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A new hobby that I recently started and already love the experience and experience of going down the mountain.

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Prosthetics are fascinating to me due to their advancements in medicine. They also allow people who have lost a limb due to trauma or other reasons live an almost normal life.

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I have a very strong interest in reading. I read all different types of genres.I also love to explore all different types of writers.

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"The more that you read, the more thing's you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go."
- Dr. Seuss

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James Patterson is one of my favorite authors.

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"Know what you want to do with your prostheses and understand your limits and skills."
-Brett Wolfe

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I couldn't find my exact snowboard, but this one is pretty close. This also a nice design that I wouldn't mind having in the future.

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This was my first year snowboarding and I was in my school's Ski Club.

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The experience with friends and family and being outside enjoying the fresh air.

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I did this trail with some of my friends, while we enjoyed the outdoors and exploring the new area.

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The waterfall was beautiful and definitely a once in a lifetime opportunity. To reach the waterfall you have to walk down over a 100 stairs, but once you're down there you're able to swim in the waterfall pool.

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In Costa Rica we did tons of tropical hikes.I enjoyed the difference of scenery compared to Upstate New York.

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Science has always been one of my best subjects and I love how it gives logical explanations to random phenomenons.

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"Science is simply common sense at its best"
-Thomas Huxley

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One of my Favorite Scientific things: The Water Bear

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One of my Favorite Scientific things: The Water Bear

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Water Bear's are a microscopic organism that can surive in space.

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The begining of the article is the most informative since it summarizes, and really helped me understand the Water Bears.

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They are probably the toughest creatures on Earth, and now we know how they manage to survive years of complete dehydration.

Water bears, or tardigrades, have been recorded surviving the vacuum of space, high doses of radiation and pressure. These water dwelling creatures can also survive dry environments in a shrivelled-up, dormant state for as long as a decade, reviving within an hour when exposed to water.

To pull off this remarkable trick, the animals rely on proteins unique to them, called tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs).

When there is water around, these anti-dehydration proteins are jelly-like and don't form into well-defined three-dimensional structures like most known proteins.

But when water bears start to dry out, these proteins turn into a kind of glassy sanctuary that cocoons all dehydration-sensitive materials in the animal from harm.

"When the animal completely desiccates, the TDPs vitrify, turning the cytoplasmic fluid of cells into glass," says lead author Thomas Boothby of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"We think this glassy mixture is trapping [other] desiccation-sensitive proteins and other biological molecules and locking them in place, physically preventing them from unfolding, breaking apart or aggregating together," says Boothby.

Surviving a dry spell

Boothby and his colleagues discovered the proteins after monitoring gene activity as tardigrades dried out. They noticed a spike in activity of genes that turned out to make the TDPs.

And when they blocked the activity of these genes, tardigrades died after dehydration, demonstrating they were vital for surviving desiccation.

Moreover, Boothby showed that yeast and bacteria artificially equipped with the genes could also survive dehydration, suggesting that they could potentially be transferred into crops to help them survive drought.

The researchers also ruled out a long-held assumption that tardigrades survived dehydration thanks to a specialised sugar called trehalose, which is known to perform the task in tree frogs, for example. They found that tardigrades either don't make trehalose at all, or only make tiny amounts.

Sweet trick

However, the researchers were surprised to discover that the proteins protect their living cargo in the same way as trehalose, by forming glass like sanctuaries.

Boothby says the results provide a new example of convergent evolution, in which evolution comes up with a similar solution more than once. "It's just that some animals have evolved to rely on trehalose, while tardigrades have also evolved the ability to vitrify, but using a completely different type of molecule - a protein," he says.

"It is amazing to see that evolution has found several biochemical ways to obtain the same kind of mechanism for solving the problem of desiccation. Trehalose in nematodes and brine shrimps, and apparently TDPs in tardigrades," says Ingemar Jönsson of Kristianstad University, in Sweden. "And what a wonderful adaptation to turn into a stable glassy state when the body dries out!"

The team is now investigating whether other organisms such as plant seeds rely on these proteins to survive desiccation, too.

Boothby is hoping the find can be translated into practical applications, for example as a way to store vaccines and pharmaceuticals at room temperature by dehydrating them instead of having to constantly refrigerate them.

"This could help us break dependence on the cold-chain, a huge economic and logistical hurdle for getting medicine to people in remote or developing parts of the world," he says. "We are pursuing these applications."

Journal reference: Molecular Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2017.02.018

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Tardigrades turn into glass to survive complete dehydration

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They are probably the toughest creatures on Earth, and now we know how they manage to survive years of complete dehydration. Water bears, or tardigrades, have been recorded surviving the vacuum of space, high doses of radiation and pressure.

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This organization came to our school and I volunteered at the event. Broadalbin-Perth raised enough money to package over 10,000 meals.

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An amazing organization that helps people have a better life. One day I would love to volunteer for the organization.

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I was a candy striper at Nathan Littauer it was a wonderful experience and feeling. To help the nurses with some work and visiting with the seniors.

