help keep the [IB] nucleus together so because we're talking about this balance between electrostatic forces that are keeping them apart and then and then the strong nuclear force is keeping them together we have to have a good ratio of neutrons to protons a stable ratio. If this ratio gets off balance that's when the nuc- the nucleus becomes unstable and they're also emitting particles so when this ratio [IB] in a good place. What does that mean ratio in a good place? So for low atomic numbers they found the that a really good ratio is a 1 to 1 ratio for every proton, you have a neutron and that is apparently very stable, but as you get in the larger larger atomic numbers you're actually going to need more neutrons to overcome those repulsions that protons they're feeling so we're going to have to need more so we're going to need 1.5 for every 1 one proton 1.5 nuclei sorry neutrons for every one proton so let's take a look at lead.
Lead is sometimes can mean different isotopes can be radioactive and different isotopes are not depending on the number of neutrons that are in it, so let's look at this one. This has mass of 206 and atomic number of 82. This atomic number tells me I have 82 protons and this mass number tells me that I have 124 neutrons 82+124 will equal 206 okay so let's find the ratio to see if this is an okay ratio. Well when I put a ratio of the neutrons on top of the protons it's 124 to 82 which then ends up to 1, 1.51 over 1 so the ratio was 1.5 this is a large atomic number that's okay this is actually stable one this is a maximum that it can be, if this was 208, then we start going under nuclear we have a nuclear reaction. Right this is 206 and the ratio is 1.5 so we're okay.
So how do I get those numbers as figyres? Well let's go over her. Here's what we call a band of stability here at the bottom line is the neutron to proton ratio is 1 to 1 so this is the slope of 1 this top line is what is the ratio of 1.5 to 1 so this is the slope of 1.5. Where this dotted line is in the middle this kind of fuzzy dotted line, that is where things are stable so if you find if you may figure out the neutron to proton ratio and you find that it's in this band of stability, then you're not going to have a nuclear reaction you're actually the nucleus is pretty stable okay but if you find that you're outside this like you're down here or you're up here, you're going to actually have a nuclear reaction or some sort of nuclear decay and it could be a fine thing it can happen even over millions of years and we're okay or it could be something disastrous so you want to make sure that we're in this band of stability to make sure that we have a stable nucleus and that's nuclear ability. |
The 20 enjoyable, interactive classroom activities that are included will help your students understand the text in amusing ways. Fun Classroom Activities include group projects, games, critical thinking activities, brainstorming sessions, writing poems, drawing or sketching, and more that will allow your students to interact with each other, be creative, and ultimately grasp key concepts from the text by "doing" rather than simply studying.
1. Crossword puzzle
Write your own crossword puzzle using information in the book as clues.
Plato was Aristotle's teacher. Read one of Plato's writings on politics and decide whether he would agree of disagree with Aristotle's beliefs and why.
Write a eulogy that you would have given at Aristotle's funeral to mark the importance of his work.
4. Book cover
There were not paper book covers with great illustrations back in Ancient Greece. Pretend that you are ready to republish the book today, and you...
This section contains 541 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
With Your Teen: Tips for Parents
The parents of children in grades 6 through
8 are often apprehensive about the changes their children are, or
will be, going through. This brochure is intended to normalize some
of the behavior parents can expect from children entering puberty.
While most clinicians are quite comfortable discussing the physical
changes of puberty, this brochure discusses the social and emotional
changes that are also occurring (most importantly, the growing independence
of teenagers and the need for increased responsibility on their part).
Through the American media, parents are saturated with "typical" teenager
problems (drug abuse, pregnancy, and violence). Many parents respond
by restricting their children's independence in an effort to keep
them safe. While this may be effective temporarily, it can set up
later conflicts between parents and child. The early establishment
of reasonable limits around children's behavior and appropriate parental
monitoring reduces these later conflicts. Since families vary widely
in their attitudes toward teenage independence and in their ability
to access community supports for their teenagers, this topic can be
the start of a dialogue between the clinician and the family about
appropriate ways to encourage the safe, increased independence of
The 3 major themes of the brochure are as follows:
How to Use This Tool
- Typical behaviors and feelings that teenagers go through.
Communication. The most common mistake that parents can
make with their children is telling them that they understand
without having heard the whole story. The brochure provides
guidance for active listening skills that are especially important
as the child enters adolescence.
- Importance of parental monitoring and limit setting. The brochure
offers direction to parents about monitoring their children's
behavior. Encouraging appropriate independence is not the
same as relaxing parental monitoring. Because most risk-taking
behavior among young teenagers occurs between the time
when school is out and dinner, parents need to continue
observing their children's whereabouts, activities, and friendships.
The brochure includes information about warning signs parents
can identify in their children.
- It is best used as an adjunct to a discussion about the physical
changes of puberty. Some clinicians begin by asking the child
if they have learned about puberty in school and assessing the
child's current level of knowledge. At this point, clinicians
can then ask, "I'm sure there are many other changes going
on that you can't see with your eyes, aren't there?"
- Clinicians also can speak directly with the parents to elicit their
concerns about their child's puberty. The brochure offers a way
to talk with parents about these other adolescent issues. Many
parents can remember their own early adolescence and the
issues they had with their parents. It can be helpful to ask parents
to recall how they behaved and coped at this age.
- Use this brochure, along with other AAP materials, when
addressing school groups and Parent-Teacher Associations
(PTAs)/Parent-Teacher Organizations (PTOs) about the
changes during puberty.
- Although written for parents, many teenagers may also be
interested in reading the information that is provided. It is
worthwhile to encourage this.
Kids Samples Home
TIPP® and Connected Kids on CD-ROM |
Solar energy is becoming more and more prevalent every year, and nowadays almost everyone is at least vaguely familiar with the concept. As of mid-2017, the U.S. has a total solar power capacity of 47.1 gigawatts, which is enough to power 9.1 million homes, and that number has only grown since then. Solar panels have known to last more than 30 years of continuous renewable production. Clearly solar energy is more popular than ever as people continue to make the switch to renewable energy sources. But how does solar energy work? What goes into making solar panels, and what other forms of renewable technology are there?
Solar Energy: The Basics
Simply put, solar panels and solar energy systems convert the sun’s light into usable electrical energy. This form of renewable energy creates no byproducts, like the burning of fossil fuels, making a cleaner source of electricity. Additionally, since light is not a limited resource, solar energy is not in danger of becoming unavailable due to overuse.
How Do Solar Panels Work?
Photovoltaic panels, more commonly known as solar panels, are one of the two main components involved in capturing solar power to use as electricity. The panels themselves rely on a variety of manufacturing processes to create, including reaction injection molding, in which two liquid components are mixed and injected into the mold where they chemically react and cure. Without today’s modern manufacturing technology, solar panels would be impractical, if not impossible, to make.
