People are seemingly more and more concerned with what goes into their bodies. The diet craze began decades ago with the release of everything from dieting books to pills to yoga classes, all promising a healthier lifestyle. Proposition 37 strove to educate consumers about genetically modified foods and where they come from. One would think that the health-savvy consumer would know about what they are eating, but according to a recent study done by researchers at UC Davis and UCLA, there is more to our groceries than meets the eye.

“Contaminants get into our food in a variety of ways,” said principal investigator of the study Irva Hertz-Picciotto, professor and chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health at UC Davis, in a press release. “They can be chemicals that have nothing to do with the food or byproducts from processing. We wanted to understand the dietary pathway [that] pesticides, metals and other toxins take to get into the body.”

In the study, researchers at UC Davis and UCLA honed in on foods with high levels of contaminants and measured the exposure in adults and children. Arsenic, dieldrin, DDE (a DDT metabolite), dioxins and acrylamide were among the different toxins examined in the study.

According to Marc B. Schenker, professor in UC Davis Public Health Sciences, symptoms of arsenic exposure include difficulty concentrating, decrease in energy, decrease in appetite and hair loss, most of which correlate with a variety of disorders making exposure hard to detect. The other toxins are connected to cancer and developmental disabilities.

“Cancer is not the only health impact of exposure to foodborne toxins,” said Rainbow Vogt, lead author of the study. “Exposure to pesticides, metals and persistent organic pollutants in our environment has also been linked to reproductive toxicity, hormone dysfunction, immunotoxicity, neurotoxicity, neurological impairment and behavioral problems.”

The individuals with the higher exposure to the foodborne toxins were young children around 4 or 5 years old. Pesticide and persistent organic pollutant exposure was high in tomatoes, peaches, apples, peppers, grapes, lettuce, broccoli, strawberries, spinach, dairy, pears, green beans and celery, but the mechanisms by which the toxins get into food are less obvious.

“Pesticides are used on the [crops] which are fed to an animal, [such as] a cow,” said Takayuki Shibamoto, professor in the UC Davis Environmental Toxicology department. “Then people eat the meat … [ingesting] very, very small amounts of [toxins].”

Vogt also said that often toxins bioaccumulate, meaning toxin concentrations increase the further up the food chain the product goes. Even with fresh fruit, it is best to rinse before consuming it.

Although there is no way as a consumer to check for toxins in food items, there are ways to reduce exposure. Eating organic foods will reduce pesticide exposure, and reducing meat consumption will reduce exposure to organic pollutants. Also, as a general rule, it is better to consume grains and fish lower on the food chain, meaning it has not been processed — processing is where much of the contaminants originate from. Tortilla chips and pre-cut French fries, for example, have acrylamide, a carcinogen that is also found in cigarette smoke.

“In addition to food, we are exposed to environmental pollutants from a number of sources including personal care products, household products and cleaning products,” said Vogt. “I recommend being an educated consumer by becoming informed about ways to reduce exposure to endocrine disruptors like BPA and flame retardants, in addition to pesticides.”

A few ways to lower exposure to toxins, in addition to eating organic foods and lowering consumption of animal foods, are to reduce the use of plastics — especially in the kitchen — and to improve air quality by dusting and vacuuming frequently. Reducing the use of plastic in the kitchen is important because when plastic cookware is heated or burned, toxic fumes are released into the air and can be inhaled. Keeping houseplants and opening windows can also improve indoor air quality.

Eating healthy is important, and by no means does this study label all vegetables, fruits and meat as toxic appetizers. Shibamoto commented saying that people should be more worried about the lipids in meat than pesticides and the like. People should just be aware of these substances in their food and take precautions to avoid any long-term exposure.

So while it is not necessary to go on a drastic organic-only diet or wash your fruits vigorously, there is a lot of truth to the saying, “Be careful about what you put into your mouth; you don’t know where it has been.”

NICOLE NOGA can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Nov. 28 to reflect accurate information.

