What Happens When You Stretch: Reading

Title: What Happens When You Stretch
Author: ---
Publication: people.bath.ac.uk
Date: March 12, 2016

Relate and Review: The main subject of this reading is what happens to your muscles when you stretch, and the processes and anatomical structures involved with stretching. The stretching of a muscle fiber starts with the sarcomere, and is basically the elongation of the sarcomere. Then, the connective tissue around the muscle align themselves with the sarcomeres, which helps to rehabilitate scarred tissue back to health. Next, the nerve endings that relay all the information from the musculoskeletal system to the central nervous system are the proprioceptors, which detect any changes within the body; muscle spindles are the main proprioceptors of the body. Then, there is also a stretch reflex, which causes the muscles to contract when they are stretched. This function protects the muscle from injury, but the stretch reflex can be suppressed. The stretch reflex has a static and dynamic component, which both help to contract the muscle from the very beginning of the stretch. However, theres is also a lengthening reaction that occurs when muscles contract and the tension becomes too high. Lastly, the process of reciprocal inhibition is when an antagonist contracts as a reaction to an agonist contraction.

1. "This triggers the stretch reflex, which attempts to resist the change in muscle length by causing the stretched muscle to contract."
- I chose this quote because it surprised me that there is an entire stretch reflex in reaction to simple stretching. When I stretched, I never realized that my muscles were also contracting; it amazed me to think how complicated stretching actually was.

2. "When an agonist contracts, in order to cause the desired motion, it usually forces the antagonists to relax."
- I chose this quote because I have never physically realized this process. Whenever I flex a certain muscle, it feels like the entire area is being flexed and is tight. However, after reading this and flexing my bicep, I noticed that my tricep was not actually tight at all.

3. "There are actually two kinds of intrafusal muscle fibers: nuclear chain fibers, which are responsible for the static component; and nuclear bag fibers, which are responsible for the dynamic component."
- I chose this quote because it really demonstrates how complicated muscle fibers are; there are so many different types of muscle fibers, like the intrafusal muscle fibers. Then, there are also different types of intrafusal muscle fibers, the nuclear chain nuclear bag fibers.

Unit 6 Reflection

In this unit, we learned about the skeletal system, which include joints and diseases of the skeletal system. First, we learned about the different classes of bones, which are classified according to their shape (long, irregular, flat, etc.). Next, we also learned that the main functions of the skeletal system include support, movement, and blood cell production. We also learned about osteocytes, which are mature bone cells that create the ring shape that is seen in bone under a microscope. I also learned about the role of osteoclasts and osteoblasts in the process of bone remodeling; osteoclasts break down the bone and osteoblasts rebuild the bone after an injury or physical stress. Then, we learned about the different types of skeletal diseases, such as scoliosis and rickets. Scoliosis is the most well-known out of the skeletal diseases we learned, since children are checked for it every year during their doctor's appointments. Rickets is a disease that usually occurs in children, and softens the bones so one's legs bow outward.

Lastly, we learned about joints and how there are some immovable, slightly movable, and freely movable joints called synarthroses, amphiarthroses, and diarthroses respectively.
Here is a video that we watched at the beginning of the unit to give us a general idea of bones:

I want to learn more about how a bone's shape affects its function, so more about why bones are shaped differently depending on their function and location. I also wonder more about the different bone diseases, and if there are any cures for them; can metal rods be inserted in bones to straighten them out or harden them?
Overall, I feel like this unit has been quite comprehensive and I have learned a lot. I wish we had more labs to complete that were more hands on, but the owl pellet lab (http://jhan496.blogspot.com/2016/02/owl-pellet-lab.html) that we conducted was very fun; I felt that during that lab I was more focused on completing the task, especially since we started the lab with little time left during class. Also, because I did not want to break any bones from the pellet, my partner and I separated the feathers from the bones very carefully, and that required a lot of my focus. Compared to first semester, I feel like I have to manage my time more efficiently due to 20 Time. In first semester, the Monday Wellness project was not an ongoing project all semester, but 20 Time is a project that spans across the entire semester, so I must balance my 20 Time blog work with my class blog work as well.
When I look at my New Years Resolutions, I feel that I have been slowly but gradually improving my first goal of putting my full effort into this class. I try to finish my homework the day it is assigned, and make sure that I finish it with detail so I do not have to study or write as much in preparation for the tests. Furthermore, I have also improved on my second goal, as I can fully run through my entire cello movement without stopping and can play the hard cadenza in the beginning of the piece quite well. Overall, a very satisfying and important unit!

