SCIENCE GURU

Mountain View High School Science Magazine

Editor-in-Chief: Kiana Nouri

November 2013
The latest and hottest news about science from all around the world! We publish an issue every month; copies can be found in Dr. Thornburgs room and issues are posted on our blog.

Science Guru club meets every Friday at lunch in 120, Dr. Thornburgs room

Science News & Facts

Kiana Nouri
Time Really Is an Illusion Do you want to kill time? Step outside the Universe! Marco Genovese at Italys National Institute of Metrological Research in Turin has shown in an experiment that time really is an illusion. He and his colleagues demonstrated this in a model universe made of two particles of light. The experiment could help to unite two of the best theories for describing reality quantum mechanics and general relativity. m Genoveses experiment has shown how time can emerge from quantum h entanglement in a physical universe, e albeit one that contains only two phoa tons. The team uses a pair of entangled t photons, each of which has a particular p polarization, that rotates as both photons p pass though a quartz plate to a set of p detectors. d
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Officers and members of Science Guru Magazine, Blog and Club Left to right: Carter Fox, Pratik Mulpury, Varsha Suresh Kumar, Kelyn Wood, Kiana Nouri, Dr. Katie Thornburg (Faculty Advisor), Jasmine Deng, Avni Singhal, Rohun Saxena

The Origin of the Elements

Carter Fox

cience has shown us what our bodies are made of and the elements that make up these molecules, but how did these elements come to be? It all started around 13.8 billion years ago, the time of the Big Bang, when the universe expanded at an alarming rate.
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HIV Protein Could Lead to Breakthrough in Neurocognitive Impairment

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Top Five Medical Reversing Thymic Innovations of 2014 Involution

by Pratik Mulpury by Avni Singhal

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Cant Touch This

by Kelyn Wood

by Rohun Saxena

Letter From the Editor Kiana Nouri Examining Hardship: The Harvests of Failure
That which does not kill me makes me stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) suffering and failure were to be welcomed by anyone seeking happiness. We should regard them as tough challenges to be overcome in the same way as a climber might tackle a mountain. To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities [...] I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not that one endures. Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsches philosophy, in short, was that suffering and the experience of overcoming hardship results in worthwhile achievements. Can we harvest failure and transform our suffering into happiness? Yes, we absolutely can Nietzsche was absolutely right and we absolutely must. Nietzsches philosophy came from how he lived his life, partially by faith and mostly by choice. Due to an illness, he spent most of his life in a small village in the Swiss mountains. He hiked these high mountains every day. He died poor and single at the age of 56. His life ended in madness; he became fully published and famous only after his death. He thought it was an advantage to have ups and downs in life. He believed the experience of working hard to overcome obstacles translated into more strength for the next joyous hump of life. That which does not kill me makes me stronger, he noted. He felt content and an ultimate success, which he did not live to see fully. He knew he was at the peak of the mountain himself, and that was the only thing that mattered. He believed we should live dangerously; that was the ultimate joy. We all have dark periods in our life, we all encounter setbacks and when we do we all encounter throwing in the towel. Alain de Button As Nietzsche once said, Fulfillment is the religion of comfortableness, and I would rather live dangerously as Nietzsche did, and die happy, knowing I endured, harvested the failures and transformed these hardships into worthwhile achievements and joyous moments. Kiana Nouri is the founder, president, and editor-in-chief of Science Guru Blog, Magazine, and Club. This issue of Science Guru is created, edited, and published by her.

y fellow Mountain View High School schoolmates: One famous philosopher whom I got to know in depth in my Critical Thinking class past summer was the very famous German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsch. Nietzsche believed that happiness and joy in life comes from suffering. If we are skilled, Nietzsche believed, we can harvest beautiful things from our failures. He also suggested we should live dangerously and welcome struggle and hardship, for their rewards are happiness: No pain, no gain. Can we practice Nietzsches theory and learn to be happy through suffering? What exactly does Nietzsche mean when he says happiness does not come from escaping our troubles but from cultivating them and turning them to our advantage? Nietzsche believed any worthwhile achievements in life come from the experience of overcoming hardship. For him, any existence that is too comfortable is worthless. If we can embrace failure and turn hardships to our advantage, then we all should be happy. Alain de Button, a current British philosopher, describes him even better: Friedrich Nietzsche believed that all varieties of

Rohun Saxena

HIV Protein Could Lead to Breakthrough in Neurocognitive Impairment

O
Rohun has been an officer, active member, and article contributor since we started Science Guru. He is in his third year of high school and currently is Science Gurus treasurer.

