domingo, 11 de marzo de 2018

Brain donation urged by Cardiff dementia research centre

This piece of news talks about brain donation. It says that it’s important to donate your brain, when you die, because it can help with dementia research whether your brain is affected or not.
There are still a lot of investigations to make, but there has to be something to work with, so that’s why brain donation is so important.
Personal opinion
I believe it’s very important to give your body to science, because that’s the way scientists are going to discover more things can save lives. Giving your body to science has always been frowned upon, mostly by the church, but nowadays it’s becoming more and more accepted so I’m very glad.

 I always have had a personal battle because on one hand I want to donate my body to science because I believe in it and I think it's important to keep progressing and discovering new solutions to illnesses, but on the other hand I want to have a place where my relatives can “visit me”. So I thought that the best I could do was, donate all my organs to science, bury the remainders and make a tree grow up from them through a Bios Incube, which is a biodegradable urn where you can grow up a tree from the ashes of someone.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-43084710

Transgender woman breastfeeds baby in first recorded case, study says

This news talks about the first transgender woman able to breastfeed her child. It all started because her partner (who was pregnant) didn’t want to do it so, this woman, after taking some health measures could be the one who breastfed the baby.
Before the birth, doctors put her on a course, usually given to women who hadn’t got biological babies, to make her produce artificial milk.
Although the baby had to drink a supplement of milk because the breast milk wasn’t enough, it was quite good, and the baby developed properly.
Personal opinion
I am so glad to read this piece of news, because it means that we are progressing as a society. It’s true that it is a big step in science, but it is a great advance in human rights too. I’ve always thought that everyone should be equal, no one should have more benefits than another, but given that it can’t happen, we should try our bests to make it happen.
This kind of thing couldn’t have happened in another time, because of the old-fashioned thoughts, and the lack of technology and science that we have now. I believe breastfeeding a child could be one of the most wanted and most impossible things at the same time. Now if you are a transgender woman it is actually was possible. So now that we’ve got the science, it’s time to open up our minds and go with the changes.
Surrogate
Bowel


sábado, 10 de marzo de 2018

Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance

In the past 50 years, science has evolved so fast. Year by year, new treatments have been discovered in order to solve all the illnesses you can imagine. But with all these advances, new problemas have appeared, like the antimicrobial resistance. And that's what my research project is about.
I divided the project into two parts, the theoretical part, where I explain things like, the action and resistance mechanisms of antibiotics, the differences between natural and synthetic antibiotics or the powers of a superbug. And in the practical part I made a comparison between synthetic antibiotics and natural ones, to prove if some bacteria could develop resistance.

International Women's Day: 'Millions' join Spain strike

This piece of news talks about women’s day, on the  8th of March, when women workers went out  on the streets to protest against gender inequality and sexual discrimination. Unions said that 5.3 million women had joined the strike.
Women who took part of the strike, stopped working for that day, they had to ditch domestic chores too. The thing was to show the world that if women stop, everything else stops, but as Spanish law doesn’t allow for single-gender strikes, men were welcome too, to fight for women’s rights.
There have been public people who did it and some others who didn't.
Personal opinion
I simply have no words for all the images I saw on the TV, I am so proud of what we, as women, are doing. I think it’s so important to protest when you don't agree with something, and that by fighting for what you want ,you are going to get it, despite the time it takes.
Not so many years ago, women were so insignificant to society, they were treated as stupid , as not being able to think at all. They couldn’t work because “they were only useful to be in the kitchen or to take care of children”, they couldn’t have properties, they couldn’t even vote. Nowadays, although there is still a lot of work to do, thanks to some strong women who fought for our rights, we are as we are now, and I couldn’t be more thankful. So that’s what we should keep doing, fight  against sexism to establish an equal society.
It’s true that there is a long way to go, the economic gap is still big, women earn between  13-19% less than men for doing the same job, and there are a lot less women in high positions than men. Every year in Spain, there are at least 100 hundred women murderers carried out by men, and a lot of them had restraining orders, which means that, as a country, is it not controlled enough.
Another thing I want to mentions is that, this news says literally “The ruling centre-right party, the Partido Popular (PP), said the action was "for feminist elites and not real women with everyday problems". Well, I respect everyone’s decision, but I cannot understand their position - everyday problems are the ones that matter. We do a lot of little things that are sexist and we don’t even notice, and besides, who is he or she, to say anything to anyone, everyone has the right of protest about something he or she feels unfair.
I have a lot of things to say about this, but to end it I want to say that I am proud seeing that symbol of unity, 5 million women, fighting together to get their rights

