Friday, May 18, 2018

Building Body Muscle - 5/18

                                           
http://www.kickassfacts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Muscles.jpg
When people are trying to build up their muscles, they are usually trying to exercise their skeletal muscles. Skeletal muscle is composed of thread-like myofibrils and sarcomeres that form a muscle fiber and are the basic units of contraction. The 650 skeletal muscles in the human body contract when they receive signals from motor neurons. Motor neurons tell your muscles to contract. Motor neurons are triggered from a part of the cell called the sarcoplasmic reticulum. The better your motor neurons do this, the stronger you can get. In addition the Motor Unit recruitment explains why certain movements become easier to perform after practice. This is because after you workout, your body replaces damaged muscle fibers. However these replaces muscle fibers are thicker than they were before. Muscle growth happens when your protein synthesis is greater than your muscle protein breakdown. Another component to the growth of your muscles, are Satellite cells. Satellite cells are precursors to skeletal muscle cells, able to give rise to satellite cells or differentiated skeletal muscle cells. When activated, Satellite cells help to add more nuclei to the muscle cells and therefore contribute to the growth of myofibrils (muscle cells). The more you activate satellite cells, the more you are able to grow. Lastly, continually putting more stress on the muscles is a major component involved in the growth of a muscle and disrupts homeostasis within your body.

S&EP - SP1: Asking questions and defining problems


I formulate testable questions when I researched the question, “how does the body build muscle?”. Upon researching this, I decided to specifically focus on teaching how the body strengthens its skeletal muscle. I established what is already known about this topic when I typed down any information I found, onto a note document. I shared this document with my partner so that we could collect information together. I determine what questions have yet to be answered when I read over the existing information on the note taking document and figured out what parts of the skeletal muscle building process that we were missing. I defined constraints and specifications for a solution as I realized that not all of the information we needed, was going to be provided on one single website. So the solution was for both my partner and I to research on several different websites that may contain more information.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Stress 5/13


https://i2.wp.com/williamreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/feature.png?fit=788%2C430&ssl=1

Stress is a feeling of strain or pressure. Positive stress can be beneficial because it helps you focus and have more energy, resulting in a better performance. However, chronic stress is the response to emotional pressure suffered for a prolonged period of time in which an individual perceives he or she has little or no control. Chronic stress can affect the size of your brain, it's structure, and how it functions. When your body detects a stressful situation, your Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenal (HPA) axis is instantly activated and releases a hormone called cortisol. High levels of cortisol over long periods of time can lead to negative affects. For example, electric signals in your hippocampus deteriorate and your hippocampus also inhibits the activity of your HPA axis, weakening your ability to control your stress.  Too much of the cortisol results in the loss of synaptic connections between neurons. In addition, cortisol can literally make your brain shrink in size and the shrinking of your prefrontal cortex, leads to fewer new brain cells being made in the hippocampus. This means that chronic stress can make it more challenging/difficult to learn and remember things. Finally, chronic stress prompts your brain for future psychological diseases. These serious mental problems include depression and eventually Alzheimer's. 

S&EP - SP2: Developing and using models

I constructed a mental or conceptual model to represent and understand phenomena when my end of year project group and I created an infographic to represent and understand multiple ways of how chronic stress can affect the brain. After studying this unit for a few days by watching videos, reading articles, and answering questions about this topic, we were assigned to craft an infographic to explain to others how traumatic events, such as natural disasters, impact the mind/brain. In addition, we had to include at least three coping strategies to deal with that stress. I used a model to explain and predict behaviors of systems, as my group and I created an infographic on Google Draw that predicts the behavior of the brain and how it functions under long periods of chronic stress. I refined/rebuild my model as I learned about more and more ways that chronic stress and high levels of cortisol can wreak havoc on the brain. Upon learning more about these negative affects, I had to move images and text around to make space to provide more information.