ver 34 million people around the world were diagnosed with AIDS in 2010. About fifty percent of patients diagnosed with the AIDS virus undergo some sort of neurocognitive impairment. After a person contracts the AIDS virus they start to lose some functions that their brain used to be able to control. This impairment has remained largely unexplained and has caused many research studies to understand the process better. However, new research from the University of Minnesota has found a protein shed by HIV-infected brains that could be the cause for the loss in cognitive capabilities in patients diagnosed with AIDS. The research, led by Dr. Nicholas Hargus and Dr. Stanley Thayer, showed that, The synaptic changes didnt appear to be a symptom of nerve death, but instead was hypothesized to be an excitation of a protective response by the HIV protein transactivator of transcription (Tat). An excitation of Tat has been shown to correlate with HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders and so the impact of Tat was researched on rat models. The results were promising, as both inhibitory and excitatory synapses were initiated by specific Tat binding activity. When drugs were used to alter the synaptic transmission, the researchers observed a reversal in the synaptic changes caused by the excitation of Tat. Hypothetically, this could mean that sometime in the near future, drugs could be available to stop the neurocognitive impairment that comes with the AIDS virus. Currently research is being done in order to better understand the relationship between drug-induced changes in synaptic connections and the changes in cognitive function. But there is very good chance that a drug may come out of this new research.

Pratik Mulpury

Top Five Medical Innovations of 2014

ave you ever wondered what it is like to live without sight? Not being able to see the ocean, or the beautiful sky, or snowcapped mountains is beyond my imagination. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 285 million people in the world. One of the newer solutions to this problem, the retinal prosthesis system, was selected by the Cleveland Clinic as the most impactful medical innovation of 2014 from a list of 150 nominations.

Pratik is a new member of Science Guru club this year. This is his first writing contribution to Science Guru.

Retinal prosthesis systems allow people who previously were blind due to diseases such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa to see. The prosthesis is surgically implanted into the patients eye. It consists of an array of electrodes that, along with a combination of video-cameraenabled glasses and a processing unit worn on the waist, allows a patient to distinguish light and dark. Multiple research groups outside of Cleveland Clinic are working on similar devices. The results have been positive; patients using these devices could make out store signs, door knobs, and some movement. They are far from perfect and have a long way to go, but the future appears promising. Second on the list is genome-guided solid tumor diagnostics. Genomics has been used to predict if a disease needs immediate attention or if it can be watched closely instead for future treatment. It has been applied to prostate and breast cancer patients. Today there are cancers that, in eighty percent of patients, respond to a standard treatment, but in the other twenty percent do not. The patients who do not respond to the standard treatment then are provided an alternative treatment.
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Top Five Medical Innovations of 2014 Pratik Mulpury

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The hope is to reach a point at which the twenty-percent patients can bypass the standard treatment and go directly to the other treatment. The process gleans genetic information from a patients tumor tissue, analyzes it, and recommends the treatment that is best for the patient. This will allow doctors to pick the right drug to treat the specific thing that is making tumors grow, enabling medicines and treatments that are more precise and effective.

The device picks up signals that trigger seizures and short-circuits them with quick electrical pulses to prevent the seizure. A similar system called the NeuroPace RNS was last years number-two innovation. It interrupts the pain of migraine and cluster headaches by delivering electrical stimulation through an almond-sized device implanted in the upper gum.

eliminate the need to inject interferon, a drug that is difficult for patients to tolerate.

Today there are more than two million Americans with epilepsy. Of these, a third will end up having seizures that do not respond to medical treatments. Seizures are devastating to patients, both physically and mentally, and in certain cases can lead to physical harm. One of the innovations selected that addresses this problems is the responsive neurostimulator for intractable epilepsy, an amazing device that appears to be straight out of a science-fiction novel. The device is surgically implanted under the skin of the skull, where it can analyze electrical patterns coming through leads placed on the patients brain in the area that is causing seizures.

The fourth innovation for 2014 is an orally delivered treatment for hepatitis C, a viral disease that affects the liver. Over three million people in the US are affected by the disease every year. According to WHO, about 150 million period are chronically infected with hepatitis C virus, and more than 350,000 people die every year from related liver diseases. There are no vaccines for the disease. The direct-acting antiviral oral hepatitis C drug, Sofosbuvir, would be the first of a new generation of drugs. It could reduce drastically the time needed to treat the disease from 48 weeks (in some cases) and could

Dr. David Brown, the chair of Cleveland Clinics Anesthesiology Institute, was flying a private plane over a decade ago when he got an idea for a system in the operating room that would send alerts and advice to a surgeon the same way airplane computers and air-traffic controllers send information to pilots. A company called Talis Clinical was started based on the idea. This led to the perioperative decision-support system, the fifth innovation selected this year. The system uses a set of algorithms behind the equipment in the operating room to keep tabs on a patients vital signs and anesthetic data during surgery. It picks up statistically significant items that the human mind might look past in a busy operating room and sets off alarms or notices for surgeons and nurses, reducing the possibility of any problems being overlooked by a tired or bored human. The system is being used at the Cleveland Clinic and is being prepared for use in other hospitals around the country.

