Nerdy Appreciation

Just a warning before you begin reading, this is what I am going to call my nerd post. So if you don't want to delve into science, I would stop reading. Actually, keep reading. Even if you don't understand it all, it's okay, because you'll still get the point I'm trying to make, which is this- GOD IS GREAT! Right now my brain can't comprehend how he did everything, but he is one smart cookie. Hopefully one day I will be able to understand it all.

Right now I am in Human Physiology, and this class literally blows my brain. There are so many things that go on, just to do simple things, such as what I'm doing right now-typing! It's all about muscle contraction baby! Let me just tell you how a skeletal muscle contracts:
1. Stimulation across the myoneural junction causes an action potential in the muscle cell.
2. Action potential causes the release of calcium ions from the lateral sacs
3. the calcium then binds to troponin C which causes the tropomyosin to move aside, exposing the actin binding sites
4. Myosin binds to actin
5. ATP then binds to the myosin head causing it to detatch from the actin, the myosin head is recokced and binds repeatably (until contraction is complete this happens)
6. Calcium pump in the sarcoplasmic reticulum constantly pumps calcium out of the sarcoplasm and back into the lateral sacs.
Isn't that AMAZING???? That was just a brief explanation of it, and understanding the different parts of it would help you understand it's significance more. But still! Can you believe someone thought of all of that??? All these tiny little processes have to occur in order for us to do our everyday tasks. Unbelievable! Everytime I talk about Physiology I get really excited and I can't explain things because EVERYTHING is running through my head and I can't find the right words to explain it, or all the words get jumbled and I can't sort them out.

As many of you know, I LOVE rain. So let me just tell you how we are able to have that wondrous experience of feeling the rain on our skin.
So you feel a raindrop on your cheek lets say. This stimulus causes an action potential in the nerve cell, which then causes another action potential etc, all the way up the afferent nerve tract to the parietal lobe of the brain which is responsible for touch, pressure, cold, heat etc. The fascinating part is the action potential! When a stimulus is received it causes the voltage gated sodium channels to open and sodium to go inside the cell making it become depolarized (absolute refractory period), then the cell goes through a repolarizing phase when the sodium channels close and the potassium channels open and potassium goes out of the cell and the cell becomes polarized again (absolute refractory period). This is a simplified version as well, but HOLY COW! Does that not just knock your socks off??? There are so many teeny tiny little parts inside you that work like CRAZY and we don't even realize it! Wow. Our bodies are so incredible. God sure knew what he was doing!

One last nerdy science fact for you all, then I promise I will stop! in Physics yesterday, we figured out the force exerted on toes from the foot bone, leg bones, achilles tendon, etc. when standing on your tip toes. If you weighed 200 lb (that's how much my professor weighs... rounding down to the nearest hundredth) and you were standing on one leg on your tip toes, there is a force of 720 pounds on your toes! Wow! It makes me wonder why I still wear heels!

If you made it down to here go ahead and pat yourself on the back, or get some ice-cream because you deserve it! Okay... I can go on more, but I will spare you guys. I am just utterly flabbergasted at how our bodies function, and how God, the great celestial architect created it all. I hope you all will find a new appreciation for it as well, if you haven't already.

Little bit of Fall 09'

My family was able to get some family pictures taken. Here are a few of our favorites.





These are my roommates Ashley, Lora, Jaz, and I at one of the home football games



This is my dear friend Vanessa. We go on many picture taking adventures. :)


Here are a few pictures from BYU vs Utah game. BYU won- of course. Ashley, Amy, Joseph and I got our faces painted by Ashley. It was an awesome day. Jaz, Amy, and I were able to get our picture taken with O'Neill Chambers! Also my cousin Matt brought his baby up for my Grandpa and Grandma Green to see. She is sooo cute!






Also, Ashely's birthday was on Dec 7th (still is actually...) So we went to Tucano's to celebrate. I LOVE Ashley, and i am so thankful she is my roommate and that I got to know her. I love all my
roommates! From left to right it's Becky (who just got engaged :)), Whitney (Ashley's best friend), Amy, me, Jaz, and Lora. And of course Ashley is in the middle. And then there's Brant... haha.

My Favorite Question

So I just had a week full of midterms, and naturally I'm not feeling like doing anything productive at the moment, so I decided to write a new post. My favorite question to ask people and to ponder about myself is as follows: If you were put in prison for the rest of your life, and given only a certain amount of books, how would you use the books to make them last? My answer is that after reading them all, probably a few times, I would go through each book and count how many A's there are, B's, C's, etc. Then I could also do numbers, words, subjects, etc. Feel free to put your answer in a comment, or just to ponder the question. Maybe you can use it to break awkward silence sometime.

Well, thats all for now. I've noticed that I have been somewhat neglectful in the picture department... hopefully I'll put some up soon.