REM, or Rapid Eye Movement sleep, is a beautiful state in which we wander the surreal realms of the mind in the quest for organizing and sorting information we accumulate throughout the day. Unfortunately for us college kids, we can never seem to get enough of it. Like many, I suffer from sleep deprivation. Countless nights, I’ve stayed up to write seemingly endless papers, complete homework assignments, or cram furiously for tests. This sleepiness or grogginess is due to the lack of, or interruptions in, the REM sleep cycle.

Every night, the average person gets between 90-120 minutes of the all-important REM sleep. When we are woken up in this sleep stage, we face possible grogginess, and, in my case, “the grumpies.” Luckily, there’s an app that ensures that we do not wake up during this critical period.

SmartAlarm (free, or 99 cents for the pro version on iOS/Android) is a fantastic app that helps people wake up at the appropriate times without ruining REM sleep. Once activated, the app uses the phone’s accelerometer to track slight movements while you sleep. You simply place the phone next to yourself (or under your pillow) while you sleep, and the app does the rest. By monitoring the patterns of movement, the app can predict when your REM sleep stage is over.
There’s even an option where you can see a graph of your sleep cycles! The app isn’t perfect and can cause you to wake up slightly past the time you set. It can also drain your phone’s battery quickly, so keep it charging.

An alternative to SmartAlarm is SleepTime (99 cents for iOS and Android). SleepTime has similar functions to SmartAlarm but also has some added features. When you set an alarm for 8 a.m., the app will wake you up anytime between 7:30 and 8 depending on where you are in your sleep cycle. It offers the ability to lull you to sleep with the sounds of nature, and can wake you up with a standard alarm or sounds from your iTunes library.

Both of these apps are available on the iTunes store or Android marketplace.

ALLEN GUAN can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

People are coming back from their Thanksgiving breaks, eyes locked ahead on the upcoming winter holiday. Oh, and finals are right around the corner. All of that work and information from the past few weeks is culminating in either a large exam or paper. Throw in whatever personal issues the average Aggie goes through on a day-to-day basis and early winter becomes a stressful time. Fortunately, there’s a simple way of finding at least a moment of mental focus and creativity. Step back. Breathe. Take a shower.

Go ahead and laugh incredulously. With the precious seconds ticking away, and the mountain of tasks not shrinking along with them autonomously, it’s easy to start believing that all of one’s attention must go to the job at hand. However, a change of scenery and attitude can often result in seeing the problem from a fresh perspective.

Why would a shower really help with thinking about problems creatively or differently?

The answer lies in how dramatic of a change in setting the shower really represents. Many college students identify themselves as competent multitaskers. It’s a really good euphemism for saying my generation is distracted the vast majority of the time. The sight of a college student with a laptop in their room isn’t a terribly uncommon one, and while it is a great tool for all things productive and academic, it provides 24-hour access to an all-you-can-eat buffet of information, and an even larger source of fun diversions.

The hyperbole “mind-numbing” comes to mind when describing the vast quantity of information available. However, it isn’t entirely inappropriate. The sheer volume of information available, both pertinent and extraneous, provides a very easy outlet for procrastination.

The shower eliminates a lot of the potential for distraction by being a generally unfit environment to bring electronics. But apart from it being impractical to be on Facebook or Reddit while you’re scrubbing, the shower does a number of other great things to put the mind at ease. It provides a moment’s rest from the day-to-day sensory overload we’ve become so accustomed to.

The brain is very receptive to sensory stimulation and has specialized regions for deciphering inputs from the surrounding environment.
The human ear is receptive to changes in the surrounding air pressure caused by sound waves. An incoming wave vibrates the eardrum at a certain frequency. The drum’s movement causes a set of bones to transfer the vibration into the cochlea, where different vibrations would cause different sensory hair cells to detect the change and send nerve impulses to the brain. The above package results in the sensation of sound.

The repetitive noise of the water droplets coming out of the shower head is arrhythmic, irregular, and to the mind’s understanding, inconsequential. It has the same soothing effect as the faint rumblings of a car when one is a passenger in the back seat. The mind wanders comfortably and the rider is often lulled into a deep tranquility. In the case of the shower, instead of having your concentration yanked away by Skrillex, your housemate loudly playing video games or your upstairs neighbors getting into a competition of who can drop the heaviest objects on their floor, your auditory cortex is granted respite by the pitter patter of synthesized rain on the wall.

