Veda #57 : Chickenpox VS Cold 12:48 AM

Day 57
"Why did we get chicken pox only once, but we might encounter cold or flu several times?"

Most of you probably had chicken pox when you was a little kid. If now you see any people got chicken pox, you're free from worries of having that disease again, because you know that it won't do you any harm again. why did that happen?it's just not like flu or cod that can strike us all over and over again.

Chickenpox is caused by a virus called varicella zoster. People who get the virus often develop a rash of spots that look like blisters all over their bodies. The blisters are small and sit on an area of red skin that can be anywhere from the size of a pencil eraser to the size of a dime.

When you get sick, your white blood cells fight the harmful germs with special germ killers called antibodies. White cells manufacture antibodies for each particular sickness, so if you have chicken pox, your white blood cells make chicken pox antibodies. After you are recovered, these antibodies stay in your blood and keep killing any chicken pox viruses that get into your body. That is why you can’t get chicken pox twice. You have become immune to it. You've probably heard that chickenpox are itchy. It's true. The illness also may come along with a runny nose and cough. But the good news is that chickenpox is a common illness for kids and most people get better by just resting like you do with a cold or the flu.

It's very rare case, but actually chicken pox will do harm to you twice, if the first one was happened too mild. That's why many eldest group their kids if one of them having a chicken pox, to infect all of them. Because having chicken pox on age 20 and more is considered dangerous and deadly. Most adults who get chickenpox are immunosuppressed meaning that their immune systems aren't functioning properly.

In the same way, when you get a cold from a cold virus, your body makes antibodies to fight that particular cold virus. You can never get a cold from that particular kind of virus again. However, since there are more than 200 different kinds of viruses that can cause colds, a new cold virus can enter your body and you will not have antibodies in your blood to fight it. Then you will get another cold.

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Veda #49 : Ambidexterity 8:42 PM

Day 49
"What is Ambidexterity?"


Often we saw people writing or doing something with their left hand primarily. But there were some peoples that could using their both hands to do the different things at the same time. This rare skill is called Ambidexterity. different than left handed person that sometimes could use their right hand, ambidextruous person could use both of their hands to do different things fluently.

Ambidexterity is the state of being equally adept in the use of both right and left appendages (such as the hands). It is one of the most famous varieties of cross-dominance. People that are born ambidextrous are extremely rare. People that are made ambidextrous are called Penwald ambidextrous; they can also stop being both-handed. The word literally means "both right handed"; in other words, you are as good with the left hand as you are with your right hand.

Although not all scientists agree on the answer, many believe that most people’s brains develop more on one side than on the other. And since the left side of your brain controls the muscles on the right side of your body, and the right side of your brain controls the muscles on the left side of your body, this would influence the muscles in your hands as well.

Therefore, if the left side of your brain is more developed, then you are right landed. If the right side of your brain is more developed, then you are left-handed. If, however, your brain is equally developed on both sides, you are ambidextrous, you can use one hand as well as the other.

In a right-handed person, the right hand is usually larger than the left because its muscles have developed more.
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Veda #36 : Ugly Handwriting 11:12 PM

Day 36
"Why do most of doctors have a terrible non-human handwriting?"


You probably have ever gone to see a doctor, or at least go to pharmacy to take the medicine that prescribed for you. Take a look, or remember what it's like to see the prescription and the doctor's handwriting. It's so ugly and most of the time, it's not readable. But amazingly, the pharmachists were able to read and gave the right medicine prescribed, complete with the dosages. Why do most of the doctors have a completely unreadable handwriting?

Okay, so before you thought that they've been teached to write badly at medical school, doctors do not have bad handwriting, they just choose to write badly. This is not a conscious decision to confuse people, but an unintentional consequence of viewing other things as more important or urgent in the moment. In this case, the patient's health and other patient's health also, and the much more important is to putting all energy into diagnosis and treatment concerns.

This bad handwriting also has something to do with medical records and doctors not wishing their patients to be able to read the entries in theirs. The other and more interesting aspect is prescriptions and the era prior to the 1960s. Before that time there were both fewer stock prepared drugs and more custom compounded medicines, often using the doctor's favored remedies. The combination of poor handwriting, Latin and abbreviations of Latin kept the patient from knowing what exactly they were taking, and trying to make their own medication (that of course, will caused something unexpected to happen if they read it and interpreted it by themselves).