20 Time: Project for this Semester- Teenage Depression

For this semester, I will be conducting a 20 Time project revolving around the subject of teenage depression. 20 Time is essentially a project or idea that an individual works on in order to reach a goal, taking up about 20 percent of class time, hence the name 20 Time. This idea was popularized by Google, since many of Google's famous and important programs have been created during 20 Time; 20 Time offers a creative outlet so an individual's innovation is not limited. My essential question that is going to be answered once I reach my goal is: What are the hidden symptoms and methods of alleviation of depression? I specifically chose teenage depression out of other forms of depression because teenage depression is the most prevalent; adolescence is a time of lots of change and therefore discomfort or emotional instability. For example, our school now holds a "Speak Up For Change" week every single year, a week during which students speak up about usually stigmatized issues like depression and eating disorders. This event was not held even a few years ago, but is now focused on heavily because of its prevalence in our highly competitive community. For this project, I will be making a drawing book that will document the symptoms, causes, and "cures" for depression. This book will not contain complicated or scientific language, so it can be easily understood by people of all ages. Furthermore, because it will be easier to understand than scientific books and studies about depression, younger and younger kids can be exposed to these issues and learn how to prevent them. By spreading awareness of the symptoms and "cures" of depression, especially that of teenagers, I hope to answer the essential question and get rid of the stigma surrounding depression. While working on this project during class, I plan to first come up with a story that is easy to follow and relatable to teenagers from all kinds of communities. My progress will most likely be measured in a quantitative format, conflating the number of pages I have completed to my level of progress. As I am writing this blog post, I have not yet started my project. From now, I plan to decide first how long my story should be, so I do not overwhelm myself with an unnecessarily long story. Hopefully this drawing book will spread awareness about an issue that needs to be talked about more!

Owl Pellet Lab

On 2/23/2016, I conducted an owl pellet lab with a partner. The objective of this lab was to determine what animal the owl had eaten based on the bones from the owl pellet.

In this lab, my partner and I slowly dissected the owl pellet with a probe and forceps into two piles, one with only feathers and one with only bones.

Then, we used diagrams and pictures of the major bones of typical animals that an owl eats, such as a vole or a rat. After comparing the bones that we found and the pictures of the major bones of the different types of owl prey, we concluded that our owl ate a shrew. A determining factor in deciding that the prey was a shrew was the pelvis. The vole, shrew, and mole have very differently-shaped pelvises from each other, so it was easy to tell which pelvis we had. Since the pelvis we had was quite vertical and had two large holes on each of the pelvic girdles, we decided that our pelvis came from a shrew.

Furthermore, the back lower leg that we discovered had quite a distinctive look as well; the end of the fibula of a shrew is quite large compared to those of voles and moles, so we decided that the back leg also came from a shrew. Considering that we did not have that many bones in the first place, we concluded that all the bones came from one animal. Because we had two distinctive factors that pointed to a shrew, we decided that the owl ate a shrew. We could not use the dichotomous key because we did not find a skull in our owl pellet, but there ended up being other distinctive factors anyway.

Compared to the skeleton of a human, the shrew has similarities and differences to the human skeleton. For differences, first off, the human pelvis is more horizontal than the shrew pelvis which is more vertical. This is a result of the way we walk; humans walk upright on two legs and shrews walk with four legs on the ground, so our pelvises will obviously be shaped differently. Second, shrews have very sharp teeth at the front of their mouths/skulls, so as to bite, and all of their teeth are quite spiky. On the other hand, the human skull is rather round, kind of like a circle, and we also have canines at the front and molars at the back of our mouths.

 Lastly, the scapula of a shrew has two protruding bones from the main shoulder blade. On the other hand, the human scapula is just one flat bone, with no protruding fragments.
For the similarities between the shrew and human skeleton, our back and lower leg bones (tibia and fibula) look quite similar, as they are fused at one end. Furthermore, the tibia is also a bit thinner than the fibula, as it also is on the human skeleton. Second, the shrew pelvis also has two large and noticeable pelvic girdles that look similar to those on a human skeleton; the pelvises of the vole and mole do not have as noticeable pelvic girdles. Lastly, my partner and I discovered many small bones that look very similar to each other, and concluded that they all formed the vertebral column. After looking at a diagram of the vertebral column of the human skeleton, I noticed that the individual vertebrae look almost exactly the same as the vertebrae of the shrew spine.

Unit 5 Reflection

In this unit, we learned about diabetes, the endocrine system, the digestive system, and the lymphatic system. Instead of learning mostly about the anatomy and physiology of the structures in these systems, we learned about how the structures in these systems interact with other systems in the body and with different kinds of hormones in the body. One of the main themes of this unit was hormones, and how changes in levels of hormones can affect the body's systems. After we learned about the basic anatomy and physiology of the digestive system, we learned about what the body does with the nutrients absorbed from food and how hormones regulate how these nutrients are stored through the Fed State, Fasting State, and Starving State. When learning about fuel metabolism, we primarily focused on insulin, glucagon, adrenaline/noradrenaline, and cortisol. Then, we proceeded to learn about diabetes and its causes, and how it is related to the malfunction of insulin production.; we learned about the differences between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is mostly genetic and is caused by a complete inability to produce insulin. On the other hand, Type 2 is not genetic and is induced by insulin resistance. Furthermore, we learned about the endocrine system and and how hormones were secreted or stopped through a chain reaction through many glands but starting at the brain. Lastly, we learned about the basic anatomy and physiology of the lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is somewhat like a separate circulatory system that helps to absorb lipids and aids immunity.

