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What does a tattoo exactly mean for you and your skin?

Did you know that humans shed around 40,000 skin cells per hour? So how are tattoos staying on our skin for a long time? That's what I'll be investigating.

The skin is made up of three layers, the epidermis, dermis, and the hypodermis. The epidermis is punched through with a needle gun and into the dermis. The dermis is composed of blood vessels, collagen fibers, nerves, glands, and a lot more. The needle is punched into the skin being at a very fast pace, and it is being done constantly. The ink is being pushed into the fibers and nerves of the dermis.

Normally our body sees the foreign substance as an attack, and so our immune system will want to do something to protect our bodies from this attack. It counterattacks. Our immune system sends cells to the wound site and starts to repair the skin. These cells are macrophages, and they travel to the site of the wound and start "eating" up the ink where it is deposited. Other parts of the skin attempt to do something about the ink as well. For example, fibroblasts attempt to suck up the tattoo ink, but they can't do anything with it, so it stays stuck in the dermis, where it is visible through the skin.

This is what makes tattoos permanent, however that doesn't mean your body stops fighting the foreign substance in your body. Overtime tattoos will fade and get pushed to the surface, and the skin cells will keep shedding like normal. If you wanted to get rid of a tattoo, laser treatment would be road to go! Laser treatment will target a color in your tattoo, and separate the ink into particles the macrophages can get rid of.

But before you even think about getting a tattoo, there are risks to it. The most common risk is infection. Just like everything else exposing your body to alien substances can have consequences. Another risk is you could have complications with future medical procedures such as MRIs. Other risks could be the involved with the ink specifically. There are more that 200 colorants and some are not cosmetic-approved/ tested. There are also addictives that are put into the ink to preserve the ink. If your not sure about the ink they are applying talk to the person/ parlor your getting your tattoo from. It's okay!

Sources:
https://goo.gl/hyjPih
https://goo.gl/D97ukE
https://goo.gl/PbapKn
https://goo.gl/qs76P1

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Iileen's Health Story:

Iileen is a wife and a mom of two children. For this story I have decided not to give the names of the relatives, for privacy matters.

In general, Iileen's health has been great. No life-altering diseases. No conditions. She has been leading a generally healthy life.

Now imagine, you're thirteen years old and you're out for a bike ride. Wind in your hair, smiling at the sun beaming down on your face as you ride your bike on the sidewalk. That's how it started out for Iileen. However, she didn't get to finish her bike ride.

Iileen was thirteen years old, when she flew off her bike and fractured her skull, and had to go to the hospital. She had basically cracked her head open. She did not have helmet, because when she was younger helmets were only used for people who would have seizures. When the ambulance was called and she got to the hospital, they found that she had a blowout fracture and that had caused her to have a black eye. While in the hospital (for the first 24 hours), she only remembers being in the ER, and the people in the ER handing her glasses back to her. She has no recollection of anything between flying off her bike and waking up the next day in the hospital bed. The only thing she remembers is the ER nurses handing her, her glasses so she could do the a quick eye exam.

From this event, her coordination on her left side of her body has been affected. She could no longer play the piano anymore, and sometimes her left eye might droop a bit, from time to time.

Her experience with healthcare in that specific event wasn't very pleasing. As they were trying to get her x-rays, she couldn't stay still, and the technician was being very rude about it, instead of being understanding of the ordeal she had just been through. The technician was also quite unfriendly.

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The CRISPR cas9 is a genome-editing tool. With this technology scientists can literally take parts of the DNA sequence and replace them or edit them. This new technology could mean altering DNA so someone wouldn't be born with any genetic mutations.

CRISPR stands for "clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" and this the region of the DNA with two notable characteristics- the presence of the nucleotide repeats and there is the presence of spacers. Cas9 is just the enzyme that cuts the strands of DNA- it basically acts like a pair of scissors.

We have discovered many things with CRISPR and one of them is that bacteria is far more sophisticated than we thought before. CRISPR wasn't actually invented, but they came across it in nature. Microbes have been using CRISPR molecules to edit their own DNA, for millions of years. Microbes are microorganisms that are usually bacteria or some sort of virus. They use CRISPR molecules as their immune system, and it is very sophisticated. Bacteria that was attacked by a virus was eliminated, but not all were eliminated. Some that survived were now resistant to the virus that was supposed to eliminate them, and so were their descendants.

Using CRISPR can mean an end to genetic disease or mutations. But not all people see CRISPR like that. Since CRISPR is a gene-editing tool, that means it can edit other genes as well. This means there are a lot of ethical issues that come along with CRISPR. To put it simply, in the hands of the wrong people this could be disastrous. The thing with CRISPR is it can change what your child may look like- one day. Many people think this is going to far, and that it goes against the nature of things. Others are ecstatic. This just shows us that the future is near, and there will be more discoveries to come.

Sources:
https://goo.gl/Vdbc7C
https://goo.gl/VdZZQW
https://goo.gl/cm7pKU