headway
chore
ditch
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43324406

sábado, 3 de marzo de 2018

Florida shooting: How the attack happened

Last 14th of February a terrible incident happened in a high school in Florida. An expelled student, Nikolas Cruz, went into his old school wearing a gas mask and carrying a rifle. What he did to kill people was, setting off the alarm so the people came out of the classes and he could shoot more people. Students were led off the campus by police officers while the gunman was fleeing the building. Nikolas Cruz was taken an hour after the attack just a few miles from the attack.
Personal opinion
I am so worried because of the behaviour of these people, I mean; Nikolas Cruz wasn’t born like this, he, somehow turned out to be a violent crazy man. So in my opinion the problem is how did he become like this? Maybe the gunman as a child was unattended at home or he didn’t have many friends, so he is frustrated and angry with life in general. I’m not saying that he isn’t guilty of what he did, because unless he has a several mental illness, he was aware of what he was doing, which makes the gunman a crazy psychopath who is clearly has no empathy at all. I can’t even think what was going through Nikolas mind during the shooting, and worse, preparing the attack. How crazy do you have to be to plan a massive shooting in a school, where there’s people with all life ahead?
When I hear news like this I could not be more sad and angry; because I think about all the families that this maniac has broken and the only thing I wish is that he rots in jail. 
I think that America, as a country should learn from all these mistakes and change the law about wapons, because this might not have happened if America had stricter gun laws.




TED talks

In this post I want to talk about a TED talk related to our project Connected, called 3 fears about screen time for kids and why they aren't true? By Sara DeWitt a worker in PBS kids, a television network directed at children. She tries to make the power of technology as positive as possible in children's life.
Sara starts the talk saying that we can be with our phone all day long but then when a child touches a screen everyone goes crazy and thinks that it's wrong for children to be with technological devices. She defends that it doesn't have to be in that way, that devices can be helpful in a child’s growth. 
Miss DeWitt talks about three main fears that all people have about this topic. It is said that screens are passive, that if a child spends a lot of time with devices he/she would never go out. So what PBS team did was create a sort of interactive videogame where children could “be” animals. Therefore, when a child shut the screen down, he could still be that animal, and when he went out he remembered what he saw in the animal, how it was, what did it eat or the differences between that animal and the others.
Sara says that another fear is that playing games on the computer is nonsense and besides it distracts the child from its obligations. The company (PBS) created a series of games called Curious George that could predict children’s abilities, they could evaluate students. To do this, they compared some data analysis from the game with the average mark of each student.
Finally, the last fear is that sometimes, people think that screens isolate them from their child. Well, Sara says that’s not true, because although you can be away from them while they are playing, the child will be so excited about the videogame he/she just played that he/she could be talking about it for hours.
 
Personal opinion
I’ve always been told that screens are harmful for our health, that they could damage your eyes, your brain, your back, etc. I have always thought that, as everything, it is harmful if you abuse that thing. I mean, obviously that you are going to have bad eyesight if you have been watching a series or the computer for 20 hours without stop, but if you use it in the right way there is no need of this to happen. 
On the other hand I think that children around the age of 3 years old, as the video says, shouldn’t be playing with computers or tablets so early; they should be exploring the world, discovering new things every day. It’s true that society progresses and maybe there are a lot of new ways to make a child discover things through a screen, but well, I believe it’s always more fun to hear the noise of an actual cow, rather than hearing it from a tablet.
Another thing that the video mentions is about learning or evaluating through videogames. Regarding this matter, I think the idea is quite good, but as a supplement, because yes, you can learn some skills from videogames that maybe a book wouldn’t give you, but there are things such as grammar, maths or physical education that a videogame can’t give you. In addition, I believe that it could be useful until a certain age, because as kids grow up maybe they won’t be as excited to play videogames as they were as children.
To sum up I want to say that it’s true that new technologies can help us a lot, but it’s also true that they can be harmful if we don’t use them in a correct way.