Delving into the World of Islamic Feminism

Islam and feminism… the misconceptions surrounding both of these words, grouped together or used separately, are innumerable. Beginning this ELI, all I knew is that I wanted to continue to explore a topic which I knew very little about. As I have progressed, however, I have realized that I also want to educate the people around me about a topic that is very foreign to the majority of Westerners. I settled on the topic of the Islamic feminist movement because it is a topic that is extremely relevant today, as feminism is becoming more widely known throughout the world, but it has a deep history that is not known to many people.

It is not common information that the Islamic feminist movement has roots as far back as the end of the 19th century, with women who protested the arranged marriages and pay gaps between men and women. Nabawiyah Musa, an Egyptian feminist, fought to take the State Baccalaureate Exam so the heads of education had no excuse to pay her less than her male colleagues. However, she accomplished this feat at the turn of the twentieth century, a right that many women in Western civilizations are fighting for currently. Malala Yousafzai is a modern day feminist at the young age of 18, not even a year older than me. She has been speaking out for equal education between men and women for many years with her father, a subject that she is very passionate about, as her father owned a school for girls. The Taliban found out about her activism and attempted to kill her; however, she survived. I hope to continue my research on Malala with a case study.

I have learned so much so far, but I know I still have a long ways to go when it comes to learning about the history of the Islamic Feminism and how it is progressed to where it is today. In all honesty, I don’t think that it is possible to ever be done learning about this topic, as it will continue to grow as I learn. However, that excites me, because I will have the ability to continue to learn about such an interesting and relevant topic that is extremely misconceived by Westerners. I also hope to educate the people around me that have fallen prey to believing the wrong stereotypes about the Islamic feminist movement.

~Emma P.

Fear Is Fun?

What is one of form of entertainment that people are fascinated with for seemingly bizarre reasons? It’s something that has been quite popular for over 50 years, and involves vampires, werewolves, and serial killers. While some of details and ideas behind these things have changed, the general form has stayed true to the idea, which is that of the horror movie.

For some reason, people like horror movies. The explanation to why this is true is not so easily seen, nor is it obvious even with closer examination. There are ideas behind why people seem to like them, but none have concrete evidence, and the truth could be a combination of many. One such idea is that people simply like being scared. This could be explained by the adrenaline rush that often occurs after a good scare during a movie. This would explain why people continue to spend money on going to see horror movies, buying them on DVD, and generally throwing money at the franchises.

That is not to say that I don’t like horror movies. The reality is in stark contrast to that statement. What I am searching for is what makes horror movies enjoyable to different audiences. Watching horror movies is one of my favorite things to do. My main reason for liking horror movies is usually to see if the movie that I am watching has new ways of scaring me. This only occurs occasionally, as many new horror movies just have typical jump scares, which are usually less than creative to say the least. However, sometimes horror movies will have incredibly creative or interesting ways of attempting to frighten the viewer that are not usually seen. Sometimes this makes the movie more popular, and sometimes it doesn’t help anything because the movie may not be ‘traditionally scary.” For many more casual viewers of horror films, the story involved in the movie does not matter, and neither does the creativity of the scares. What simply matters is if the movie can give them a “rush,” and make them jump. Something in the basic idea of a horror movie must appeal to people, otherwise they would not be nearly as popular. Even with the quality of popular horror films often not being the best, the films still often make large amounts of money. This idea follows the trend of horror movies being enjoyable to many different kinds of viewers, no matter what the content.

-Ben S.

Neuron Cake

Neuron cake? What does this even mean? Well, I’ll get to that in just a little bit. As the semester progressed, I was able to revise and improve my hypothesis stated in my first blog, “Asking the Right Questions.”

Since neurons transmit unique information through electrical and chemical signals, and we are constantly creating new synapses throughout our body, what if we track these impulses to find “healthy” patterns between not only the neurons themselves but within the connectum of neurons around a certain organ? What if we mimic the electrical and chemical pattern of a healthy organ in a dysfunctional organ? Will it become functional again?

To explain the new “cake hypothesis” I will use my favorite friend, the triple layered cake. But before I dive straight into the analogy, let me explain a little bit of what the “cake hypothesis” is. I believe that in any given sector of the brain that controls a function, there will be three different layers of neuron patterns: a base layer, an internal stimuli layer, and an external stimuli layer. Just like the triple layered cake, when one of the layers experiences a change, either in flavor or in patterns, then the overall flavor/pattern will be changed. The action of changing the flavor/pattern alters the overall function/ taste of the neuron cake.

In the base layer we should be able to observe a pattern that is universal among all humans. This layer controls the basic functions for whatever system that sector of the brain controls. If this pattern is altered, or simply not there, then we have a system that is inoperable. We may be able to control/regulate this pattern by stimulating the other two layers.

