By Jessica Li While many have wondered whether the colors they see are the exact same as their peers, they can agree on common colors; generally, the sky is blue, and freshly-grown grass is green. However, some have a deficiency in their ability to see color where they either mix up two or more colors or simply do not see color at all. ColorWhen individuals see color, the wavelength of light that is absorbed by said object is actually what is seen. For example, a tomato reflects back all wavelengths of light except those in the red spectrum, which leads to the tomato appearing red. The Retina and PhotoreceptorsIn the retina, there are two classic types of photoreceptors, or cells that convert light into signals: rods and cones. Rod cells are responsible for functioning in low levels of light, otherwise known as scotopic conditions, while cone cells function in bright light, contributing to photopic vision. While they do not perceive changes in light levels as well as rod cells, cone cells allow for the perception of color. Additionally, there are three types of cone cells: red, green, and blue.
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By Isabella Liu
Most people think of wildfires as potent, inherently negative natural disasters, causing massive forests to burn to the ground and widespread destruction courtesy of Mother Nature. However, wildfires are actually not a category of natural disasters. In fact, wildfires would be quite rare without humans, since 90% of wildfires are man-made. However, none of that matters when a fire starts, since the damage is too great--burning 4 to five million acres of land per year and consuming everything from vegetation to whole buildings. There are four main components to starting a wildfire:
When you think about it, a wildfire has never started in the middle of winter in the heart of Canada. It’s cold and wet in this time of year, which is exactly the opposite type of air needed to start a wildfire: hot and dry. The air acts as both the oxygen and heat source, and creates a domino effect leading to a ravaging wildfire. The dryness crumbles the leaves of a forest into bone-dry flammable items, while the heat only encourages and provokes the flammability. By Annie Lu Gravitational TheoryGravitational theory is the idea that any two particles of matter attract one another with a force directly proportional to the produce of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them (generally credited to Isaac Newton and his law of universal gravitation). GeocentrismWhy was geocentrism inherently attractive to people? These believers are mainly of antiquity, but this is not to discount the roughly 20% of Americans in 2006 who still claimed to believe the sun revolves around the Earth (Berman). Religious institutions have argued there is biblical support for a geocentric model. World-renowned modern geocentrist Gerardus Bouw dedicated a book to the geocentric nature of the Bible, and analyzed the semantics behind certain verses. For example, Psalm 93:1 from the King James Version of the Bible reads: “the world also is established; it shall never be moved.” Psalm 104:5 reads: “laid the foundations of the Earth that it should not be removed forever.” It is evident that these lines may be interpreted one way or another, depending on the beliefs of the reader. It is more widely accepted these days, however, that the universe is indeed not geocentric, which brings us to the next point in time.
By Alyssa Cho
The opioid epidemic has been called the deadliest drug crisis in American history. From smuggled packets of fentanyl passing between stealthy hands on street corners to the illicit prescriptions of OxyContin and Vicodin offered by corrupt “pill mill” doctors, opioid drugs have increasingly deluged the nation in recent years, ensnaring millions of Americans in the relentless grip of addiction. The highly addictive properties of these opioid compounds result in an annual rate of about 3 million Americans abusing prescribed medication or turning to illegal opioid substitutes when they crave a cheaper or more potent substance. By Tompson Hsu On June 30th, 1905, Albert Einstein published the article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." The article was the first to detail his vision of special relativity, which said that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers (i.e., the person looking) and that the speed of light in a vacuum, or lack of air, is independent of how the observers are moving. Yet Einstein could not have developed his theory without the breakthroughs that came before his time—while Einstein was indeed a genius, special relativity simply could not have been theorized before his time. There was simply no good experimental foundation up until James Clark Maxwell completed his theory of electromagnetism in 1873. To trace the developments further back to their origin would be to include Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, where classic Newtonian mechanics were first introduced. (Newtonian mechanics imply the universality and absoluteness of time, which played a key role in the development of special relativity. These mechanics mean that, no matter where you are in the world, time will always progress the same. This turns out to be false for some special cases, hence the “special” in “special relativity”.) Other notable discoveries include the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, the Lorentz transformations, written by Woldemar Voigt in the same year. Let’s go into more detail.
Personal Perspective: An Interview with Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth, Psychologist and Educator1/6/2018 By Jeanne Zheng Being Revolutionary![]() Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth is a psychologist, educator, and author who studies the significance of character in education. She holds an A.B. in neurobiology from Harvard College, an M.Sc. in neuroscience from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Duckworth is currently a Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of psychology at UPenn. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2013. Her book, entitled Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, was a 2016 New York Times bestseller. She has also founded a summer school for low-income students and founded a nonprofit called the Character Lab dedicated to character development in education. Dr. Duckworth’s TED talk on grit (defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals”) has almost thirteen million views on TED’s website as well as an additional three million on YouTube—for good reason. By Zachary Zhu
We all remember the 2008 recession. The stock market crashed, unemployment skyrocketed, and murder rates went through the roof. But what really caused the financial crisis of 2008? Many people can cite the housing bubble and the subprime lending, but few know the root cause of the issue. To fully understand the causes of the most recent economic downturn, we need to go back a century. In 1929, the US experienced the worst economic contraction in its history: the Great Depression. The Great Depression was one of the most influential events in US history: one out of four people were left unemployed, capitalism itself had failed. |
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