But a more simple fact that actually could be put into consideration,after all the years of taking notes quickly in medical school, the handwriting got messier and messier. :p
How did the pharmacist able to read this messy handwriting?it's simple, usually at the beginning of the sentences, there were actually 2-3 letters that are correct, the rest usually concluded by the pharmacist through year and years of learning medicine.

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Veda #31 : Scrubs 8:25 PM

Day 31
"Why the doctors and nurses always using green/blue scrubs when they operate?"


Familiar with tv series House?Grey's Anatomy?or the classic ER or Scrubs?
No problem if you haven't seen one of those movies, they all telling life in hospital as medical and surgical unit at the hospital. i'm not gonna tell each synopsis of those movies, but i'll tell you about their apparel, called Scrubs. Scrubs are the shirts and trousers or gowns worn by nurses, surgeons, and other operating room personnel when "scrubbing in" for surgery. They are designed to be simple with minimal places for dirt to hide, easy to launder, and cheap to replace if damaged or stained irreparably.
Now, do you know why this scrubs always coloured green (or in some case : blue)?

Earlier history tell that usually the doctors wearing white suit, to resembles clean and hygiene, because it's vital to health, or to sick persons, they must treated with hygiene stuff. This is a basic colour's psychology on most human's mind.
But then, if we talk about scrubs, most of the doctor change their clothes to green suit, because of the simple reason : it is more comfortable and refreshing to looked at. Although it is hard to believe and lack of logical reasons, green color is very suitable for the operating doctors and nurses to help them see better, because green is the opposite of red in color's wheel.
interesting isn't it?why?
According to Psychologist, seeing green color could refresh the eyes of the surgeon who stare at red things for a long period of time, this is including the blood and internal organ of the body. Seeing red color (or any 1 color) for too long will cause the brain lose its sensitivity to those color, and made the eyes a little bit blurry. Other case mentioned that it'll triggering some color illusion on bright color.
i.e : if the surgeon stare at the red blood for too long, the eyes will become blurry and they'll see some color illusion of red when they see the white or bright background.
So, that's why they using green color to help neutralize this illusion and improve permormance when operating.

About some of the surgeon or doctor using blue?the reason is simple, red is hot color, and to help neutralize it, use the cold colors such as green or blue.
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Veda #29 : Sleeping Time 10:22 PM

Day 29
"Sleeping with the lights still on may cause health problem such as Leukimia, how'd that happen?"

How many of you sleep at night with the light still on?. Well, maybe after you read the explanation below, you might want to consider to kill your light whenever you sleep. As we may know, your night sleep is the most important state of sleep than any ther that you have on the afternoon, or evening, because most of our body's hormones regeneration happened at night. One of them called "Melatonin". Melatonin is a hormone made by the pineal gland, a small gland in the brain. Melatonin helps control your sleep and wake cycles. Very small amounts of it are found in foods such as meats, grains, fruits, and vegetables. You can also buy it as a supplement.
Now, how this connected with your health?and most of all, how did this connect with your sleeping habit?

Melatonin and its functions
Your body has its own internal clock that controls your natural cycle of sleeping and waking hours. In part, your body clock controls how much melatonin your body makes. Normally, melatonin levels begin to rise in the mid- to late evening, remain high for most of the night, and then drop in the early morning hours.
Melatonin also helps control the timing and release of female reproductive hormones. It helps determine when menstruation begins, the frequency and duration of menstrual cycles, and when menstruation ends. As an antioxidant, in many studies melatonin has been shown to protect DNA from oxidative damage that bring cancer. The scientist suggests that it may help strengthen the immune system.

Melatonin and its cycle
Many researchers believe that melatonin levels are related to the aging process. For example, young children have the highest levels of nighttime melatonin. Researchers believe these levels diminish as we age. In fact, the decline in melatonin may explain why many older adults have disrupted sleep patterns and tend to go to bed and wake up earlier than when they were younger.
Darkness stimulates the production of melatonin while light suppresses its activity. Exposure to excessive light in the evening or too little light during the day can disrupt the body’s normal melatonin cycles. The stronger the light at night, the less Melatonin will produced.