Solar panels work through a variety of complex mechanisms. Solar panels are most frequently made of silicon and phosphorous, creating a positively charged and negatively charged layer. When light hits the panels, it encourages the movement of electrons between these layers, which creates a source of energy that can be stored and used for electricity. This power usually gets stored in a battery, or it can go to directly power electrical devices. When stored, this electricity can be used to power homes, cars, electronics, and more. Using a battery to store the power gathered by the solar panels allows the electricity use to be more consistent, which can be incredibly useful in environments that don’t get consistent sunlight.
Other Eco-Friendly Tech
Solar panels aren’t the only relatively recent technological advancement that helps the environment. Other eco-friendly technologies include windmills, hydro-power energy systems, and even water treatment plants. Believe it or not, water isn’t as unlimited as a resource as many people think. Fresh water can be hard to come by, and water treatment plants are essential to ensuring people continue to have access to usable water. Around 20% of wastewater comes from agricultural operations and commercial discharge, and treating this water properly helps to protect the environment and keep water available for use.
Plenty of modern technologies that exist today help keep energy as clean as possible and ensure available resources for everyone. In the years to come, it’s likely solar panel and other eco-safe technologies will continue to advance, creating more environmentally friendly options for maintaining our current standards of living. |
Shingles - Symptoms and Treatment
Shingles is an outbreak of rash or blisters on the skin that is caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox the varicella-zoster virus. More than 1 of every 10 people who had chicken pox as children get shingles as adults, usually over age 60. Shingles is also more common in people with weakened immune systems from HIV infection, chemotherapy or radiation treatment, transplant operations, and stress. After you've had chickenpox, the virus lies dormant in your nerves. The chicken pox virus remains dormant or inactive in nerve root cells of the body. In about 1 out of 5 people, the virus "wakes up," often many years after the chickenpox infection. The virus then travels along a sensory nerve into the skin causing a painful rash known as shingles. Early signs of shingles include burning or shooting pain and tingling or itching, usually on one side of the body or face. Under certain circumstances, such as emotional stress , immune deficiency or with cancer , the virus re-activates causing shingles. VZV is the same virus that causes chickenpox. After an individual has chickenpox, this virus lives in the nerves and is never fully cleared from the body. Usually the virus does not cause any problems; however, the virus can reappear years later, causing shingles. It occurs only in people who have had chickenpox in the past and represents a reactivation of the dormant varicella virus. Shingles causes a painful rash of small blisters that typically appear on the body, often in a band on the chest and back.
Shingles is a viral infection of the nerve roots . Shingles is most common in older adults and people who have weakened immune systems because of stress, injury, certain medications, or other factors. The virus remains in a resting phase in these nerve cells for years before it is reactivated and grows down the nerves to the skin to produce shingles.Shingles patients are infectious, both from virus in the lesions and in some instances the nose and throat. The virus has not been destroyed but remains dormant in our nerve cells, ready to strike again later in life. The woman had the typical one-sided band of rash and pain of this common neurological disorder. After you've had chickenpox, the virus lies dormant in your nerves. Although painful, typically shingles isn't a serious condition. Sometimes, however, the rash can lead to a debilitating complication called postherpetic neuralgia.Later in life, a decline in immune system function, brought on by aging or illness, leads to reactivation of VZV. Shingles patients often wear loose or no clothes over the rash because simple light touch is painful. It can occur at any age, but it is most common in people over the age of 50. Significant pain can last for months or years in 10–15% of all people who have had shingles. It is uncommon to have shingles more than once, but about 1 in 50 people have shingles two or more times in their life. Commonly known as the herpes zoster virus, shingles is a late manifestation of the chicken pox virus known as varicella zoster. Early diagnosis and treatment is important to minimize the symptoms and reduce the risk of complications that may compromise vision.
Causes of Shingles
Common Causes of Shingles :
Symptoms of Shingles
Some common Symptoms of Shingles :
Treatment of Shingles
Some common Treatment of Shingles :
Disclaimer : All information on www.healthatoz.info is for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice. For specific medical advice, diagnoses, and treatment, please consult your doctor. |
The Temple of Apollo was built in the Doric Style, with 6 columns at each end, and 15 columns along each side. They are made from single pieces of stone (monolithic), quarried from the limestone ridge nearby. Each column is over 23 feet high! Today, seven of the columns remain standing, with a bit of the entablature (top) resting atop these columns
- Take a look at this plan of Ancient Corinth. Can you imagine it in real time, back in the day? Discuss what the area might have looked like, and how people flowed through and used the area.
Excavations of Ancient Corinth have been carried out by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, starting in 1896 and continuing until the present day. Read about the excavations, a brief history of Corinth, and then peruse the online catalog of findings. Discover several items, from different categories, and then discuss why they call to you. It might be a powerful image, an extraordinary statue (I love cloth folds, in marble), architectural drawings, etc.
Look at these drawings of the Temple of Apollo over time (1751-1927) . How do artists choose to represent their reality? Do you think it is a good idea to leave out roads, villages, mountains, in the name of artistic license? |
Investigating the Rock Cycle Through Writing and Illustrating
In this writing and illustrating activity, students will be able to follow a simple rock cycle to follow the life of "Rocky the Rock". After investigating the rock cycle, students will then be able to illustrate the rock cycle, along with writing the story of "Rocky" to show their understanding.
1. Show understanding of the rock cycle.
2. Write fact based stories to illustrate that understanding.
1. Igneous Rock through weathering and then lithification becomes Sedimentary rock; Sedimentary rock through metamorphism becomes Metamorphic rock; Metamorphic rock through melting to magma and then crystallization becomes Igneous rock.
2. Most often the rock cycle starts with Igneous rock because everything starts as magma.
3. The rock cycle does not have to follow the predictable pattern; Metamorphic rock can change to Sediments and dissolved ions, thus becoming Sedimentary rock, etc.
Context for Use
Resource Type: Activities:Lab Activity, Classroom Activity
Grade Level: Intermediate (3-5)
Description and Teaching Materials
The teacher will give each student (or group of students) a piece of paper.
They will make a large circle and divide the paper into 8 sections.
The teacher will then go through the cycle with the students and illustrate what is happening (one event per section).
Students will then write a story about the adventures of Rocky the Rock as he/she moves through the rock cycle, breaking down and changing.
Students will be evaluated on their knowledge of the rock cycle and how their stories show this knowledge.
Students will share their stories with the class.
The rock cycle will then be reviewed with select students if needed.
Teaching Notes and Tips
Students will also be assessed in usage of key words, such as igneous rock, erosion, sediments, weathering, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, and magma. |
What is tonsillitis?
