The thought of having an identical twin has always peaked my interest. To think that there would be someone that shares all of the same DNA as you is something that is almost unbelievable. This is why identical twins became the forefront of experimentation during World War II. When twins would get sent to the concentration camps they would be separated for the rest of the group. The group of twins would be treated better than everyone else and got privileges that the other residents did not get like eating everyday and playing sports. This was the good, the bad was when the experimenting started. They would sometimes infect one twin with a disease, like TB, and left to die and then the healthy twin would be killed so that they could compare them. Sometimes blood would be taken from one twin and transfused into another. They would also use painful eyedrops in an attempt to create blue eyes, these drops would cause infection and blindness. The though behind these experiments was that since the twins were identical in every way, they could see the changes that would occur when they were infected with a disease or see if there is a change when they were injected with the others blood. The reason that identical twins have the same DNA is because they are from the same fertilized egg. After the egg is fertilized it splits into two embryos that will be, basically, identical. The identical nature of the body parts of twins makes them perfect donors for each other. There was a story recently about a pair of twins that both underwent a rare breast surgery when they were diagnosed with breast cancer. One of the twins didn't have enough extra skin to be able to reconstruct the damaged breast so the other donated skin to help. This was also see back in the 1950's when one twin donated their kidney to the other. What makes twins so interesting is that many have no idea how they are conceived and how they can contain the same DNA, which is why they were the subjects to the testing back in war torn Germany. The unknown makes the science community go crazy and experiment so that the unknown can become the known.

References 

1. http://www.slideshare.net/guest54eeb4/nazi-experimentation-and-treatment-of-twins-1313734

2. http://www.nbcnews.com/health/identical-twins-share-breast-cancer-rare-surgery-2D11600484

Why is One Never Enough?

When it comes to junk foods, you can never eat just a single chip or one piece of candy or when it comes to a recent study done by undergraduate students at Connecticut College, one Oreo. Using rats they wanted to test the theory that food, especially junk food, can have an addictive quality and the availability of said junk food in low income households has contributed to the obesity epidemic in America.
Rats were put into a maze that was split into two sides, on one side the rats were given rice cakes and on the other, Oreos. After their exposure to the food they were given the choice of what side of the cage that they wanted to go to. They compared the time that was spent on each side of the maze to a similar experiment where the rats were given cocaine or morphine on one side and saline on the other. They also looked at the pleasure center of the brain of the rats while eating Oreos.
What they concluded  was that they spent as much time on the cookie, or "drug," side of the maze as the rats that were exposed to actual drugs. They also noticed that the pleasure center of the brain was more active while the rats were eating the Oreo than the rats that were injected with drugs. This, in turn, proves that Oreos, and junk food in general, have an addictive quality. These results could be used to understand why, even though it is a known fact that junk food is bad for us, we still eat it and have a hard time stopping.
The "addictive" nature that this study showed junk foods have could give light to the reason why obesity is a problem. The availability and affordability of junk foods makes it easy to obtain and for people that don't have the money to buy fresh produce, such as fruits and vegetables, fall into the trap of buying all this unhealthy food. This shows that people who have a hard time controlling their food intake, especially if they only have junk around the house, are susceptible to obesity. These findings could help find a way to control the "addiction" that the pleasure of having sweets gives us.

References
Wilson, J. (2013, October 16). Oreos as 'addictive' as cocaine in lab study. Retrieved from http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/16/oreos-as-addictive-as-cocaine-in-lab-rat-study/

Your Brain on Exercise

Photo by Danielle Sarracino

Have you ever had one of those day where you are just feeling down in the dumps and feel like there is no way to boost your mood? Well do I have the perfect boost that you need...EXERCISE!
It may sound like a crazy idea, I mean who feels great after exercising it is so tiresome, but the truth is that it is proven to boost your mood. When doing any kind of physical activity from playing a sport to even just walking, you are releasing dopamine, a hormone that gives that warm and fuzzy feeling, into your system because it binds to receptors that help to diminish the feeling of pain. It is very similar to the effects that people get when on morphine without any of the adverse effects of being on a drug. Over the winter and summer breaks I was suffering, and still am, from anxiety and the one things that helped me every day were my walks. I would just go and walk for about an hour or more a day, every single day, with a bouncy ball, to rid all of my anxious tendencies. Even though this only helped a slight bit, it was something that made me feel good about myself and turned into something that I can do whenever I have an anxious thought or feeling. With that in mind, exercising daily is proven to make you feel good about yourself, get rid of anxious thoughts, rid you of feelings of depression, even distress you from a long dayAll I can say is that I endorse exercising to get rid of things that are stressful and get the endorphins flowing because it not only boosts your mood, but boosts how you feel about yourself.

Photo by Danielle Sarracino

These pictures might seem a bit random in this entry, but these are some pictures that I took over the winter break when I would go on my walks.









Reference
http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/exercise-depression