I thought that this unit was one of the hardest units that we had ever learned, as it required lots of detail and the learning of new terms, especially for the different kinds of hormones and the glands that they came from. There were so many new terms to learn and many of the glands and hormones sounded similar to each other, so I easily confused the terms. However, this task was made easier after watching this video on YouTube:  it is a crash-course video on hormones in the human body. It was also difficult to connect the themes we learned in this unit to other units, since I usually forget some of the material learned in the previous few months. However, I felt that learning about the different fuel metabolic states was relatively easier because we also received a reading packet that made the content easier to understand.

For the fuel metabolism subject, I read an article called "Stress, Metabolism, and Liquidating Your Assets", that went into detail about what the hormones specifically do to the body and how stress and change the hormonal balance in the body. I also conducted a Digestive System Lab (http://jhan496.blogspot.com/2016/01/digestive-system-lab.html) , for which we measured the approximate lengths of our digestive systems.
Relating to this unit, I want to learn more about how genetics affect one's hormonal and digestive health, as I have read articles stating that genetics can determine the type of gut bacteria a person has; I want to know the extent to which genetics control one's hormonal control, and how much can be controlled by environmental factors.
From my New Years Goals (http://jhan496.blogspot.com/2016/01/new-years-goals.html), I feel like I have been improving in my effort to not slack off in this class. Even though I do have classes with a harder workload, I have been making sure to turn in everything despite absences in order to maintain a clean gradebook. I have also been making progress on my cello piece, and I am planning to maybe play this piece in another competition in late spring.

Digestive System Lab

1. In this lab, I measured the approximate lengths of the major components of my digestive system: mouth esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and large intestine. I used colored ribbon for all components except for the small intestine, and instead used regular yarn for the small intestine. From this lab, I learned that the small intestine is the longest component of the digestive system by far, since it is approximately my height multiplied by four! My small intestine measured around 660 cm, which is very long; I was surprised that all of that could fit inside of my intestinal cavity. Below is my data table from the lab:

Digestive Organ	Color and Length (cm)
Mouth	red, 11.7cm
Esophagus	blue, 45.7cm
Stomach	pink, 19.0cm
Small Intestine	yarn, 660.4cm
Large Intestine	green, 165.1cm
TOTAL	901.9cm

2. The length, in meters, of my digestive system is approximately 9.02 meters, but my height is only about 1.65 meters; the length of my digestive system is significantly longer than my height. I think that my digestive system is able to fit in my abdomen because the small and larger intestines are coiled on top of each other, so they are somewhat squeezed in a tight space within my abdomen. 

3. On average, I think that it takes about 4-6 hours for food to move through the entire digestive system. After looking it up just now, it takes approximately 6-8 hours for food to move through the entire digestive system. My guess was significantly shorter than the actual time it takes to digest food. The time it takes to digest food is influenced by the the concentration of the the food eaten; for example, whether the food is made mostly of fat, or just carbohydrates, etc. Furthermore, the amount of exercise and the level of metabolism of an individual can also influence the time it takes to digest food.

4. Digestion is different from absorption because digestion is the act of actually breaking the food down into simpler forms, so that it is possible for the body to absorb nutrients from the food. The main organs that are involved in digestion are the mouth and the saliva in the mouth, the stomach, and the duodenum of the small intestine. On the other hand, absorption is the act of absorbing the nutrients from the food, and no further breakdown of the food occurs. The main organs involved in absorption are the jejunum and ileum of the small intestine and the large intestine.

5. I want to learn the reason why the small intestine is so much longer than the large intestine, and also why the larger intestine is much wider than the small intestine. Furthermore, I also want to learn how ulcers are assuaged once they appear in the stomach wall. 

New Year's Goals

For this semester, I will pay more attention to this class and not slack off on this class's schoolwork. Because Anatomy is not my hardest class, it was difficult spending lots of time on my other harder classes and leaving little time for this class. As a result of my slacking off, my grades gradually decreased. In order to reach my first goal, I will do the following:

1. Complete my homework on time.

2. Complete all of my classwork in the time given during class to do so.

3. Make a comprehensive study guide for each test.

4. Do not skip studying for any chapters, despite the feeling that the test may be easy.

For this semester, I will also play my current cello piece, Elgar in E minor, with full confidence and master. I have been working on this piece since the beginning of the school year, and I can mostly play the piece well. However, there are still some parts of the piece that are very technically difficult, and I cannot shift fast enough to those positions. In order to reach my second goal, I will do the following:

1. Prepare for my shifts earlier to prevent delay in the first note after the shift (especially in cadenza).

2. Track all of the tenuto markings and notice the differences between tenutos on different notes (how they change the mood of the piece).

3. Establish a mood for each change in phrasing.