The large tonsils are two oval-shaped areas of lymphoid tissue that occur on the left and the right side of the throat. These tonsils are also referred to as the palatine tonsils. In addition there are two lingual tonsils located at the base and the back of the left and right tongue. Tonsillitis is inflammation of one or both of the tonsils. The adenoids are lymphoid tissue located at the back the pharynx that often become infected with the same microbes at the same time as the tonsils.
Is tonsillitis contagious?
Most acute infections of the tonsils are due to viruses or bacteria and usually is contagious by direct person-to-person contact.
- Tonsillitis caused by a virus infection usually is contagious for about 7-10 days.
- Bacterial tonsillitis can remain contagious for about two weeks.
Some individuals can become chronic carriers of potentially infectious bacteria and can be mildly contagious for long periods of time. Persons that are infected by bacteria and are treated with antibiotics are considered non-contagious after approximately 24-48 hours of appropriate antibiotic therapy.
Swollen tonsils can accompany a number of different infections of the upper respiratory tract. Tonsillitis refers to inflammation of the tonsils, which typically occurs due to infection
from viruses or bacteria. Tonsillitis may be accompanied by other symptoms like
- sore throat,
- painful swallowing,
- headache, and
- a coating of yellow pus on the tonsils.
How will I know if I have tonsillitis?
Symptoms that suggest tonsillitis include
The tonsils themselves are usually enlarged, reddish, and depending upon the infecting organism may have whitish/yellowish to gray-appearing pus areas on the tonsil's surface. The diagnosis of tonsillitis is usually made clinically by a health-care professional after simply observing the tonsils. However, other tests such as X-rays of the soft tissues or a CT scan may be ordered if there's some concern about more serious spread of the infection into the neck. In addition, throat cultures are done if strep infection is suspected while blood tests may be ordered to detect certain viral infections like mononucleosis.
How is tonsillitis spread?
Tonsillitis is usually spread by direct and/or close contact with an infected person. Contaminated droplets produced by coughing, sneezing or kissing can be easily transmitted to another person with both viral and bacterial infections.
When will I know I'm cured of tonsillitis?
Individuals can be cured of tonsillitis, both bacterial and viral types when the symptoms of swollen reddish tonsils and other symptoms go away (about 7-10 days). Many individuals require no treatment, while some with a bacterial cause may need antibiotics. However, there are some individuals that may have symptoms go away, only to have them return within weeks or months. These individuals are not cured of tonsillitis but have developed chronic, recurrent tonsillitis that eventually may require surgical removal of the tonsils.
When should I contact a health-care professional about tonsillitis?
Usually, tonsillitis is not considered an emergency medical condition. However, you should contact a health-care professional if you have
- a sore throat,
- a fever greater than 38.3 C or 101 F,
- swollen and tender tonsils with whitish or yellowish to gray colored coating, or pain on only one side of the throat.
You should seek emergency medical care if you
Medically Reviewed on 2/13/2018
REFERENCE: Shah, UK., MD. "Tonsillitis and peritonsillar abscess." Medscape. Updated: Jan 19, 2017. |
We have seen that total spending equals total income (part 4). It has been argued that it is spending that creates (or determines) income (part 9). This can be inferred from the observation that some spending can occur independently of income (part 10).
Now that we have introduced ‘government money‘ and ‘commercial bank money‘, we are in a position to understand in basic terms how fiscal policy (government spending and taxing) is conducted and its direct financial effects. At this stage, the treatment is still cursory. There are more details that can be added in at a later time.
We have seen that a national currency enters the economy when government spends, and that the recipients of the government spending can use the currency for various purposes, including to purchase goods and services. Government is therefore an original source of funds.
There is another original source of funds that gives people the ability to make purchases. This other source is private credit creation. Put simply, a household or firm can borrow from a bank or other financial institution and use the funds to spend.
We saw in part 2 that to establish a currency, government needs to do three things:
1. Define a unit of account (e.g. dollar).
2. Impose taxes that can only be paid in that unit of account.
3. Spend or lend the currency into existence.
The most basic purpose of taxation (introduced in step 2 of the sequence) is to create a demand for the currency. Provided taxes are effectively enforced, we in the non-government will have a need to obtain the currency, because it is the only means of paying taxes. |
Importance of pet animals in our life. The Importance of Pets in Our Lives 2022-12-10
Importance of pet animals in our life Rating:
Second language acquisition is the process by which individuals learn a new language in addition to their native language. It is a complex process that involves a variety of factors, including the learner's age, motivation, and language exposure, as well as the nature of the target language and the teaching methods used. Research on second language acquisition has produced a wealth of information about how people learn languages and the factors that influence their success in doing so.
One important factor in second language acquisition is the learner's age. It is generally believed that younger learners are more successful at learning a new language than older learners, due to the fact that their brains are more plastic and receptive to learning new language structures. However, research has shown that older learners can also be successful at learning a second language, provided they are motivated and have sufficient language exposure.
Another important factor in second language acquisition is the learner's motivation. People who are highly motivated to learn a new language tend to be more successful in their efforts than those who are less motivated. This may be due to the fact that motivated learners are more likely to seek out opportunities for language exposure and to engage in language-learning activities on a regular basis.
The nature of the target language is also an important factor in second language acquisition. Some languages are more similar to the learner's native language than others, which can make them easier to learn. For example, speakers of Romance languages (such as Spanish, French, and Italian) may find it easier to learn other Romance languages due to their shared linguistic roots. On the other hand, languages that are more dissimilar to the learner's native language (such as Chinese or Arabic) may be more challenging to learn.
Finally, the teaching methods used can also influence the success of second language acquisition. Research has shown that a combination of traditional classroom instruction and immersive language learning experiences (such as studying abroad or participating in a language immersion program) can be most effective in helping learners achieve fluency in a second language.
In conclusion, second language acquisition is a complex process that involves a variety of factors. Research on this topic has helped to shed light on the ways in which people learn languages and the factors that influence their success in doing so. By understanding these factors, educators and language learners can develop more effective strategies for language learning and improve their chances of success.
The Importance of Pets!
They teach us to be responsible, love us unconditionally, and are always there for us when we need them. Because the more you take them out the more obedient they seem to get. While it is true that wild and exotic animals should be left in their natural habitat, the same cannot be said about domestic animals. These animals also help farmers to earn bread for their families. Thanks to evolution, They can also detect changes in our body language and tone of voice according to which they adjust their behavior. They can read our body language and seem to know when to cuddle.