Melatonin and sleeping habit
Okay, now you've known enough about melatonin, now you should've been figure the connection between this and sleeping with the light still on. As explained above, darkness stimulates the production of Melatonin, a reduction in melatonin had been linked to cancer initiation and cancer progression. Since Melatonin also figured as an antioxidant that protect DNA from oxidative damage, Once damaged, DNA may mutate and carcinogenesis may occur. This is why people most likely having cancer, especially on children. Also, night workers were known to have a higher risk of breast cancer, because their exposure to lights in the day and night.

This should come to consideration to you who having a childs, don't forget to turn off the light whenever the children sleep, because their immune system aren't as well as adults. If you or your children having trouble with darkness, try to use a low intensity light bulb as consideration.

So, have you turn off your lights?better safe than sorry, right?
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Veda #24 : That Wasn't Me 10:30 PM

Day 24
Question by : Me - "Why do other people hear our voices differently than we do?"


We have probably all had this experience or feeling. We listen to our own voices through tape recorder or through voice notes, and we insist that the voices on the tape doesn't sound at all like our voice, but other people's voice sound reasonably accurate.
Why did this happens?

Speech begins at the larynx, where the vibration emanates. Part of the vibration is conducted through the air, which it was what your friends (and those recorder) hear when you speak. another part of the vibration is directed through the fluids and solids of our heads. Our inner and middle ears are parts of cavern hollowed out by bone, the hardest bone of the skull. The inner ear contain fluids, the middle ear contains air, and the two press against each other. The larynx is also surrounded by soft tissue full of liquids. Sounds transmits differently throught the air than through the solid and liquids. That's why when we hear our own voice through recorder, we could hear all tonal differences.

When we speak, we are not hearing our voices through the ears, but also through internal hearing, the voice sounded inside our head, literally. And our brain said that the voices that we heard over the recorder is recognized but sounded like a pale imitation.
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Veda #23 : Sneeze It! 11:44 PM

Day 23
Question by : Me - "why can't we open our eyes whenever we sneeze?"

It really cold tonight, rain all day long, and i just sneeze several minutes ago. Darn it was very good and relieving... . But some facts stated that you can't sneeze with your eyes open, and some said that if you forced to open your eyes whenever you sneeze, your eyes will pop out because of the strong reaction from sneezing. is that true?

Sneezing in your body's way of getting rid of an irritation in your nose. Your nose is a sensitive organ,so all sorts of things might irratate it.
Sneezing is a reflex and so is closing our eyes. We have no control over whether or not we close our eyes when we sneeze. Some people don’t have reflex, so when they sneeze then their eyes won’t close. Some people try to close their eyes so when they sneeze their eyes won’t pop out. Your eyes don’t really pop out.

So why did we close our eyes?according to research, Sneezing is our body reaction to prevent bacteria entering our body, so whenever we sneeze, our body reflex shutting our eyesto prevent germs and bacterias entering through our eyes. As we may know, a sneeze is a kind of bodywide reflex in which a LOT of muscles contract, not just in the nose and throat but also the entire face, those in the diaphragm, the abdomen, thighs, back, which is why some people with stress incontinence may urinate slightly when they sneeze
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Veda #19 : Itchy Itchy Mosquito 10:44 PM

Day 19
Question by : ? - "Why do we feel itch and need to scratch our skin whenever mosquito bite us?"


General question tonight, maybe some of you've already know the answer to this question.
Mosquito is like a little annoying robot, they can sense us humans. With their antenna, mosquitoes can sense carbon dioxide and lactic acid up to 100 feet away. They can also detect chemicals in sweat. Since people and animals give off lots of carbon dioxide and these other chemicals, it makes it easy for mosquitoes to find us. Whenever a mosquito bite us, it'll left behind the itchy feeling to us, and suddenly we need to scratch it. why would that happen?why suddenly we feel itch?and do we really need to scratch it or not?

So to be clear, the mosquito that usually bite us is the female one. They do this because they use blood as a source of protein. Without a protein snack, a female mosquito cannot lay eggs. So when the mosquito lands, her first thing to do is to stick her long, thin sting into your skin like a needle. She injects a fluid that keeps your blood from coagulating (thickening). Then she sucks up a drop of blood, about five microliters, and stores it in her abdomen. Once she is full, she flies away to lay her eggs.

