Truth About Ecstasy

What would possibly drive someone to go three without or with little sleep, food or water to the point where they almost die of dehydration? One word answers that question; Ecstasy. Ecstasy is a drug in the form of a pill that will really mess a person up.

Some reasons why this is such a popular drug is all of the short term effects, including feeling of euphoria, enhanced mental and emotional clarity, sensations of lightness and floating and other hallucinations. This drug, as I said earlier, will also suppress a user’s appetite, thirst and need of sleep. Although as with other drugs, it is easy to overdose and potentially die while on Ecstasy from heart failure or extreme heat stroke. The use of this drug has skyrocketed since 1993, where in ’93 the DEA confiscated only 196 tablets of MDMA (Ecstasy) compared to 143,600 tablets in ’99. MDMA is often used by teenagers and young adults, largely at dance clubs, raves and rock concerts, and this use is gradually going up as well. For the longest time MDMA has been considered a safe, non-addictive alternative substance that still gives you the extreme “high”, but this “truth” has been proven dead wrong due to studies that show even light use still puts at high risks for death and/or addiction.

I’ve never been a teen that desires to “test the waters” as far as drugs and other substances go, so I completely agree with the article I based this blog on. I think that it’s extremely good that this information is so easily at people’s fingertips so that the truth about MDMA, or Ecstasy is out there to read.  

GMO's VS. Selectively Bread Animals

So you’re walking through a commercial cattle “ranch” and a cow that looks like an Arnold Schwarzenegger incarnate walks by you. The first thing that comes to mind is who in the world gave this cow steroids?! Well at least that’s what would go through my mind. So is this a actual cow? Is this just a dream, or did they just pump steroids into old Bessie?

To your surprise this is actually a real all natural bovine. This animal is just the result of selective breading; this is the process of choosing only the “best” of the animal you’re breeding to breed the other “best” (so with cows you find the “best” and breed him/her with the other “best”). So obviously there are benefits and concerns with this process. One benefit of this process is that you get more meat per cow, and you can house 3 cows instead of 10 cows and result with the same amount of meat. However people will argue that its just not natural or “right” to breed animals like this, and they often use the example that if humans didn’t interfere, you would not be finding cattle like this in the wild.

Now that we’ve gone over what selective breading is, lets move on to GMO’s or otherwise known as genetically modified organism. Basically this is when you take two different organisms, and “breed” them. For an extreme example theoretically you could breed a parrot and a kiwi, now even though I have no idea why you would want to do this, it could happen. Taking a genetic trait out of a fish that keeps it from freezing, and then inserting it into tomato plants to keep them from freezing as quick (which spoils them); so this would be a more realistic and actual example of GMO’s. There are also pros and cons to GMO’s, and they are also kind of obvious. A pro of GMO’s in my mind would be that like we’ve done with tomatoes, we can alter plants (or animals) to our benefit relatively easily. But with all things, there is always a bad side. Lots and I mean lots of people are really worried about cross breeding things that would never ever end up breeding, and the side effects of doing this.

So GMO’s or selective breeding, which one is worse? Personally I think society should be much more worried with GMO’s rather than selectively bread organisms. My first reason for this opinion is that selective breeding is practically natural; the only thing humans do is select who can breed with whom. On the contrary, GMO’s result from “breeding” that would’ve never happened and will only happen when humans manually take genes from one organism, and “put” them in another organism. In the article we read about these two things, the idea that GMO’s could potentially bring unwanted side effects to people that would’ve never occurred if the breeding was kept “normal”

If Gregor Mendel was alive currently I think he would be blown away with the application of his studies. When he first started his studies I don’t think he envisioned a day when buying “normal” food would be more difficult than buying GMO’s. So knowing these things, which are you going to worry about, GMO’s or selectively bread animals?   

A World Without Mosquitoes

                So your fishing in the middle of the summer have a good time until bzzzzzzz, what seems to be a huge cloud of mosquitoes covers the lake and start swarming all around you. Times like these are the reason you unload half a can of OFF on your body before you go anywhere in the outdoors. So if you could would you eradicate mosquitoes from the face of the earth? This is the same question that lots of people are asking them selves, and coming up with the answer: yes, but they have no idea what and how this choice would effect the earth’s ecosystem.

                “A World Without Mosquitoes” was the title of an article we read in biology class last week and it brought up very interesting things related to how the ecosystem would be effected with a lack of mosquitoes. Scientists in the article were on both sides of the argument and all brought up interesting facts about mosquitoes that I never knew. They talk about how mosquitoes affect the tundra initially and all of the things they influence there, and then they move on to the fish side of things. After this the plants side of thing is brought up and how marshy plants use mosquitoes. And finally it’s brought up that mosquitoes help pollination and things like this. A five paragraph “discussion” brings the article to a close and it is here that the aspect of how there isn’t much that mosquitoes do that can’t be done by other organisms besides spreading disease.

                My opinion on the “argument” is probably not welcomed nicely with most people. I think that mosquitoes aren’t here by mistake and that they defiantly have a purpose, even if it isn’t very big. I do agree that mosquitoes are VERY annoying and I pretty much hate them, but when you take into perspective the effect they have on a place like the tundra, where caribou migration routes are decided by where mosquitoes will and won’t be, it shows you how big of an effect they have. So do mosquitoes need to be wiped off the face of the earth? That’s a question I’ll let you decide the answer to.     

Ecosystem Services

Up until today I never even heard of the title “Ecosystem Services” before. Ecosystem Services are The product or functions that nature provides which are of great value to people  Some of them include clean water and air, pollination, fish in the ocean, storm protection, ect…  All of things are vital to our existence and help us everyday without our realizing it at all, and are often taken for granted.

In the world today everything’s worth is based on a dollar value, so nature really gets short handed by people. The problem is you can’t put a monetary value on nature, so it often gets left out of discussions and is never given credit for what it does and people end up not caring and it. Hurricane Katrina was a good example of what happens when you don’t realize what you’ve done till it’s too late; the absence of wet lands was a little piece that made the storm worse.

Personally this was a vey interesting thing to learn about and the dynamics that it includes. I received a better understanding of hurricane Katrina and part of why it was so bad, and I was given a different way to look at nature and its resources now.