Having a pet helps them in bonding, playing, etc. They are the ones who will curl up next to you in your bed when you decide to stay in for the weekend. Having a pet will expand your mind. Pets can actually help kids learn a lot of things, and also help them to become responsible. Picture waking up one morning and not feeling the six mile jog you told yourself you would do the previous night. Therapy dogs visit nursing homes, clinics, and disabled care facilities to connect with patients and improve their quality of life by making them more friendly and encouraging contact and activities. Getting involved with an animal can improve your life making it significantly more positive and joyous.
They give you a sense of routine and purpose. They provide us with companionship and emotional support, lowering our stress levels and feelings of isolation while also encouraging us to participate in more social activities. Some people like animals such as What Are The Benefits Of Having A Pet In Your Life? If you spend even a small portion of your time with your pets or any other pet animals then your body in response would release positive hormones such as serotonin, oxytocin, and prolactin which are beneficial for your good mood. Did you ever think about how are animals treated? In summary, owning a pet will change your life and bring you so much joy and love. When people are around their pets they can instantly feel better and find the motivation they need to keep moving forward. An example of a test is the Draize eye exam.
For a sample, the 163 million dogs and cats restrained in the United States engulf about 20% of the percentage of dietary strength that humans fulfill and an approximate 33% of the animal-derived strength. People back then acted differently. Animals experimentation is a process in which animals including rats, mice, cats and dogs are tested by physicians, lab workers, researchers, chemists and experts for certain needs. According to a study, the average walking time for people went up at least 30 minutes when they bought a pet as compared to when they did not have one. When it comes to stress and sorrow, pets may be lifesavers. There are more cars, more deadlines to meet, more patients in the hospital, and so on. This Persuasive Essay On Pet Therapy 876 Words 4 Pages Animal lovers all over the world can attest to how good it feels to interact with their pets.
Most animal proprietors will certainly know exactly how fantastic possessing a pet can be; they will certainly understand the companionship and also just how lovely bonds can be developed in between pet and also human. The relationship of a pet can more easily lessen loneliness, and maximum dogs stand a tremendous incentive for a healthy workout, which can instantly boost your personality and rid sorrow. However having a fuzzy friend suggests you will always have a little living being, waiting patiently for you at home as well as prepared to invite you with a wagging tail or a purr. The sensory acts of hugging and touching an affectionate animal can immediately prompt a calming feeling where you were otherwise stressed. Some of the most common ones include mice, rats, fish, farm animals, cats, dogs, and various non-human animals.
However, there is an upside to this. Even stiffened criminals in prison exhibit long-term modifications in their manner after interacting with pets, multiple of them encountering mutual appreciation for the first time. They offer comfort and support when the world can seem overwhelming. Pets allow you to be responsible for someone other than yourself. Having a family pet can open up your globe.
In other situations, dogs have been trained to deal with settings that are too risky for humans such as sniffing out explosives. Anticipatory guidance: Having a dog in the family. Dogs Can Recognize Positive And Negative Emotions On Human Faces Cuddling with you, getting upon, and licking your hands are some of the affections performed by your pets towards you whenever they feel that their owners are in a stressful situation. Animals such as horses and dogs can also provide us a lot more whether it 's for companionship, protection, or work. No pets should be provided a human diet unless it is cooked meat or fresh fruits and vegetables that stand comfortably for your special species. This can be quite irritating. Did you realize the importance of having a pet? A hug, a jump in our laps, a nudging, and a playfulness can make us forget the struggles of the day.
Cookies are required to understand how you and other visitors use our websites and applications and to improve your browsing experience. Pets have a way of helping their owners relax. These individuals have most likely never ever owned a dedicated dog or caring pet cat and also their words could not be additionally from the fact. Some studies have shown that pet owners generally do have low blood pressure as compared to others. The benefits to having an animal are countless. KimmelPsychology has provided a monthly E-Letter for over 16 years, which is educational, informative, and helpful. |
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Common Core: Standard
Common Core: ELA
Common Core: Math
Topic: Common Core Learning Standards
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The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), one of several institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), conducts and funds research aimed at understanding normal brain development, as well as disease-related disorders of the brain and nervous system. Other NIH institutes and centers also support research on disorders that may affect development. Among several projects, scientists are studying genetic mechanisms and identifying novel genes involved with brain development. Animal models are helping scientists to better understand the pathology of human disease, and to discover how the sizes of tissues and organs are impacted by developmental variability. Other researchers hope to gain a better understanding of normal brain development and the molecular and cellular mechanisms of microcephaly.
Information from the National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus
Microcephaly is a medical condition in which the circumference of the head is smaller than normal because the brain has not developed properly or has stopped growing. Microcephaly can be present at birth or it may develop in the first few years of life. It is most often caused by genetic abnormalities that interfere with the growth of the cerebral cortex during the early months of fetal development. Babies may also be born with microcephaly if, during pregnancy, their mother abused drugs or alcohol; became infected with a cytomegalovirus, rubella (German measles), varicella (chicken pox) virus, or possibly Zika virus; was exposed to certain toxic chemicals; or had untreated phenylketonuria (PKU, a harmful buildup of the amino acid phenylalanine in the blood). Microcephaly is associated with Down’s syndrome, chromosomal syndromes, and neurometabolic syndromes.
With viral-induced brain injury, such as with the Zika virus, there is often widespread tissue and cell death leading to brain shrinkage rather than simply impaired growth. The Zika virus is also associated with retinal lesions in about a third of cases, often leading to blindness.
Depending on the severity of the accompanying syndrome, children with microcephaly may have impaired cognitive development, delayed motor functions and speech, facial distortions, dwarfism or short stature, hyperactivity, seizures, difficulties with coordination and balance, and other brain or neurological abnormalities.
There is no treatment for microcephaly that can return a child’s head to a normal size or shape. Treatment focuses on ways to decrease the impact of the associated deformities and neurological disabilities. Children with microcephaly and developmental delays are usually evaluated by a pediatric neurologist and followed by a medical management team. Early childhood intervention programs that involve physical, speech, and occupational therapists help to maximize abilities and minimize dysfunction. Medications are often used to control seizures, hyperactivity, and neuromuscular symptoms. Genetic counseling may help families understand the risk for microcephaly in subsequent pregnancies.
Some children with microcephaly will have normal intelligence and a head that will grow bigger, but they may track below the normal growth curves for head circumference. Some children may have only mild disability, while those with more severe cases may face significant learning disabilities, cognitive delays, or develop other neurological disorders. Many, if not most, cases if Zika microcephaly will be very severe, possibly requiring lifelong intensive care. |
When every opportunity to learn something is associated with some form of work, especially in a form that your child dislikes, they’ll eventually begin to negatively associate learning with work. A love of learning is based on curiosity and exploration. Parents can support curiosity and exploration through interacting with their children by making learning fun and adventurous.
