By Andrea Liu A child, no older than five, walks into the doctor’s office with his mother behind him. She has recently noticed something strange about her son: he has crossed eyes, bad vision, frequent headaches, and a strange lump that has recently appeared on his back. She doesn’t know it yet, but the doctor is about to diagnose her son with Rhabdomyosarcoma. ![]() Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is a cancer common in children that begins its development in the embryo. About 7 weeks into embryonic development, cells called rhabdomyoblasts (which eventually will form the body’s skeletal muscles) begin to form. These are the cells that might develop into RMS. This is a cancer of embryonal cells, therefore it is much more common in children and is the most common type of soft-tissue cancer in children. There are two main types of RMS: Embryonal and Alveolar. Embryonal RMS (ERMS) typically affects children of around 5 years old, like the boy mentioned above, and is most common type of RMS. The cells look like the developing muscle cells of a 6 to 8-week-old embryo, typically occurring in the head and neck area, bladder, vagina, or in or around the prostate and testicles. This type of RMS has two subtypes (botryoid and spindle cell) that tend to result in a better prognosis (a forecast of the likely outcome of a situation), meaning that the children who have those two subtypes are more likely to make a full recovery. The second main type of RMS is Alveolar RMS (ARMS) which affects all age groups equally, though it makes up a larger portion of the RMS cases in older children and teens. ARMS typically occurs in large muscles of the torso, arms, and legs. These cells resemble muscle cells in a 10-week-old fetus. These cancerous cells tend to grow faster than ERMS and require more intense treatment.
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By Jennifer Yang
Delving Into The Past![]()
The origins of AI began, where most things seem to, in Ancient Greece. One myth mentions an intelligent robot Talos, a creation of Hephaestus—the god of metalworking and forges—designed to protect Europa of Crete. The Greeks themselves dabbled in the making of robots. They can claim to have created the first working robot in history. Made in the shape of a life-size woman, this robot was capable of pouring wine and water. There are also records from various peoples—such as the Chinese, Arab, and English—of creating automatons and contemplating the imitation of human thinking.
Both literature and the film industry have also spent a lot of time toying with the idea of AI. There was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a story delving into the creation of a being capable of feeling and thinking subjectively. Star Wars is also no stranger to AI, with its beloved robot characters R2-D2, C-3PO, and now BB-8, who all display intelligence, emotion, and the capability to take action based on the previous two traits. Familiar with I, Robot? The whole book, and its movie adaptation, centers around the idea of robots who have become intelligent enough to take actions based on what they believe is the best course of action. To humans, this sort of thinking occurs without much difficulty, but where is the line drawn? I’ll pull an example from the work. There are two people drowning in a large river: a middle-aged man and a young girl. Only one can be rescued. The typical reaction of a human would be to save the child first, but the robot in the movie saves the middle-aged man, based on the calculation that the man had a better chance of survival. The worlds that authors and movie writers have been dreaming about for so long may come to life sooner than you might think, if the progression of AI is anything to judge by. The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) first gathered steam in the 1950s, bringing with it the notion that machines might be capable of thinking (Turing’s Test) and therefore capable of manipulating symbols the same way they do numbers. 60 years later, the accomplishments of game AIs, such as the groundbreaking chess program and ELIZA, the first chatterbot, now look childishly simple in comparison to recent events. ![]() By Jasper Chen Have you ever wondered about the mechanisms that govern the behavior of the world around you? Theory has it that about 13.8 billion years ago, an infinitely dense and unimaginably small entity expanded into an extremely hot state (10,000 million degrees, 1,000 times the temperature of the center of the sun) that grew unimaginably fast: a few light years across in one second of time (this rate is continually increasing). This is known as the Big Bang, and it marks the start of time. Current theories cannot handle the infinite density of the entity, a mathematical singularity (or simply an undefined object), and the theories are therefore unable to “predict” certain properties of the era before the Big Bang. It also gave rise to the four fundamental forces that act as the basis of virtually every single phenomenon that human kinds have managed to discover: the weak force, the strong force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They all have crucial roles in shaping the world around us. During the first 10^(-43) seconds, or one ten-million-trillion-trillion-trillionth of a second of a second after the Big Bang, the four fundamental forces of nature were united into a single, grand force. This period of time is known as the Planck Epoch, named after the German scientist Max Planck. However, as time moves past this miniscule amount of period in time, the gravitational force separated from the grand force, then from the Strong Force and lastly from the electromagnetic force. The four fundamental forces started to take forms in the way we experience them today as the universe starts to cool from the blazing state. By Emily Zhou “You’ll never find a rainbow if you’re looking down,” quotes Charlie Chaplin, the famous silent film comic actor. Indeed, the rainbow has developed over the centuries as a symbol of happiness, beauty, and magical blessings. However, many are unaware of the involvement of physics with the creation of these displays of light; by understanding the workings of science behind them, you may be able to see one every single day. Why are rainbows colorful?Rainbows usually result from refraction of light through suspended water droplets. In the 1660s, Isaac Newton conducted his prism experiments, which isolated a single beam of sunlight to shine through a glass prism and create a visible color spectrum as a multi-colored band of light. When Newton placed a second prism in front of the first, he was capable of combining the colors back into the beam of white light. His findings proved that the sunlight, which usually appears white to our eyes, is actually a combination of a range of all colors that are detectable to the human eye. Thus, when light travels across mediums of different density, (in this case from air to water), beams of light at different wavelengths are deflected at slightly different angles, bending to separate into individual colors. For example, red light, which has the longest wavelength on the spectrum of visible light, will be refracted at a steeper angle than blue light, which has a shorter wavelength. Difference in angle after refraction allows the human eye to distinguish the bands of light by color.
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.
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. |
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