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Our volunteers are paid in six figures- S.M.I.L.E.S.
Nathan Littauer Hospital and Nursing Home Auxiliary has been supporting health care in our community since 1894. Our 300-plus members support countless operations throughout Nathan Littauer's facilities, including volunteering at the Nursing Home and leading tours around the Hospital. Since 1980, our volunteers helped to raise over $600,000 and donate 16,000 hours in a typical year.

To become a volunteer or to join our Auxiliary, call Susan McNeil, Director of Volunteer Services, at (518) 773-5408 or e-mail semcneil@nlh.org .

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Auxiliary/Volunteers - Nathan Littauer Hospital

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Our volunteers are paid in six figures- S.M.I.L.E.S. Nathan Littauer Hospital and Nursing Home Auxiliary has been supporting health care in our community since 1894. Our 300-plus members support countless operations throughout Nathan Littauer's facilities, including volunteering at the Nursing Home and leading tours around the Hospital.

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An article about advances in Prosthetic's:

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An article about advances in Prosthetic's:

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This article first three paragraphs help explain the advancement, and help people understand how prosthetics work.

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Medicine has progressed a lot since the Civil War, but amputations haven't. Once a limb is sliced off, surgeons wrap muscle around the raw end, bury nerve endings, and often attach a fixed prosthesis that is nowhere near as agile as the flesh-and-blood original. Better robotic limbs are available, but engineers are still figuring out how to attach them to people and give users fine motor control. Now, a team of researchers and clinicians has developed a simple surgical technique that could lead to prosthetics that are almost as responsive as real limbs.

"It's a very clever model," says Melanie Urbanchek, a muscle physiologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "[It makes] use of what the body naturally has to offer."

The biggest barrier to lifelike limbs is that signals can no longer travel in an unbroken path from the brain to the limb and back. Scientists have developed several ways to bridge the gap. The simplest is to place electrodes on remaining muscle near the amputation site. For finer control, doctors can use severed nerves themselves to relay the signals, through electronic attachments. But when they aren't rejected by nerve tissue, such attachments tend to receive weak signals. A stronger signal comes from attaching nerve endings to small muscle grafts that amplify the signal and relay it using electrodes. But even this method fails to take advantage of a simple biological solution for joint control: the pairing of agonistic and antagonistic muscles. When you contract your biceps to bend your elbow, for example, your triceps on the other side of the joint stretches, providing resistance and feedback. Together, such opposing muscle pairs let you fluidly adjust a limb's force, position, and speed.

The new technique, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, creates such a pairing for prosthetic joint control. It respects "the fundamental motor unit in biology, two muscles acting in opposition," says Hugh Herr, a biophysicist at MIT and co-developer of the method.

Let's say you lost your leg above the knee. Surgeons would take two small muscle grafts from somewhere in your body, each a few centimeters long, and suture them together end-to-end to form a linear pair. They would place the pair under the skin near the amputation site. Then they'd suture the two ends to the tissue under the skin, so that when one half of the muscle graft contracts, the other stretches. Finally, they'd connect severed nerve endings to the graft and allow the nerves to grow into it.

Once the graft is healthy and connected, the researchers would use electrodes to connect each muscle to a smart prosthetic leg. The severed nerves that would normally tell the ankle to extend, for example, would instead go to one of the grafted muscles, which would contract, sending a signal to the robotic ankle to extend. As the grafted muscle contracts, its mirror opposite would stretch, sending a signal back to the brain. The grafts would receive additional electrical feedback from the smart prosthesis, indicating the ankle joint's position and force, allowing for finer adjustments. Additional grafts could be added to control other joints in the prosthesis.

The new technique, called an agonist-antagonist myoneural interface, was tested in rodents. The MIT team operated on seven rats, severing muscles and nerves in the back right leg of each. Researchers then grafted on a pair of muscles about 3 centimeters long, connected severed nerves, and let the rats heal for 4 months. When electrodes were attached, the grafted muscles worked in tandem, one contracting and the other stretching. They also emitted electrical signals in proportion to the stimulation. That response suggests that the technique could allow for fine-grained control of a human prosthetic, the researchers report today in Science Robotics. What's more, inspection under a microscope showed that the grafts healed well and were populated with new nerves and blood vessels and healthy neuromuscular junctions.

"This is fairly low-risk. It's minor surgery," says Rickard Branemark, an orthopedic surgeon and prosthetics researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Even without adding a prosthesis, growing severed nerves into muscle grafts could prevent painful neuromas, or abnormal nerve growth. With the new method and a smart prosthesis, "there's every expectation that the human will feel position, will feel speed, will feel force in the same way that they once felt when they had a limb," says Herr, who lost his own legs below the knees to frostbite while ice climbing, and is in line to get the procedure. He says they'll have results from human trials within the next 2 years.

doi:10.1126/science.aan6912

Matthew Hutson is a freelance writer covering technology for Science.

More from News

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This new surgical procedure could lead to lifelike prosthetic limbs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Medicine has progressed a lot since the Civil War, but amputations haven't. Once a limb is sliced off, surgeons wrap muscle around the raw end, bury nerve endings, and often attach a fixed prosthesis that is nowhere near as agile as the flesh-and-blood original.