The fact that a love of learning is fostered by allowing creative exploration may make you question why your child has to deal with projects and tough assignments at school. Teachers assign these as part of project based learning opportunities. They create quantifiable work products, which can be translated into a grade, or which satisfy a measurable standard. The fact is, school assignments help teachers measure the growth and proficiency of their students skills. In private education, this allows them to identify areas of weakness, building on their strengths, and plan further instruction.
As a parent, you have the freedom to make your student’s assignments and projects something adventurous. Creating more “pop-quizzes” or assignments in the home will only hinder your students desire to learn. It is healthy to allow your student to pursue curiosity simply for curiosity’s sake. Ultimately, this will teach your child learning doesn’t have to be a job, it can be fun!
Allow your child creative freedom
By encouraging exploration and avoiding turning every learning opportunity into a job, you can help your child feel free to embrace their curiosities and engage in the world around them. Exposing them to a variety of experiences such as museums, cultural events, plays, sporting events, and science centers are all great examples of experiences that can stimulate your child’s curiosity. It’s important to keep in mind that in order to enjoy learning, your child has to be able to pursue their own interests.
At St. Barnabas Episcopal School we want your child to enjoy learning. Student engagement and the desire to pursue knowledge are integral to your child’s future success. High academic standards coupled with opportunities for exploration make our school the ideal environment for your child’s education. Contact us today to schedule a tour or to learn more. |
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4. Triangles – G4, G5, G6
About this Lecture
In this mini-lecture, we cover the part of Topic G4 on triangles, Topic G5 on basic triangle congruence criteria, and the part of Topic G6 on triangle congruence and similarity. In particular, we focus on: (i) four types of triangles: equilateral triangle, isosceles triangle, right triangle (with hypotenuse), and scalene triangle; (ii) defining what it means for two triangles to be congruent; (iii) the four triangle congruence tests used to determine whether two triangles are congruent: side-side-side (SSS), side-angle-side (SAS), angle-side-angle (ASA), and right hypotenuse side (RHS); (iv) defining what it means for two triangles to be similar using side-length ratios and by comparing angles; (v) characterising triangles by angle (acute-angled versus obtuse-angled triangles); and (vi) properties of isosceles triangles, where we show that the base angles in an isosceles triangle are equal and that the bisector of the third angle is the perpendicular bisector of the line between the two base angles.
In this course, Professor Jason Lotay (University of Oxford) discusses topics G1-G6 in the Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) Mathematics (1MA1) Specification for Foundation Tier. In the first mini-lecture, we cover the conventional terms and notations used in geometry (Topic G1). In the second mini-lecture, we use ruler and compass construction to create perpendicular bisectors and bisect angles (Topic G2). In the third mini-lecture, we explore types of angles and how we can use the properties of angles at a point on straight lines and on parallel lines to prove useful identities (Topic G3). In the fourth mini-lecture, we look at triangles and show how to use triangle congruence tests (Topics G4, G5, G6). In the fifth mini-lecture, we introduce six important quadrilaterals and use our understanding of angles, bisectors, and triangles to prove properties of quadrilaterals (Topics G4, G6). In the sixth mini-lecture, we tie together all the concepts we have learned in this course to find the length of the diagonal in a regular pentagon with side lengths of one unit (Topic G6).
Jason Lotay is a Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He has previously held academic positions at UCL, Imperial College London, and Berkeley. His research interests are in differential geometry, particularly related to special holonomy, minimal submanifolds, gauge theory and geometric flows, and instantons.
Cite this Lecture
Lotay, J. (2022, August 30). Properties and Constructions I – Edexcel GCSE (1MA1): Foundation Tier - Triangles – G4, G5, G6 [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/geometry-and-measures-properties-and-constructions-i-pearson-edexcel-gcse-mathematics-9-1-foundation-tier/triangles-g4-g5-g6-a156fe83-d242-4595-9273-19869697ce44
Lotay, J. "Properties and Constructions I – Edexcel GCSE (1MA1): Foundation Tier – Triangles – G4, G5, G6." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 30 Aug 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/geometry-and-measures-properties-and-constructions-i-pearson-edexcel-gcse-mathematics-9-1-foundation-tier/triangles-g4-g5-g6-a156fe83-d242-4595-9273-19869697ce44 |
The larynx is the part of the throat often called the “voice box” in humans. Laryngitis is an inflammation of the larynx. It may result from upper respiratory tract infection or by direct irritation from inhalation of dust, smoke, irritating gas, or foreign objects. It can also be caused by trauma, excessive meowing, or a tumor of the larynx. Laryngitis may accompany infectious rhinotracheitis and calicivirus infection in cats. Fluid buildup and swelling (edema) of the mucous membranes is often a key part of laryngitis; if severe, the upper airway may be obstructed. Edema of the larynx can also result from allergic reactions, placement of a breathing tube during anesthesia, or surgery in the area.
A cough is often the first noticeable sign of laryngitis. The cough is harsh, dry, and short at first, but becomes soft and moist later and may be very painful. Fluid buildup and swelling of the larynx may develop within hours, causing an increased effort to inhale and high-pitched breathing arising from the larynx. Vocal changes may be evident. Bad breath and difficult, noisy breathing may be evident, and the cat may stand with its head lowered and mouth open. Swallowing is difficult and painful. Death due to suffocation may occur, especially if the animal is over-exercised or stressed, or if a mass, lesion, or swelling is severely obstructing the larynx.
The veterinarian can make a tentative diagnosis based on the clinical signs and physical examination of the cat. A definitive diagnosis requires examination of the larynx with an endoscope; in cats, anesthesia is usually required during this procedure. If the larynx is obstructed, an opening will be made in the neck to allow a tracheotomy tube to be placed; this tube enables the animal to breathe while the problem is being corrected. Identification and treatment of the underlying cause is essential. Corticosteroids may be prescribed to reduce swelling caused by inflammation. Diuretics may be used to relieve fluid buildup in the larynx and lungs. Antibiotics may also be necessary. Control of pain with medication, especially in cats, allows the animal to eat and thus speeds recovery. Humidifying the air, feeding soft foods, and confining the cat to a clean area may also help.
Paralysis of the Larynx in Cats
Laryngeal paralysis, a disorder of the upper airway, is rare in cats. The condition occurs when the cartilages of the larynx do not open and close normally during respiration.
Signs include a dry cough, voice changes, and noisy breathing that slowly progresses to obvious difficulty in breathing during stress and exertion, and eventually to collapse. Regurgitation and vomiting may occur. The progression of signs usually takes months or even years before respiratory distress is evident. Your veterinarian will generally need to examine your cat's upper airway with an endoscope (laryngoscopy) to confirm the diagnosis. This procedure is done using light anesthesia.
