When you find a suitable episode, download a copy of the report — not just a URL, make a PDF — and also record the URL (or other bibliographic information) to cite in your assignment. Then, read the report of the episode and try to understand and evaluate it according to our program. You may find it valuable to dig deeper, looking up the original science that the report describes. You are not required to go to the scientific literature if there is enough detail to do an evaluation from your popular media source. I do not recommend going first to the scientific literature to find a study to evaluate. Then, write a 2 page report with your evaluation. (2 pages is a guideline, not a rule or limit, indicating roughly the scale of writing you should attempt. You can format your essay in any readable format — changing font size or margin size to comply with the 2 page guideline is silly and won’t fool anybody. )
Your assignment should include the following elements:
- A brief (1-2 paragraph) summary in your own words of the episode as described in the report you found.
- 5-6 paragraphs giving your evaluation of the episode. If your episode leads to the judgment that the data do not agree with predictions from a model, you will have 5 paragraphs. If the data agree with predictions, you will have 6 paragraphs.
- A diagram following the pattern of Figure 2.12 on page 36 of our textbook, but instead of using the labels for boxes such as “MODEL” and “DATA” and labels for arrows such as “observation/experiment” and “reasoning/calculation”, use brief descriptive labels about your episode, like the textbook does in Figures 2.10 and 2.11 on pages 32 and 33. Do not fill in the boxes with text that substitutes for the 6 paragraphs evaluating the episode.
- A bibliography citing the author(s), date of publication, title, and publishing source (with URL if you found your report on the internet). Your citation can follow any bibliography format you like, so long as these elements are included. The standard is that a reader should be able to know what your source is from reading the bibliography and be able to find the source themselves from your bibliography. A bibliography that only has titles, or authors is therefore not acceptable. A bibliography that only has URLs is also not acceptable.
- A copy of the report you used to write your evaluation.
Your assignment will be graded for content and correctness. Since we obviously cannot read all the reports you find and include with your reports, we will rely on your summary in the first part of the assignment, though we may skim your report articles if we can’t make sense of your summary and perhaps to see that your evaluation is appropriate to the report.
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UNFORMATTED ATTACHMENT PREVIEW
World Phenomenon 1. Real __________________ Model 2. __________________ fit? Observation/Experiment Data 4. __________________ Reasoning/Calculation Prediction 3. __________________ agree? Negative Evidence? 5. __________________ Do the data agree with the predictions of the model? No The data provide evidence that the model does not fit the real world. No The data provide evidence that the model does fit the real world. Yes Positive Evidence? 6. __________________ Was the data likely to agree with the predictions of the model even if the model doesn’t fit the world? Yes The data are inconclusive regarding the fit between the model and the real world. Analysis Step 1. Real World. The real-world object of study is the climate of Earth. Step 2. Model. The model is the “greenhouse model.” According to this model, Earth’s atmosphere acts like the windows in a greenhouse, trapping light and heat under the atmos- phere. Carbon dioxide increases the efficiency with which the atmosphere traps heat. Step 3. Prediction. The prediction is that Earth’s temperatures should be increasing. However, the model is not developed in sufficient detail to permit precise predictions of how much the temperature should increase by specified dates or whether the increases would be uniform around the world. Step 4. Data. The data include the drought that covered much of the United States during the summer of 1988. Also, the decade of the 1980s contained “the four warmest years of the past century—1980, 1983, 1986, and 1987.” Step 5. Negative Evidence? No. The data and the prediction seem to agree. The summer of 1988 was unusually warm, and for most of this decade, at least in the United States, the weather was quite warm relative to earlier years. Step 6. Positive Evidence? The data, however, seem to be relatively likely to have occurred even in the absence of any “greenhouse effect.” Some climatologists have even developed an alternative model, the Lorenz model, which predicts relatively large fluctuations in Earth’s temperature. These past few years could be one of those fluctuations. The data, therefore, are inconclusive regarding the applicability of the greenhouse model to our current climate. That does not mean, however, that the greenhouse effect is not operative or that it will not show up with more dramatic force in the future. It is important to note that the +3.6°F change in temperature from year to year is a prediction and does not count as data even though data are often reported as numbers. This is because no physical interaction with the real-world object of study (the temperature of Earth) occurred in order to obtain this number. Rather, a series of mathematical equations were solved by a com- puter in order to produce the +3.6°E X Why skimping on sleep makes your br… NAAAS Become a Member Log In ScienceMag.org Q Science Advertisement xfinIX Learn More Never miss the action with Xfinity. NASCAR f 3k in 11K Sleep deprivation can affect the