In the internal stimuli layer, we should be able to observe the different neurons firing according to the different bodily functions, such as hormones, pheromones, and bacteria. This pattern is unique to each person as it will alter its pattern according the internal stimuli of that individual. A lack of firing neurons in this layer would simply cause an irregularity in the system.  However, the system would still work to some degree.

Stimuli that occur on the outside will affect the external stimuli layer. These stimuli can be produced by using our senses. Basically anything that happens in the outside world that affects us in some way will alter the external stimuli layer pattern. Just as in the internal stimuli layer, a lack of firing neurons would simply cause an irregularity and not a completely dysfunctional system.

To mimic or reproduce these patterns, we could use two types of electrodes. One type of electrode will record the pattern of neurons firing, and the other will send in electrical pulses to stimulate other neurons into firing in order to reproduce the necessary pattern.

At this point I have only begun to write my proposal paper. A complete proposal paper includes a title page, an abstract, a literature review and summary, a history/preparation on the subject page, an objective page, a project outline, a timetable, a selective research bibliography page. I have only gotten as far as halfway through the literature review. After every sentence comes a in-text citation and hours of researching and synthesising information from books, magazines, and online articles. I hope to have a paper written up and ready to be sent out before the end of summer. Stay tuned!

~Gabryel

Asking the Right Questions

What if…? The question of many of our childhoods. Whenever that wild idea popped into our heads, the question that we asked our parents always started with “what if.” While this particular type of inquiry might have annoyed our parents to no end, it is truly the only way we, as humans, can make advances in our society. After all, we do not possess the ability to blue pencil all possibilities before we experiment through a process of  trial and error. This exact process is followed in all fields; however, the process may be more pronounced in the field of biology than in others, specifically in the area of human anatomy and physiology. Personally, for this project,  I asked, “What if we had new a new type of technology or technique that could improve our breathing?” To answer this I had to start at the beginning of the study of our respiratory system.

The ancient civilizations had myths and spiritual reasoning to explain respiration. They believed that anything having to do with the flow of air, breathing, wind, even birds, had a mystical power that enabled us to live. That is until we started to ask ourselves, “What if?”

Eristratus (300-250 B.C.E) was the first to put a name to respiration and the study of why and how we as humans breathe; he named it pneumatism. More famed people, including Leonardo da Vinci and Lavoisier, started to ask “what if” about the respiratory system, focusing on the physiology of the body as we inhale and exhale.

As to what they discovered, I’ll give you a quick run-down. First the air enters through either our nasal or oral cavities (mouth or nose), continues through the pharynx, then to the larynx, into the trachea, through the bronchioles, and finally to our alveoli. The alveoli is a permeable membrane which diffuses oxygen into capillaries that surround each alveoli. The oxygen diffuses into the hemoglobin in our red blood cells and becomes oxyhemoglobin (oxygenated blood). The oxygen is distributed throughout the rest of the body. The cells use the oxygen during a process, coined by Lavoisier, called metabolism. Carbon dioxide is produced as a byproduct of metabolism. The carbon dioxide diffuses back into the capillaries and heads to the lungs. The carbon dioxide diffuses back into the alveoli releasing certain chemicals that cause exhalation. The process is repeated for as long as we live.

Once the physiology of our respiratory system was understood, we have been able to do marvelous things to aid our respiratory system, ranging from the use of external ventilators to completely cutting out and regrowing our lungs in labs. As I look into how artificial lungs interact with our bodies, as well as how ventilators and mechanical lungs work in concert with our bodies, I continue to ask myself what I consider to be the most important question that we as humans can to advance - “What if…?” And so I leave you with my newly formed question which I plan to expand on in my project proposal paper that I will hopefully send to labs before the end of the school year. (Keep in mind that the question has potential to change as I further increase my understanding of the subject.)

Since neurons transmit unique information through electrical and chemical signals, and we are constantly creating new synapses throughout our body, what if we track these impulses to find “healthy” patterns between not only the neurons themselves but within the connectum of neurons around a certain organ? What if we mimic the electrical and chemical pattern of a healthy organ in a dysfunctional organ? Will it become functional again?

~Gabryel

Why We Don’t Know More About Sleep

The human brain is often called the most complicated thing in the universe. This is blatantly false on many levels. A human contains a brain, and other organs besides. Isn’t a human more complex than a brain? An ecosystem contains a multitude of organisms. Isn’t that more complex than a single human brain? The universe itself consists of everything in existence, so that would make the universe the most complicated thing in the universe, wouldn’t it? I understand that some people only mean that a human brain is incredibly hard to simulate, but the misuse and misunderstanding of that ‘fact’ annoys me.