Initially, treatment is directed at relieving the signs of airway obstruction. Tranquilizers and corticosteroids are temporarily effective in mild cases. Severe obstruction may require the placement of a tube into the trachea (tracheotomy). Surgery to correct the problem is often successful. |
GROUP SIZE: small
TIME: Several Days
TYPE OF ACTIVITY: Student Investigation
TEACHING STRATEGY: Open Discovery Guided Discovery
CONCEPTS: Spinoff Technology Research Benefits
SKILLS: Research Hypothesizing Inference
Objective: to help students understand the “Spinoff” benefits of the space program for those of us on Earth.
Materials: Various books, pamphlets web sites on “spin offs” from the space program.
Procedure: 1. Ask your students to think of the things we now have because of the space program. Write the responses on the board and have someone keep a written record of them. (Most of the initial responses will quite likely be about the Space Shuttle, missiles or rockets, etc., and there will surely be a number of benefits the class will be unaware of.
2. When they have finished, explain that there are numerous benefits from the exploration of space and they can be broken into some basic categories:
a. Communication Satellites
b. Weather Satellites
d. Oceanic Observers
g. Other Technological Benefits (like freeze-dried food, alternative energy sources, computers, fabrics, metal processing, etc.)
3. Break the class into seven groups and have them research the benefits of space with a focus on their specific area of concern.
4. Have the students spend some time searching for information and collecting their data. Encourage students to visit NASA sites for information on the benefits of the space program.
5. After gathering their data, have the students compile the information in a booklet with illustrations of some of the benefits they have found.
6. Bring the class together for a discussion and sharing of the booklets. Prior to class, write the original list of benefits the students had thought of on the board and then have each group present their booklet to the rest of the group. As benefits are presented, have someone write on the board those that were not brought up in the original discussion and compare the two lists. |
Milk components are a common topic related to dairy cattle. For example, when researching dairy breeds, one fact you will notice is that Jersey cows have more components in their milk than Holsteins do.
So what are the components of milk? There are three main categories:
- Other solids.
When a cow’s rumen digests fiber, it produces fatty acids. Some of these fatty acids are processed in the udder and released into the milk, accounting for about half of the fat naturally found in milk. The other half of the fat enters the milk from the bloodstream, often coming from the cow’s liver or backfat, or directly from fats absorbed in the diet.
Because fiber is important to producing milk fat, cows generally have higher levels of fat in their milk when fed diets high in natural forages of good quality. Cows are sometimes fed low-fiber, high-energy diets to increase total milk production. Needless to say, this extra production comes at the expense of the fat component.
Fat content is generally expressed as a percentage. This is important because a high-producing cow like a Holstein may yield more pounds of fat per lactation than a Jersey. However, a gallon of Holstein milk contains a higher percentage of water than a gallon of Jersey milk does. Total milk yield and percentage of components are usually inversely related.
Protein makes its way into milk thanks to the action of rumen microbes that start the process of breaking proteins down into amino acids. Mammary glands later reconstruct the amino acids back into proteins with the aid of glucose. Also, small amounts of albumin and immunoglobulin proteins enter milk directly through the bloodstream.
It is interesting to note that the chemical makeup of the protein component can vary from cow to cow. Casein is the main type of protein found in cow’s milk, but it can come in two forms, known as A1 and A2. The latter type is considered easier for humans to digest.
A deficiency of dietary protein will indeed reduce the amount of protein in a cow’s milk. However, once the cow’s protein needs are met, feeding additional protein will not further increase amount of protein in the milk. Beyond this point, protein content is strongly influenced by genetics.
Like fat, the protein content of a cow’s milk is expressed as a percentage.
Many times, when milk components are under discussion, fat and protein are the main solids of interest. However, there are many other solids that make milk:
- Lactose: A type of sugar; the carbohydrate component of milk.
- Minerals: Including calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium.
- Vitamins: Particularly vitamins A and B complex.
Why Components Matter
- Components indicate cow health. A healthy, well-fed cow with minimal stress will have plenty of fat, protein, and other nutrients to spare for her milk. On the other hand, a cow suffering from mastitis or from rumen acidosis will show a considerable drop in fat and protein components.
- Components are important for human nutrition. Two glasses of milk from two different cows are vastly different. A glass of milk from a cow bred and fed for high total milk production is mostly water. A glass of milk from a cow bred and fed with an eye to components contains more of the proteins, vitamins, and minerals necessary for good health. Even the fats are beneficial to humans, as they are important for building cells.
- Components offer value-added opportunities. Fat and protein are necessary for making butter, cream, and cheese, among other dairy products.
- Components give rich flavor and texture to dairy products. Milk fat and other solids are what make ice cream creamy. In fact, one of the factors that separates gourmet ice cream from just plain old ice cream is a higher percentage of fat.
Choosing a Breed of Cattle
If you are considering dairy or dual-purpose cattle, you will want to know the milk production and component percentages of the common breeds. This book has the answers. Free sample pages are available here. |
The word conclusion refers to the ending of something and we want to end our writing in the most effective way possible. Luckily, many English teachers, editors, and authors agree that conclusion transition words are very important to use, but there’s one problem that all writers face when it comes to using them correctly: many don’t know what they are! In this guide, you’ll learn about the most common conclusion transition words and phrases so you can make your writing more effective than ever before.
- Types of Transition Words
- Conclusion Transition Words – Definition
- Commonly Used Conclusion Transition Words
- Examples on How to Use Conclusion Transition Words in A Sentence
- What is a concluding transition sentence?
- How do you start a conclusion paragraph?
- What is a good conclusion word?
- What are 5 examples of transitions?
A transition word or phrase is a word or short phrase that connects two related parts of a sentence. It can be used to show change, contrast, comparison, addition, or other relationships between ideas.
There are several types of transition words and phrases that help the writer connect two sentences are as follows:-
- Compare/Contrast: They indicate a contrast between two ideas or actions. This can be done in one sentence, but it is often done in two separate sentences, with a comma to connect them. Contrast transition words may also come at the beginning of a sentence, rather than at its end.
- Chronology: These transition words are used to show a sequence of events in time, or to compare two or more actions that happened at different times.
- Cause/Effect: These transition words and phrases show a cause-and-effect relationship between two ideas or actions. They are often used to introduce an explanation of how something happened, why it happened, or what effect it had on something else.
- Illustration/Examples: These transition words and phrases show how one idea or action is like another, or how it might be considered to be an example of something else. They can also indicate that one idea is being used to explain another, or that it may be seen as an example of a broader concept.
- Addition: A transition word or phrase can also be used to show that one idea is being added to another, or that it may be considered an addition to a broader concept.
