Science lead

The pharmaceutical industry has become one of the largest industries in the world with the introduction of new drugs every year to treat any symptoms that one human being might have. If any one person went into someone’s house, they would most likely find an array of pills to treat countless amounts of undesirable symptoms. This has become somewhat of a problem across the United States. Putting aside the illegal use and distribution of prescription pills, even legally prescribed pills can be a massive problem because these medications don’t affect any two people in the exact same way. This makes it very difficult for doctors to correctly prescribe the medication that someone might need. There is however a new field of technology that can be the fix for this problem. The new technology of digestible computerized pills will allow doctors to monitor the exact effects of pills on the person taking the medication. With the information gained from these pills, there is no telling what kinds of advances we could make in medicine.

Overview of science feature topic

For my science feature paper, I will be writing about the new field of digestible technology. With the FDA just recently approving the first ever digital pill, this topic of research will be blowing up to epic proportions in the coming years. The possibilities for this field of research would give doctors a faster and simpler way of monitoring patient’s health through the use of brand new technology.

1.      Introduction.

-Intro of the new field

2.    Discussion

- History and current use of digestible medicine (medical pills, supplements…)

3. Current Research that is going on now and new technology that has come out

4. Future of this field of research and technology

5. Conclusion

Conference week assignment 3

For the comparison assignment, I read student 2’s and student 7’s essays. The first thing that brought me into these two essays and essay is the titles. Student 2 had a very good title called “The fountain of youth”. This got me very interested in what this essay might be about. While this title was very grabbing, the other title I didn’t think was quite as good in terms of bringing the reader in. The title of student 7’s essay was simply “Abu Ghraib”. This told me what the essay was going to be about but didn’t necessarily leave me with a desire to want to continue reading. As for the essays themselves, I thought both were very well written features in which I feel that I’ve learned something. Both had strong introductions that got me pulled into the essay. I could see that a large amount of research and time was put into making these authors experts on the topic. Something that I took away from these essays was the technique of being able to be informative and scientific while still making the essay very enjoyable to the reader.

Conference week assignment 2

For the second assignment I read, “So who can we kill?” by Michael Crowley. This science feature was about the government’s use and misuse of unmanned drone technology. There really wasn't very much science in this feature at all other than a few comments about the drones themselves. Most of the essay talked about the government itself and Obama’s actions regarding the drones. The author used some story like techniques to describe the problems with the unmanned drones and even more specifically, the irresponsibility of the government in using them. This article also took a turn to an issue that can be considered even larger and that is the seemingly unchecked secrecy that the government is allowed to use with they’re power. In my opinion, this was a great essay in explaining the controversial issue of the use of drones and the secrecy that the government overuses with them. There wasn't very much science or prickles in this essay at. This is ok however because this topic doesn't necessarily need a lot of prickles to be effective. For that reason though, I wouldn’t really think of this essay as much of a science feature paper but rather a controversial essay about a government issue.

Conference week assign 1

For part one of the assignments, I read the article, “If only they could talk” by Hannah Bloch. This article initially drew me by its interesting title. It got me first thinking of what could this author possibly be talking about and what she could want to be hearing from these things that supposedly can’t talk. As I got into the article some more and realized that it was the Easter Island heads that she was talking about, I became even more interested in the article. I’ve always been very interested in this mystery. I really enjoyed reading about all of the speculation and history of why and how the Easter Island heads got there. Unfortunately this article tended to lose my interest a little when diving into such details as the ideas of earth conservation. I do think this is an extremely important topic to keep in mind, however, it was not what I was originally interested in reading about in this article. I did like the following of the single archaeologist to give the essay structure. Overall I thought this was a well written science feature. 

Nerf blaster post

This article definitely brought back some great memories of having Nerf wars with my neighbors. We would each have our own arsenal of Nerf blasters to use for our cause. We had a ton of fun pretending like we were agents in various armies across the world. With that being said, this wasn't necessarily my favorite article we've read. I didn't quite understand the point of the essay and I felt as if the author was giving me a boring lecture about the history of Nerf. I do agree with a lot of the points he made however. I agree that Hasbro building these Nerf guns is a tough engineering task. The engineers had to develop toy guns that had enough power to have fun with yet they had to be weak enough that they were safe to use for kids. I felt that the structure of this essay that the author used was very linear and boring. It seemed to me like he was just going through the history of Nerf like a lecture. While this may be a viable structure for a lot of essays, the topic of toy children’s guns as a huge business is something that I think can be made much more interesting than this author did.

Black Holes

This article was extremely interesting and remarkably easy to read for me. The author did a fantastic job of explaining black holes with a tough balance of hard facts about a topic I could never hope to fully comprehend with simple comparisons to daily life that helped me better understand the significance of black holes. The structure of this essay made me really feel like I was being taken on a journey by which I would have learned something in the end. The author started off with great comparisons of events similar to the creation of black holes to get the reader interested. He then continued these comparisons until finally getting to the black holes, in which the reader can understand just how truly unbelievable they are. The next section of the essay goes into giving the history of science of black holes. After the history section the author gets to the most important part of the essay; his attempt at explaining black holes in a simple way for the reader to hopefully understand. Again, I thought the author did a great job here in explaining black holes in a simple matter for us to understand while at the same time, not making us as readers feel like he is talking down to us as curious 4 year olds. The ending of the article was my favorite part. I loved how the author left us with an abstract, open-ended thought to really make us as the reader go crazy. The thought of us being in one of those black holes is just absurd to think… or is it? We can never really know the answer to that and the more we as readers think about it after reading the article, the more I appreciate the authors technique in writing this piece.