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Show 6 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2015 Science & Tech Four foods to help you power through finals KELLIE PLUMHOF columnist Let’s face the facts: finals are tough. Whether a final is comprehensive, chapter-based or a project, it’s going to be stressful. One thing that will help reduce stress is preparation, which means studying. In order to study the right way, you need to make sure you’re getting enough sleep and taking care of your body. One way to do this is eating the right foods during finals week, especially foods that will help you stay focused and keep you going all day. Here are some foods to help get you through finals week: Dark chocolate Other dessert foods are full of sugar and end up slowing you down, but dark chocolate does the opposite. Dark chocolate is rich in antioxidants, which help control free radical cells in the body by donating spare electrons when needed. Dark chocolate also contains many natural stimulants, like caffeine, which can help you stay awake and provide energy. Dark chocolate is also helpful when paired with fruit. Pomegranate or blueberries dipped in dark chocolate offer all the benefit of both foods. Whole grain Whole grains are easy to slip into a diet since many foods, like bread, rice or pasta, offer whole grain options. Whole grains can aid in better digestion and help eliminate stomach aches and discomfort, which is more than can be said for a trip to a fast food joint. Since they take longer to digest, whole grains also help you stay focused longer and keep your blood sugar even, which is needed during any study session or examination. Tea Tea isn’t technically a food but it can be a lifesaver for those stressful nights of studying. Different teas have different effects on the body. For example, chamomile tea doesn’t contain any caffeine and can help calm restless nerves. While you want energy to stay alert during a study session, after a long day of studying it’s important to get rest. If the stress is making it hard to sleep then a nice cup of chamomile might help you calm down and get to sleep. Green and white tea both contain ECGC, epigal- locatechin gallate, which is a compound that helps improve short-term memory. A cup of tea may be the boost you need to memorize a pesky list of elements or important math equations. Nuts Nuts are a great source of essential fatty acids, this means that they will help your brain function which is exactly what you need for studying. Nuts are also a great source of energy and can easily be paired with other foods, like a bite of dark chocolate or a cup of tea, to really give you the boost needed to power through studying. These are just a few of the foods that can help push you through a long studying session or a massive final exam. This list is not exhaustive and the most important thing to remember is to feed your body right. It’s important to maintain a healthy diet, especially when it comes down to the end of the semester. So avoid that fast food for a week or two and add some new choices to your lunchbox to help jumpstart your brain. Follow Kellie on Twitter @kelliepotter SOURCE: MCT There are many foods that offer convenient whole grain options. Whole grains can help aid digestion and assist with focus. U.S. proposes 17-year delay in start of Hanford nuclear cleanup By RALPH VARTABEDIAN Los Angeles Times The Energy Department has proposed a 17-year delay in building a complex waste treatment plant at its radioactively contaminated Hanford site in Washington state, pushing back the full start-up for processing nuclear bomb waste to 2039. The department submitted the 29-page plan in federal court as part of a suit to amend an agreement with the state that requires the plant to start operating in 2022. A series of serious technical questions about the plant’s design have caused one delay after another. The plant, located on a desert plateau above the Columbia River, is designed to transform 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge, currently stored in underground tanks, into solid glass that could theoretically be stored for thousands of years. The waste was a byproduct of plutonium produc- tion, which started with the Manhattan Project during World War II. The 586-square-mile Hanford site is widely considered the most contaminated place in the country, requiring 8,000 workers to remediate half a century of careless industrial practices that were done under strict federal secrecy. A 2014 review, conducted by a panel of the nation’s leading nuclear and chemical engineers, found that the partially built plant had 362 “significant design vulnerabilities,” including seals that could melt and ventilation systems that might not be able to contain radioactive gases. Construction was stopped before that review when doubts surfaced that the complex technology for mixing of heavy sludge in large tanks would not be vigorous enough to prevent explosive hydrogen gas from forming or clumps of plutonium from starting spontaneous nuclear reactions. SOURCE: MCT Construction halted yet