Regardless, the human brain is incredibly complicated, and anything that has its roots in the brain is likewise difficult to understand. Sleep is a biological process that affects the whole body, and yet the systematic investigation of sleep has been going on for less than a century. There are obviously holes in our understanding of sleep. What many people do not seem to realize is how basic the understanding is in even the more well researched areas. It is fairly well known that sleep affects memory. How it does so is less well known, for a variety of reasons. What is memory? Today, memory is typically divided into categories, which most neurologists assume are taken care of by different sections of the brain. But to try and find the location of any category but the broadest is currently an exercise in frustration. An active human brain is so difficult to examine, even the best tools such as EEGs and imaging can only give rough pictures. Dissections of dead brains, while more thorough, reveal little, because the activity has ceased.

Despite difficulties, the field of sleep has advanced, and continues to advance. Modern imaging devices represent a huge technological leap. The funding for neurological research in general, as well as sleep research in particular, has gone up over the last several decades (although the REM research craze is still unmatched). Sleep is a rapidly expanding field of study. Today, much is still unknown. Next year, much will still be unknown, but a little bit more information will have been uncovered. And that process will continue, until, one day, people will stop asking questions about sleep that they cannot answer.

~Kaleb Johnson-Leung

Banking in the World of Fungi

Since my last post on April 7, about how I extracted the DNA from the specimens and prepared it to be sequenced, I have sent the samples off to be sequenced by Macrogen. Four of the five samples were able to be sequenced, which is good odds given that it was my first time doing the procedure and that some of the fungi were older. I knew that four of them worked, because after receiving the sequences online, I downloaded the sequences from Macrogen and used the website Nucleotide BLAST® (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), a part of GenBank®, to compare our sequence to others that had already been uploaded to GenBank®. Nucleotide BLAST® gives a match with sequences that had already been uploaded. If there is a 98-100% match with a them, then we could safely say that they were the same species.

Something interesting happened when we tried to identify the veiled polypore, or popcorn conk. We searched for it on Nucleotide BLAST®, but the closest sequence match in Nucleotide BLAST® said that it was a totally different fungus, even though it was known that it was the veiled polypore, or popcorn fungus. It was confusing until we found out that GenBank® had not had any submissions of this fungus in that particular gene region, the ITS region. This is interesting because the popcorn conk is very common, so it is surprising that no one had uploaded a submission.

Therefore, three new submissions were uploaded and they should be of use to many people. I now have my name on a GenBank® submission, which I never expected to happen.

~Patrick

Presenting, Performing, Practice, Panic, and Popper

After such a self-deprecating first blog post, I’ve got just a few days left to finish up my project (within the time I’ve allotted myself), and while I’m sure I would be a little more relaxed right now if I had managed my time better from the start, I’m feeling better with each completed task.

But anyway, I really don’t want to spend another post just talking about whether or not I’m caught up; I would like to talk about another issue I’ve encountered in the process of this ELI, however. From the get-go I knew that I wanted to include a cello performance in my final presentation, because what’s a music ELI without music? My initial goal was to polish the piece Hungarian Rhapsody by David Popper and to perform it in its entirety during my presentation. The Rhapsody is a very cool piece and it’s a lot of fun both to listen to and to play, but… it’s hard. With a lot of diligence and no small thanks to my cello teacher, I can play all of it by now, but I don’t think I can say that I would have a very good chance of keeping it totally smooth if I tried to perform it beginning to end at this point. (And with all of you to impress!)

But I don’t want to let my final presentation go by with scarcely a slipping interval reaching your auditory cortices just because of a few pesky harmonic double stops.

I want to be able to demonstrate what I’ve learned and how much fun I’ve had learning it this year, even if it’s not perfect. I also want to use the best example possible of the concepts I’ll be discussing elsewhere in my presentation, including music in physics, neuroscience, and culture as well as basic music theory. I want people to be engaged and to make connections between what I talk about and what I play, and I want to show off a little bit.

I resolved at first to talk briefly about certain concepts and then to demonstrate each one with a short section from the piece that tied into what I was explaining, but then I realized that this really wouldn’t show my audience anything about what it’s like to have all of this work come together as a musician. My new plan is to find a good chunk of the piece that I feel confident playing and that gives good examples of a lot of different things that I’ve studied this semester, and to play that chunk with an explanation of what you’ll be hearing first. I think it’ll be a great way to pull everything together, and Ms. Wissner might be my piano accompanist, so I’m excited to see how it all works out.

The problem now is finding a cute outfit that can accommodate my cello.

~Clare