- Clarification: Sometimes a writer needs to use a transition word or phrase to clarify or explain something in an essay, story, report or another type of writing.
- Qualification: The transition words are used to qualify or restrict a previous statement.
- Summary/Conclusion: The transition words are used to connect a summary statement or conclusion with what has come before it in an essay, story, report, or another type of writing.
- Sequence: Sequencing transition words and phrases are used to show that one idea or action comes before another, after another, or at about the same time as another in a sequence of events.
A conclusion transition word (also called a bridge, by some) helps readers move smoothly from your main idea to your conclusion. Without it, there is a risk that your conclusion will seem like an afterthought. A good transition accomplishes three things:
- It shows readers that you are wrapping up your discussion;
- It implies a connection between what you’ve just said and
- What you’re about to say; and sets up whatever you’re going to say next as obvious and inevitable.
There are many different conclusion transition words. Each can be used to subtly alter your argument or suggest a new line of thought. For example, you might decide to use nevertheless instead of but or consequently instead of and so. Whichever one you choose, always be sure that it fits logically with what you’ve already said before moving on to your conclusion.
The conclusion transition words that you choose should also reflect how confident you are in your main idea. This is an area where audience and purpose come into play. If you’re writing for a highly educated, specialized audience, it’s probably fine to use some big words and confident language to wrap up your argument—for example, henceforth or hence.
Thus, In conclusion, To sum up, On concluding, As a result, It can be concluded that, The following are some of the most common conclusions transition words in English. This is not an exhaustive list. If you want to add more you can leave a comment and I’ll update it.
- In conclusion.
- To sum up.
- As a result.
- For example.
- For instance.
- So it can be concluded that.
- In short.
- In brief.
- To conclude.
- To summarize.
- At last.
- To finish up, I will conclude by saying that…
- In a nutshell, my argument is that…
- Let me conclude by saying that…
- Let me put it another way: …
We can see that a transition word can also be used in a sentence to link two related sentences together. We see that our conclusion transition words in a sentence have connected with other parts of our sentence and led us smoothly from one place to another.
Example 1: In a sentence, transition words can be used to add meaning and help create smooth transitions between ideas. One way to do so is by using words like therefore or as a result. Let’s look at an example of how you can use these words in a sentence:
Here, we see that therefore connects two ideas to provide meaning.
Example 2: we can use transition words like first, second, and third to group related information in a sentence. Let’s look at an example of how you can use these words in a sentence:
Here, we see that first is used to connect two ideas and create a relationship between them. This word shows us that there is something before what comes next in our sentence.
Example 3: It’s also important to note that transition words aren’t only used in writing. For example, in a conversation you might say something like Hey, you know what? I read about… or I know, right? You see, it was really interesting how… In these cases, these are examples of how transition words can be used in a sentence to move conversations forward.
Example 4: Here, let’s look at an example of a conclusion transition word in a sentence In our final example, we see that finally is used to connect two ideas and give us some additional information about them. The sentence says: Finally, you will want to write down all your research on each piece of furniture and accessories so that you can keep track of everything you liked or didn’t like as well as anything else that stood out.
FAQs on Conclusion Transition Words
A concluding transition sentence is a short phrase or clause that connects your thesis statement to your conclusion. It helps readers understand how you’re going to wrap up your argument.
Begin your conclusion with a summarizing transition. Some examples include in the conclusion, to sum up, and overall.
Concluding words are similar to transitional words, with one key difference. Transitional words help you move from one idea to another within a sentence while concluding words help you make a final connection between your thesis statement and your conclusion.
Some examples of Transitions are:
- To sum up.
- As a result.
- In conclusion.
We hope that you have enjoyed reading our latest e-guide and using these concluding transition words in your writing. To continue supporting you in your English learning, we would like to invite you to subscribe for free to our newsletter. With it, you will receive updates on our newest publications and some other surprises! You can sign up by entering your e-mail address below. Goodbye! Have a look at other articles as well How to Improve your Vocabulary. |
Early literacy approaches
Early literacy approaches aim to improve young children’s skills, knowledge or understanding related to reading or writing. Common approaches include:
- storytelling and group reading;
- activities that aim to develop letter knowledge, knowledge of sounds and early phonics; and
- introductions to different kinds of writing.
Early literacy strategies may have components in common with Communication and language approaches and may also involve Parental engagement.
How effective is it?
Early literacy approaches have been consistently found to have a positive effect on early learning outcomes. The early literacy approaches evaluated to date led to an average impact of four additional months’ progress, with the most effective approaches improving learning by as much as six months.
All children appear to benefit from early literacy approaches, but there is some evidence that certain strategies, particularly those involving targeted small group interaction, may have particularly positive effects on children from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, early literacy approaches should not be seen as a panacea. Though long-term positive effects have been detected in some studies, for a majority of strategies these benefits appear to fade over time, suggesting that a single intervention is unlikely to be enough to close the attainment gap.
There is evidence that a combination of early literacy approaches is likely to be more effective than any single approach. For example, some studies suggest that it is possible to develop certain aspects of literacy, such as knowledge of the alphabet or letter names and sounds, without improving all aspects of early literacy. It is likely to be beneficial to put a range of activities in place, and to use these in combination with regular assessments of early literacy skills across both reading and writing capabilities.
Studies indicate that involving parents in developing early literacy strategies can be beneficial, and ensuring that training and professional development is provided for staff when new approaches are introduced is likely to increase impact.
How secure is the evidence?
There is moderate evidence related to the impact of early literacy approaches, including a number of meta-analyses and high quality individual studies. The majority focus on reading. One challenge with the evidence base is that early literacy approaches are often only one part of multi-component interventions or curricula, which can make it hard to attribute changes to the early literacy approach, or to identify which aspects of that approach are most important.
In common with a number of areas of early years education, the most robust evidence collected to date has been collected in the USA. Testing some of the most promising early literacy approaches from overseas in the UK would be valuable.
What are the costs?
Overall, the costs of early literacy approaches are estimated as very low. Research indicates that knowledge of children’s development and current understanding are an important precursor to putting an early literacy strategy in place, and using professional development to support the introduction of new early literacy interventions is associated with increased learning. As a result, some assessment and professional development costs are included in this estimate. Other resources such as books and other print materials are also likely to be necessary.
What should I consider?
Before you implement this strategy in your learning environment, consider the following:
How will you ensure that your early literacy strategy is well-balanced, and combines approaches that will support the development of skills, knowledge and understanding?
Do you use assessments to identify children’s current level of development, and monitor learning?
When you introduce new early literacy approaches, do staff receive sufficient training and professional development?
