Teenager Smoking?????

I have figure out that nowadays a lot of teenagers smoke. I believe that most of them knows that smoking causes cancer, emphysema, and heart disease; that it can shorten their lives by 10 years or more; and that the habit can cost a smoker thousands of dollars a year. Even though they know this, why do they still try it and do not quit?

Well, according to a 2014 survey of 40000 to 50000 students in 8th, 10th and 12th grade, 8 percent of teens at 400 secondary schools in the United States reported smoking cigarettes in the month prior to answering the questionnaire. This is kind of understandable because young people always want to try things that adults do. However, why can't they quit? Then answer is - addiction. Smoking is a hard habit to break because tobacco contains nicotine, which is highly addictive. Like heroin or other addictive drugs, the body and mind quickly become so used to the nicotine in cigarettes that a person needs to have it just to feel normal.

People start smoking for a variety of different reasons. Some think it looks cool. Others start because their family members or friends smoke. Statistics show that about 9 out of 10 tobacco users start before they're 18 years old. Most adults who started smoking in their teens never expected to become addicted. That's why people say it's just so much easier to not start smoking at all.

For those teenagers who want to try it, here is a video I found on YouTube. 

DON'T FOLLOW THE CROWD
THINK FOR YOURSELF
SAY NO TO SMOKING!!

What Is A Stress?

Many of you guys may have experienced stressful situations. Stress is a common symptom among nowadays people. However, what is a stress? Stress is anything that poses a challenge or a threat to our well-being. Some stresses get you going and they are good for you - without any stress at all many say our lives would be boring and would probably feel pointless. However, when the stresses undermine both our mental and physical health they are bad. 

Fight or flight response

The way you respond to a challenge may also be a type of stress. Part of your response to a challenge is physiological and affects your physical state. When faced with a challenge or a threat, your body activates resources to protect you - to either get away as fast as you can, or fight.. 

Our fight-or-flight response is our body's sympathetic nervous system reacting to a stressful event. Our body produces larger quantities of the chemicals cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline, which trigger a higher heart rate, heightened muscle preparedness, sweating, and alertness - all these factors help us protect ourselves in a dangerous or challenging situation. 

Non-essential body functions slow down, such as our digestive and immune systems when we are in fight-or flight response mode. All resources can then be concentrated on rapid breathing, blood flow, alertness and muscle use.

In the MNT, its says, when we are stressed the following happens:

• Blood pressure rises
• Breathing becomes more rapid
• Digestive system slows down
• Heart rate (pulse) rises
• Immune system goes down
• Muscles become tense
• We do not sleep (heightened state of alertness)

We are continually sizing up situations that confront us in life. We assess each situation, deciding whether something is a threat, how we can deal with it and what resources we can use. If we conclude that the required resources needed to effectively deal with a situation are beyond what we have available, we say that that situation is stressful - and we react with a classical stress response. On the other hand, if we decide our available resources and skills are more than enough to deal with a situation, it is not seen as stressful to us. 

Organ-on-a-chip

I m going to give a speech in composition class in few weeks, and I will persuade people to avoid experiments on animals. To give audience readabilities, I did some research.  

According to Humane Society International, animal testing is known as the experiments using non-human animals as subjects. The common experimental animals include mice, fish, rats, rabbits, hamsters, dogs and non-human primates such as monkeys and chimpanzees. And there are approximately more than 115 million animals are used in laboratory experiments per year. 

A lot of animals are suffering form animal experiment every year. According to the article "Harm and Suffering" published by New England Anti-Vivisection Society, in research and testing, animals are subjected to experiments that can include everything from testing new drugs to infecting with diseases, poisoning for toxicity testing, burning skin, causing brain damage, implanting electrodes into the brain, maiming, blinding, and other painful and invasive procedures. Many, if not most, animals die before the end of the study. With the exception of chimpanzees, animals who survive their use in research and testing can be killed after the study is completed.

Because of a lot of negative aspects of animal experiment, the scientists is working on developing alternatives to it, and they finally have come up with a new method that could replace the animal testing - organ on a chip.

In fact, there are a lot of advantages: first, it cost less. According to [1]Kevin Healy, who is a bioengineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley said that “It takes about $5 billion on average to develop a drug, and 60% or that figure comes from upfront costs in the research and development phase. Using a well-designed model of a human organ could significantly cut the cost and time of bringing a new drug to market.” Second, the biochip works as real heart. It make a regular heartbeat of 55 to 80 times per minute. 

The development of this new technology will eventually lead to decrease in sacrificing of innocent animals.