again on Hanfor nuclear plant. The Energy Department’s legal filing cites those two issues as ongoing concerns. The latest delay was disclosed Friday, when the Energy Department and Washington state submitted proposals to modify the 2010 agreement for cleaning up the tank waste. Washington regulators have been pushing the Energy Department to comply with the agree- ment but have acknowledged that a delay is inevitable. The state has proposed a start-up for full operations by 2034, a 12-year delay. The Hanford plant consists of three main facilities: a high-level melter that would convert the most radioactive waste into glass, a low-level melter that would vitrify less deadly material, and a pretreatment plant that would WSUSIGNPOST.COM SCIENCE WEEKLY by: KELLIE PLUMHOF PHOTO BY EMILY FERGUSON | THE SIGNPOST An animal therapy event earlier in the year at Weber State University. Dogs’ brains light up at sight of human face Those who have owned a dog, or been around dogs for an extended period of time, know that dogs pick up social cues from their owners and other people. Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia have recently been studying the way dogs process faces in order to shed some light on whether dogs learn the ability to recognize faces or are born with it hardwired in their brains. Gregory Berns is a neurologist at Emory University as well as the senior author on the study. Berns described that the findings of the study show that dogs have a way of processing human faces that until now has only been recognized in humans and other primates. Before the research began the dogs first had to be trained to get into and sit still inside of an fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, scanner without being tied up or medicated. Once the dogs had been trained to do this, the next trick was getting the dogs to interact with a 2-D image on a screen, since this is something dogs don’t normally do. On the screen the dogs were shown pictures of everyday objects versus human faces. The sample size for this experiment was small because only six out of the eight dogs were able to hold their gaze on a screen for 30 seconds during the research. separate waste for the melters. The low-level melter is the only plant that is still being built. Under a revised plan, the Energy Department hopes to use that part of the operation early, sending untreated waste into it for vitrification. The new schedule is certain to affect the cost of the plant, which has been set for years at $11.6 billion. But final cost will be impossible to determine until the technical issues are resolved and a new construction schedule set. Tom Carpenter, executive director of the watchdog group Hanford Challenge, said the latest delay raises serious cost issues. Carpenter noted that the federal government has been spending $690 million annually on the waste treatment plant for more than a decade. “Will Congress go along with funding the (waste treatment plant) at this rate for another 25 years or more, just to get the plant operational?” he Although the small sample size was not ideal, the results of the study still came out quite clear. According to Berns there was an area in the temporal lobe of the dog’s brains that responded more to images of the human face rather than the everyday objects. Researchers said that if the dogs had learned to have this response to a human face, either because of associating a human face with food or attention, the area of the brain that would have been activated would have been the reward system. During this study however that was not the case. Researchers named the face-processing area of the dog’s brain that they discovered the DFA, also known as the dog face area. Daniel Dilks, an assistant professor of psychology at Emory and author on the current dog study, said that humans have at least three face-processing areas of the brain. Researchers hypothesized that dogs may have this area of the brain for face-processing because this is an ability that is important for any social creature to have, including dogs. Those working on the study hope that learning more about cognition and perception in dogs will help us understand more about cognition and perception in general terms. @ KelliePlumhof said in an email. Another unknown is how the delay will affect plans to complete the Hanford tank cleanup. Under the original design, the plant was designed to turn out each day 6 metric tons of vitrified high-level waste and 30 tons of vitrified low-level waste. If the plant had started in 2022 and met those production goals, it could have completed the job in about 40 years, or by 2059. But now, that completion date could be pushed out to late in this century. The waste is being stored largely in single-shell steel tanks, some of which have leaked. The potential for additional leaks grows with time. The Energy Department filing proposed a plan for removing the waste from some of the single-shell tanks through 2024. The department has built some new double-wall tanks that are considered safer. Under the new plan more would be required. |