Another of our senses that is constantly accosted throughout the day is our vision. Flashing colors on computer screens, swerving bikers in the roundabouts, lecture slides, etc.

On the retina, images trigger an arrangement of photosensory cells to send information to the brain via the optic nerve. At our desks, there are all kinds of images being formed and dealt with by the brain. For the most part, the shower is empty (save for bottles of soaps and shampoos, maybe some kind of brush or scrubber). The uniformity of the tiles doesn’t really provide us with the same kind of mental engagement that a bright flashing popup saying “INSTANT WINNER” does.

As a result, in the shower, our brain can tune out much of the input from the occipital lobe for a while and let the mind focus on more important things. The ability to enter an environment in which visual and auditory stimuli can be ignored lets us harness the brain’s massive processing power and re-direct it from external problems towards more abstract internal solutions.

Ultimately, the creative retreat to the shower might not be a major innovation in the cognitive science of productivity. At the very least, however, it serves as a moment’s pause from distraction, during which the mind is free to recuperate in its own private meditation pod.

In addition to all the mental and creative benefits of showering, there are also clear social rewards. Surrounding peers will be incredibly grateful for the reduced olfactory assaults caused by reluctance to bathe.

When not in his white noise pod, the well-groomed ALAN LIN can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

Finals are just around the corner, and if you are like most college students, you have a serious problem with procrastination. By studying on your computer and having your cell phone nearby, you are at risk of being seduced by your technology and the vast amount of distractions that it can provide. Technology can seriously harm your studying if you are pulled away by every ding and ring on your digital devices. However, technology can also save you from technology.

The following applications are easy to use and are very effective in curbing procrastination. The first program is Freedom, which is $10 at macfreedom.com. Freedom completely disables all access to the internet for a set amount of time. Getting online once Freedom has started is very difficult, so it is good at keeping you focused. Freedom costs $10, but there are free alternatives as well.

LeechBlock, an extension for the Firefox browser, which you can get at addons.mozilla.org, will not cost you a dime, and is more customizable than Freedom. It does not block all your internet access but instead only blocks sites that you tell it to. LeechBlock is useful when a lot of your studying material is online so you still need to access the internet.

In addition to internet-blocking programs, there are also activity-monitoring programs that can mock your weakness and show you how much you are letting your technology distract you.

RescueTime, which is free at rescuetime.com, will actually track your online activity and provide you with informative charts that reveal just how much time you spend on your favorite, distracting websites. This is a good way to visualize how much time you are wasting, and can be effective when used along with Freedom or LeechBlock.

As for your cell phone distraction, you could simply choose to just turn it off for a certain amount of time. If you cannot bring yourself to part with it, don’t worry, there’s an app for that. It’s called StudyBuddy, 99 cents for iPhone/Android, and it will use a graph, like RescueTime, to show all the times you stopped working to send a text or play your new game.

Technology can be your greatest study partner, or your academic downfall. Luckily, there is enough technology available that it can help negate some of its own negative effects.

KELLY MITCHELL can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

Woman to Winston Churchill: Sir, you are drunk.
Winston Churchill to Woman: And you are ugly. But tomorrow, I will be sober.

Humor is as much a part of being human as anger, sadness, joy or any other emotion. Even more fascinating is the fact that humor spans every single culture on earth. Regardless of language, religion, ethnicity or geographic region, humor permeates written letter and spoken word. This pervasiveness exists because humor comes from within. It is hardwired into every one of us. We can stop laughter if we really try, but that feeling of laughter we experience on the inside is impossible to fake.

Take a look at any comedian who performs on the stage and you will notice that it is almost never the content itself that is actually causing you to laugh; it is the context and the way it is delivered. Content plays almost no role in determining what is funny.
Why is it funny to watch Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner and see the coyote get flattened by an anvil, or blown up by copious amounts of dynamite? Why do we watch “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and burst with laughter when someone falls through a trampoline, and why is it funny when someone trips on the sidewalk but doesn’t get hurt?