Science News & Facts

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Kiana Nouri
Experience Travel to Mars in a Few Minutes! Just go to our on-line Science Guru Magazine blog at scienceguru18.blogspot.com/ and experience a very cool way to travel to Mars or type the link below into your browser: http://www.youtube.com/ embed/XRCIzZHpFtY?rel=0 Sleep Is the Waste Management Service for the Brain Researchers at University of Rochester Medical Center recently did a study which concludes that a major reason for sleep is To remove the waste in the brain. The brain uses sleep to wash away the waste toxins built up during a hard days thinking, researchers have shown. The US team believes the waste-removal
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Magnetism: The Forgotten Force Gravity is the big attraction when we think of forces in the cosmos. Gravity not only keeps us on the ground, it also shapes the universe. It sculpts clouds of gas into planets and stars. Gravity binds hundreds of billions of stars into galaxies, these galaxies form clusters, and the clusters clump together to create superclusters. But gravity by itself does not make this happen magnetism is the forgotten force here. Magnetic fields that span billions of light years between galaxies is the other big attraction. What you might not know is that the magnet on your fridge is a million times stronger than the sea of magnetism in the Milky Way!

The Dream App The curators of the latest app DreamCloud, which may come to your smart phone shortly, say they want to change the way you think about sleep. They say analyzing your dreams is like training a muscle. On their website the curators talk about how dreams are the worlds common language, and they want you to send them your dream and get an analysis of it back. DreamClouds team of experts include licensed psychologists, social workers, and even life coaches, who combine their areas of expertise to help provide free dream reflections to users. The scientist who is advisor to the company says there is evidence that dreams can help a pregnant woman better predict the time of her labor and that dreams often give dreamers advance warning of oncoming illness.

DreamCloud has a new mobile app that analyzes your dreams.

Science News & Facts

Kiana Nouri

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system is one of the fundamental reasons for sleep. Their study showed that brain cells shrink during sleep to open up the gaps between neurons and allow fluid to wash the brain clean. They also suggest that failing to clear away some toxic proteins may play a role in brain disorders. One big question for sleep researchers is why do animals sleep at all when it leaves them vulnerable to predators? It has been shown to have a big role in the fixing of memories in the brain and learning, but the University of Rochester Medical Center team believes that housework may be one of the primary reasons for sleep. The brain only has limited energy at its disposal and

it appears that it must choose between two different functional states awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up, said researcher Dr. Maiken Nedergaard. You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you cant really do both at the same time. Their findings build on last years discovery of the brains own network of plumbing pipes known as the glymphatic system which carry waste material out of the brain. Scientists, who imaged the brains of mice, showed that the glymphatic system became ten times more active when the mice were asleep. Cells in the brain, probably the glial cells which keep nerve

cells alive, shrink during sleep. This increases the size of the interstitial space, the gaps between brain tissue, allowing more fluid to be pumped in and wash the toxins away. Dr Nedergaard said this was a vital function for staying alive, but did not appear to be possible while the mind was awake. She told the BBC: This is purely speculation, but it looks like the brain is losing a lot of energy when pumping water across the brain and that is probably incompatible with processing information. She added that the true significance of the findings would be known only after human studies, but doing similar experiments in an MRI machine would be relatively easy. (Portions copied from BBC Science News.)

Avni Singhal

Reversing Thymic Involution

Avni has been an officer, active member, and article contributor since we started Science Guru and since she started at Mountain View High as a freshman. Currently she is Science Gurus secretary.

he thymus is an organ behind your breastbone that trains T cells, a type of white blood cell that is critical to the immune system, to recognize self from other. By the age of ten, it is fully developed. Its activity peaks during puberty. By age sixty, it is less than half of its size at peak activity. Thymic involution, the thymus becoming smaller as you age, causes your immune system to decline. There is evidence that it is related to the exponential growth of mortality risk with age. By the age of sixty-five, it is almost nonfunctional, resulting in many flu deaths in seniors. Dr. Laura Napolitano has shown that HDH, human growth hormone, can reverse thymic involution in AIDS patients. A regenerated thymus makes more new naive T-cells, which are especially helpful for AIDS patients because AIDS kills T-cells. Grey Fahy, a leading cryobiology expert, decided to try to regrow his own thymus. He used human growth hormone and DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone), a steroid hormone for one month. One problem with HGH is that it blocks the function of insulin; he figured out that DHEA prevents this and used it. A second problem with HGH is that it works by stimulating IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1). This protein plays an important role in childhood growth, but can cause cancer at high levels. Fahy controlled his HGH dosage to prevent this.
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Kelyn Wood

Cant Touch This

But Feel Like You Did

https://student.societyforscience.org/article/restoring-sense-touch

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Kelyn is a second-year member of Science Guru Club and a contributing writer to our magazine.