How do you use targeted small group support to help areas of challenge for disadvantaged children? |
Leo Minor (LMi) is a small and faint constellation in the northern celestial hemisphere. Its name is Latin for "the smaller lion", in contrast to Leo, the larger lion. It lies between the larger and more recognizable Ursa Major to the north and Leo to the south. Leo Minor was not regarded as a separate constellation by classical astronomers; it was designated by Johannes Hevelius in 1687.
The classical astronomers Aratus and Ptolemy had noted the region of what is now Leo Minor to be undefined and not containing any distinctive pattern; Ptolemy classified the stars in this area as amorphōtoi (not belonging to a constellation outline) within the constellation Leo.
Johannes Hevelius first depicted Leo Minor in 1687 when he outlined ten new constellations in his star atlas Firmamentum Sobiescianum, and included 18 of its objects in the accompanying Catalogus Stellarum Fixarum. Hevelius decided upon Leo Minor or Leo Junior as a depiction that would align with its beastly neighbours the Lion and the Great Bear. In 1845, English astronomer Francis Baily revised the catalogue of Hevelius's new constellations, and assigned a Greek letter known as Bayer designation to stars brighter than apparent magnitude 4.5 (The apparent magnitude (m) of a celestial body is a measure of its brightness as seen by an observer on Earth, adjusted to the value it would have in the absence of the atmosphere.
). Richard A. Proctor gave the constellation the name Leaena "the Lioness" in 1870, explaining that he sought to shorten the constellation names to make them more manageable on celestial charts.
German astronomer Christian Ludwig Ideler posited that the stars of Leo Minor had been termed Al Thibā' wa-Aulāduhā "Gazelle with her Young" on a 13th-century Arabic celestial globe, recovered by Cardinal Stefano Borgia and housed in the prelate's museum at Velletri. Arabist Friedrich Wilhelm Lach describes a different view, noting that they had been seen as Al Haud "the Pond", which the Gazelle jumps into. In Chinese astronomy, the stars Beta, 30, 37 and 46 Leonis Minoris made up Neiping, a "Court of Judge or Mediator", or Shi "Court Eunuch" or were combined with stars of the neighbouring Leo to make up a large celestial dragon or State Chariot. A line of four stars was known as Shaowei; it represented four Imperial advisors and may have been located in Leo Minor, Leo or adjacent regions.
Ursa Major | Lynx | Cancer | Leo
Lists of stars by constellation
WallHapp Catalogue (WH)
LISTS OF STARS IN Leo Minor
WallHapp Catalogue (WH) |
is the main reason that people get metabolic syndrome. Being overweight or obese causes
insulin resistance. Normally, insulin
helps glucose enter the body's
cells. Insulin resistance happens when the body doesn't respond properly to insulin,
making it harder for glucose to enter the cells. Insulin resistance and inflammation
add to the problems linked to metabolic syndrome.
What Are the Signs & Symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome?
Some normal weight people can have high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.
But most people with metabolic syndrome are overweight. In kids, as obesity gets worse,
metabolic syndrome becomes more likely.
Obesity and the problems associated with metabolic syndrome tend to run in families.
Other things that put someone at risk for metabolic syndrome include:
Because metabolic syndrome and obesity tend to go hand-in-hand, doctors might order
more tests to look for other weight-related problems, like fatty liver, PCOS, and
How Is Metabolic Syndrome Treated?
Metabolic syndrome is treated by making positive lifestyle changes. Weight loss
can bring about big improvements in blood pressure, blood sugar, and lipids. Slowing
the rate of weight gain or maintaining
weight in children who are still growing also will help.
Families can work with their health care provider, a dietitian, or a weight management
program to create healthy habits. Recommendations include:
When lifestyle changes aren't enough, children may need treatment for the medical
problems, like hypertension. Doctors might recommend weight
loss surgery for some teens with metabolic syndrome and severe obesity who do
not respond to lifestyle changes. |
“The public needs to be informed that the 21st-century requires a higher standard for curriculum and instruction. This standard includes the development of critical and creative thinking; the ability to put knowledge to use in complex living, learning, and working performances; and an instructional program that gives teachers flexibility in engaging students with process and skill development.
The United States has a responsibility to educate its citizens and future citizens to the new standards and requirements. The equitable distribution of computers and technology into all schools should be a national concern and priority. School districts can systematically design curricula to integrate and focus on needed knowledge, processes, skills, and attitudes, but teachers have a right to expect the time and training to design curricula; learn new teaching methods and technologies; and collaborate in school, business, and home partnerships.”
Excerpted from: Erickson, H. Lynn. Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction: Teaching Beyond the Facts. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press, 2002. |
Dust pneumonia is a medical condition that develops due to the excessive exposure to dust. This form of respiratory disorder affected a great number of people during 1930s in the US when the Dust bowl took place. The Dust bowl refers to a period of dust storms that affected American and Canadian prairies during a severe drought in1930s. The Dust Bowl caused ecological damage, agricultural depression and consequently economic and social disaster. Enormous amount of dust in the air caused dust pneumonia in large portion of the population and many died.
Causes of Dust Pneumonia
Dust pneumonia occurs when excessive and prolonged inhalation of dirt and dust results in inflammation of the alveoli, tiny air sacs within the lungs. Normally, when a person inhales dust particles in trace amounts, the cilia (small hair like organs in the lungs) protect our lungs from foreign particles. However, overexposure to dust affects functioning of the cilia allowing the air pollutants to enter deep into the alveoli. Due to that, the lungs get irritated and it may result in pneumonia. Dust pneumonia is also known as chemical pneumonia and can be also caused by toxins and harmful gases.
Symptoms of Dust Pneumonia
Dust pneumonia is acute respiratory infection followed by painful and severe symptoms. Initial symptom of dust pneumonia is cough, which normally helps the lungs to eliminate foreign particles. In the beginning, the cough is dry. Later, the lungs start to use mucus to force the particles out thus cough is accompanied with mud like mucus. Mucus may also be yellow or green. Wheezing is another symptom of dust pneumonia. Wheezing occurs due to constriction of the airways resulting from build up of debris and fluid in the lungs. As dust pneumonia progresses, fever develops. Fever always indicates presence of an infection and it is a body’s natural mechanism for dealing with infection. Dust pneumonia is commonly followed by high fever. Chest pain is a common symptom of dust pneumonia that results from accumulation of dust in the air passage ways and constriction. Chest pain accompanies cough or may occur when sufferer is breathing deeply. In advanced stage of dust pneumonia, a septic shock may occur. Septic shock is a life-threatening condition that occurs when an infection reaches the bloodstream and other parts of the body. Septic shock seriously affects health, causes organ failure and may lead to death if left untreated. Other symptoms associated with dust pneumonia include: difficulty breathing, dyspnea, headache, nausea, malaise and nose, eye, mouth and throat burning sensation. |
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