As a scientific experiment, and not just for laughs, researchers tickled three human infants, seven orangutans, five gorillas, four chimpanzees, five bonobos and one siamang. The “family tree” that was created by analyzing laughter vocal patterns was an exact match for the true genetic family tree.
The evolution of laughter is intrinsically linked with the evolution of the human brain. Laughter and a sense of humor are part of what make the human brain so amazing, and so superior in capacity to even our closest relatives. Humans are social species, and so are the chimps and bonobos that we share an ancestor with. In chimps, an essential aspect of social behavior is the act of grooming. Grooming, an activity usually practiced in pairs, fortifies bonds between members of a group.

As group sizes increased, and the first humans began to emerge, complex language also emerged as a way to form bonds between multiple members simultaneously. While grooming can only accommodate two or three individuals, conversation can include 10 or more individuals, and a verbal presentation can reach hundreds or thousands at once. Of course, not every group member can actively participate in a conversation, so laughing emerged as a signal that individuals could use to show that they were engaged and part of the larger group.

Laughter has even been proved to be closely related to blushing, an involuntary act. When a member of a group is not participating in a conversation, neurons in parts of the brain responsible for vocalization become overexcited, but without any language passing through the vocalization areas, the result is a “panting cackle” that we call laughter. It is the social importance of laughter that has evolved, not laughter itself.

Laughter is so important to the human sense of socializing that we have come to associate socializing with substances that lower our inhibitions and make us laugh, such as alcohol and marijuana.

But what exactly is humor? What is it about a certain sentence, phrase, action or expression that makes us laugh? If laughter is meant for bonding, what makes us laugh at Coyote’s plight and something embarrassing that someone did, versus not laugh at someone falling out of a 10th-floor window?

Perhaps laughter comes from a desire for superiority, when laughter from thousands comes at the cost of shame for a few. Public shaming or bullying causes many people to laugh, but directly hurts those who are at the receiving end of it.

Maybe humor comes from the hilarity of incongruity; when something happens that is completely opposite to what we were expecting.

A man at the doctor’s office is reading a pamphlet on relationship facts. One fact states that one out of every three people in a relationship is unfaithful. The man thinks to himself, “Hmm, I wonder if it’s my wife or my girlfriend?”

The joke gets set up, but the punchline causes the brain to correct its first assumptions. Writer David Sedaris has managed to turn this incongruity/resolution form of humor into an art form in his books and short stories. He tells a story about learning that the first person on earth to live to be 200 years old has already been born, and prays to god that the person is not his father.

Of course, not all incongruities are funny. Grave injury, child abuse, severe gambling losses … these are all incongruities to social norms, but are not funny.

These do not trigger laughter because we have developed a preference for what is called “benign violation.” The incongruity, or violation, only evokes humor and laughter if it is benign. If Coyote had an anvil fall on him, he would be crushed to death and there would only be one episode of the show. The fact that he only gets flattened, proceeds to spring back to normal and continues his mission without a scratch on him is what makes his pain humorous, benign.

Sarcasm and irony are essentially an artificial creation to elicit the feelings of humor that we so enjoy. We find humor in the irony that the Alanis Morrisette song “Irony” has absolutely no irony in it. Or we may find a mirthful pleasure in learning that a meter maid gets their drivers license suspended for having too many unpaid parking tickets.

Freud had a theory that humor and laughter were related to sexual tension. But of course, what wasn’t related to sexual tension in Freud’s mind? Freud’s idea ties back to the incongruity idea, but it’s more sex-oriented. A sexual topic is brought up in conversation, but the conclusion or punchline is not what the brain was expecting.

Roses are red, violets are blue, I suck at poetry, show me your boobs.

Humor evolved because it rewards humans for being able to resolve false mental assumptions. Humor is the brain’s way of keeping itself in check and preventing runaway assumptions from harming us.

Children learn the humor of irony when their parents tell them that they have no idea how the presents got under the tree, and that they have no idea who ate the cookies and drank the milk.

Humor, sarcasm and irony can be painful and humiliating, but it is often that pain and humiliation where we find the lessons we were supposed to learn from the situation. So when your friend asks if you actually paid money for that new haircut, learn from it. Get a different cut next time.

HUDSON LOFCHIE tries really hard to be funny. Sometimes, it works. He can be reached at science@theaggie.org.