ere comes yet another neurological trick using electrodes implanted in the mind: making the brain think that the body has touched something when it really hasnt. Psychologist Sliman Bensmaia and his team at the University of Chicago performed their test on rhesus monkeys and published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 14th. First, they trained the monkeys to perform a specific action (in this case, looking in a certain direction) when a certain finger was touched while recording the brain activity when the finger was touched. Then, they triggered the electrodes in the monkeys brain but didnt actually touch the finger. The monkey looked to the side, just as it had when its finger had been touched, even though it hadnt. By only triggering electrodes, scientists could make a monkey feel vicariously.
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Reversing Thymic Involution

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Avni Singhal
when an organ is transplanted, the body often rejects it, meaning the killer T-cells destroy it. The thymus has the ability to retrain T-cells, as shown in animals studies. Small sections of an affected tissue have been placed into the thymus and T-cells have successfully been retrained not to attack that tissue. Although a lot of research has to be done before the thymus can safely be used to improve the immune system, cure autoimmune disorders, and stop organ transplant rejection in humans, it has great promise.

After the study period, he got an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan to figure out whether his thymus was regenerated. The scans showed that there was a distinct enlargement of the thymus and an increase in the percent of functional mass. His level of naive T-cells also increased, which meant that the thymus did not just grow, it also functioned better. In essence, he went back twenty-five years in thymic function and immune system function. While immuno-restoration

is exciting itself, the thymus also has the prospect of being used to cure autoimmune disorders and to prevent rejection of organ transplants. In the thymus, T-cells are trained to differentiate between native and foreign tissue, so killer T-cells can attack foreign cells that are in the body. Autoimmune disorders occur when these killer T-cells mistake native tissue as foreign tissue. One example of this is type-1 diabetes, a disorder in which the body destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of its pancreas. Also,

Cant Touch This

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Kelyn Wood
humans may respond to electrodes more complexly than monkeys, so human tests may come soon to pave the way for commercial application. Also, because humans have a sensitive sense of touch, we could link the electrodes to other things, like a notation that its time to go to a meeting. The possibilities are endless. Now how long will it take to emulate the other senses? Press a button, and make Brussels sprouts taste like chocolate, for example.

This has large implications for humans, and not only because they used a monkey and not a mouse as a test subject. If we can attach these electrodes to touch sensors on an artificial body part, we can help amputees feel again. Of course,

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The Origin of the Elements

Continued from page 1

Carter Fox
Carter Fox is a new member of Science Guru this year. This is his second contribution to Science Guru Magazine.

Within five seconds of the Big Bang, the universe started to cool. This cooling stopped the subatomic particles in the universe from heating and blowing up. They settled into a soup of neutrons, protons, and electrons. Electrons, having a negative charge, and protons, having a positive charge, attracted each other and formed the first atoms of hydrogen. Now weve got hydrogen, but what next? To find out where the rest of the elements came from, we must dive right into the core of a star. A star is essentially a giant nuclear reactor. It fuses hydrogen atoms together to form helium and energy. However, there comes a time when a star burns through its source of hydrogen. Now it is left with helium but it wont stop there. The star fuses helium into carbon, then carbon to oxygen. This process continues until the star forms layers of heavier elements, as seen in the image. The star reaches its breaking point when it starts to burn iron. Iron eats up all the energy of the nuclear reactions. Without this energy pushing outward, the core of the star collapses inward due to gravity. In just a millisecond, the core collapses from the size of the Earth to the size of a city. This increased density creates a massive amount of energy that causes the star to explode. During this explosion, iron fuses to become cobalt, cobalt becomes nickel, and so forth until gold,

platinum, and uranium are created. Now the heavier elements are created and are spread across universe. In fact, all the heavy elements in the universe are created by this process. This means the Earth is made of elements formed from a supernova and our bodies also are made of elements created during a supernova. The carbon, iron, oxygen, and other elements that make up our bodies were all once inside the core of a star. We are here because of stars producing the elements needed to make up our bodies. They sacrificed their lives to distribute their treasures across the universe. Watch this video to see what a supernova looks like! http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KfImLNJa8wk

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On-line Blog:

Scienceguru18.blogspot.com

Left to Right:
Avni Singhal Rohun Saxena Kiana Nouri Varsha Suresh Kumar Dr. Thornburg

From the Editor

Dear Readers, We hope you h ave enjoyed ou r November issu e. Feel free to visi t us online at scienceguru@ blogspot.com or join our weekly club mee tings every Frid ay at Lunch, room 1 20. Kiana Nouri

Science Guru Club Officers

Kiana Nouri Rohun Saxena Varsha Suresh Kumar Jasmine Deng Avni Singhal

Science Guru Club Members

Carter Fox Kelyn Wood Pratik Mulpury

Advisor
Dr. Katie Thornburg Mountain View High School 3535 Truman Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94040