endocannabinoid system, leading people to choose fattier, higher calorie foods, a new study shows. AH86/ISTOCKPHOTO Why skimping on sleep makes your brain crave sweets By Eva Frederick | Oct. 17, 2019, 9:00 AM It’s a truism of the diet industry that getting too little sleep can make fatty, sweet foods more tempting. Now, researchers think they know why: Sleep loss influences the same smell-processing neural pathway that smoking marijuana does. “This is an exceptional study,” says Christian Benedict, a neuroscientist at Uppsala University in Sweden who has worked on the effects of sleep loss on metabolism but was not involved with the new research. Sleep deprivation has long been known to make people crave higher calorie foods. To find out how that process works, Thorsten Kahnt, a neurologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, took inspiration from studies linking sleep deprivation in humans to an increase in certain molecules in the endocannabinoid system, a complex network of neurotransmitters and receptors that, among other things, is affected by marijuana. Studies in mice have shown this system influences how the brain processes smells. And smell is a powerful driver of appetite-as illustrated by any gas station cinnamon roll shop. Previously, though, no one had established clear links between sleep, the endocannabinoid system, smell, and appetite in humans. “We came in and said, ‘OK, let’s test this in humans. Let’s put these things together,” Kahnt says. SIGN UP FOR OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER Get more great content like this delivered right to you! Email Address * To do so, he and his team asked 25 healthy volunteers to sleep for either 4 hours or 8 hours per night. Four weeks later, the volunteers repeated the experiment, but those who slept 4 hours during the first round slept 8 hours, and vice versa. The following evening, the volunteers provided blood samples. Sleep- deprived volunteers, as expected, had higher levels of 2-oleoylglycerol, a molecule that likely acts on endocannabinoid receptors. The sleep-deprived group didn’t report feeling hungrier than their well-rested fellows, and when they were given a buffet of food, both groups consumed the same average amount of calories. However, people in the sleep-deprived group consistently chose foods that packed more energy per gram-for example, glazed doughnuts instead of blueberry muffins. To test whether sleep was affecting the odor- processing parts of the brain, the researchers also took prebuffet MRI scans. While in the scanner, study participants smelled a variety of food and nonfood odors, including pot roast, cinnamon rolls, garlic, and fir trees. The researchers examined scans of the piriform cortex, a pear-shaped region responsible for interpreting smells in the brain. In mice, it is peppered with endocannabinoid receptors. If increased endocannabinoid system molecules changed how the brain interpreted smell-and therefore a person’s appetite-the researchers reasoned that the piriform cortex should show variations in smell-processing activity that lined up with volunteers’ changes in food preferences. It wasn’t that simple, though. The researchers found that sleep-deprived participants’ piriform cortices showed increased activity in response to food related smells, but not in a way that directly correlated with their changes in appetite. For example, two volunteers with the same increase in odor encoding might have chosen foods with different amounts of fat and calories at the buffet. So, the team members took a different tack. Maybe, they reasoned, the sleep-related changes that led to high-calorie cravings took place somewhere else in the brain. When they looked at information flow between the insula, a region deep inside the brain that helps regulate food intake, and the piriform cortex, they found that volunteers with higher levels of 2-oleoylglycerol showed consistently less “chatter” between the two regions. Those changes, along with the changes in appetite, show a possible pathway for how lack of sleep affects the olfactory system and food intake, the researchers report this month in eLife. Kahnt stresses that cause and effect in the two brain regions are unclear. “We don’t know who is speaking and who is listening,” he says. But the work solidifies the connection between sleep deprivation and sensory processes. “It also really underscores the role that the sense of smell has in guiding food choices,” he says. Knowing more about how external factors can affect smell processing and appetite could lead to new approaches to treating obesity or eating disorders, he says. Benedict says the well-designed project provides plenty of avenues for future research. However, he notes that variables aside from sleep duration could have affected the results. For example, the people who slept 8 hours went to bed at 11 p.m. and woke up at 7 a.m., whereas the 4-hour group slept from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. “We know that [time of] awakening has some effect on the circadian rhythm,” he says. Waking before dawn might throw your biological clock off compared with someone who woke up to sunshine. Kahnt and his team hope to next look at how a person’s sense of smell changes throughout the day, and how that might contribute to food intake. Another project will examine how the body’s circadian rhythm is affected by extended fasting, in which a person limits their food intake to a short window of time each day. Kahnt wonders whether such changes exist, and if so, how they will whet the appetites of other researchers studying smell processing. Posted in: Brain & Behavior, Health doi:10.1126/science.aaz8839 Eva Frederick Twitter
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