People probably wouldn't mind this so much, it's not a lot of blood from their body, but there are two problems with mosquitoes. First, diseases. When the mosquito injects this fluid, germs and parasites can enter your body. You could get malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever or West Nile encephalitis. And each of these can be fatal!
The second problem is, the fluid the mosquito injects does not belong in your body. Your immune system makes the area swell so that it can clean out the fluid, that unfortunately "disturb" our skin nerves. The whole clean up process is what makes your skin itch after the bite. So, it's not the mosquito that makes us itch, but our immune system basically.


And do we really need to scratch the itchy part?if it was caused by mosquito, go ahead, don't scratch it too hard though.
but if your skin feel any itch without any mosquitos bite, then don't. Because this itch indicating there is some abnormalities on our skin nerve, scratching it only make it worse because the allergies gonna be spreading, and make your skin wounded.
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Veda #13 : Brr It's Cold...Wait, I Have To Pee 8:59 PM

Day 13
Question by : Me...me...mee - "Why do i have to pee more often when it's cold outside?"

Okay, simple question today, but probably most of you forget this one or even don't know. Hi-school science actually. It was raining all day long today at my place. Simple math : Rain + Air Conditioner = I HAVE to pee!. So that's how the question ran across my mind today. Let's see...with the last time i took a leak before made this post, i've counted 9 times i have to "jog" from my desk to the toilet.
Why did this always happen on the cold day?

Here's the explanation
When the weather is hot,our body system tries to keep our body cool by evaporating the water along with unwanted things through the skin in the form of SWEAT. Think of it this way: sweat contains urea, water and mineral salt, whilst urine contains the same thing as they both are related to the excretory system in our body.

So, during hotter/warmer weather and at high temperatures we tend to urinate less cause we are already sweating most of everything out. Skin helps the kidney by sharing its work of cleaning the body in hot weather conditions. In cold conditions,there is no perspiration, as the skin does produce sweat and the kidney has to bear the entire burden and hence we urinate frequently. This is the main reason for this condition.

Fact for you today : Females typically feel a need to urinate more than males because of their (usually) smaller bladders.
answered my question my most of female more often go to the toilet...

how about you?how many times do you go to toilet today? (ga pentiing...ga pentiing...ga usah dijawab...)

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Veda #10 : Sleep Paralysis 9:47 PM

Day 10
Question by : None - "Sleep Paralysis"

common sleep paralysis

Have you ever been on a sleep state between unconsious and awake, and you try to move your body, but you can't move. You try to speak or shout, but that didn't work either. Sometimes followed with strange hallucination, heavy breath, and others phobia. If you answered "yes" to most symptoms, yeah that's what we called "Sleep Paralysis" according to medical term, or our traditional Indonesian people would call it "Ketindihan" (-Stacked, in English) just because we would feel like being stacked by "something".

Surprisingly, many people in this whole world have their explanation about this thing, and it was all about their myths. let's take some example :
In Afro-America culture, this is called "The devil riding your back"
in Chinese beliefs, called "gui ya shen"
The Mexican believe it was a dead person's spirit stick to living person
and many more from Cambodia, Turk, Iceland, Japan, Thailand, Hungaria...they all believe that this sleep paralysis means there was/were a spirit(s) that sit on your chest and try to steal your living spirit.
Could this explained medically?

Explanation
This condition often called "Sleep paralysis", and it could happen to everybody, both men and women. Most of the people have experienced this condition at least once or twice in their lives, mostly the first time occured at age between 14-17. Most of the cases just happened only for a few seconds or minutes, in the advanced case, sometimes the person would felt a hallucination, like seeing black shadow, or heard something around them. That's why many peoples said it was mystical.
The western would call this as "incubus nightmare", or else, based on what they would "see".

According to Al Cheyne, researcher from Waterloo University, sleep paralysis is a hallucination because there is a sleep-malfunction at the stage called REM (Rapid Eye Movement). As for information, our sleeping state could be divided into 4 stage :
Light Sleep ; Deep Sleep ; Very Deep Sleep ; and REM, where event we called as dream could happen (see the diagram below for explanation)

sleeping state

When we feel too tired, or lack of sleep, our brain wave doesn't synchronized well with the sleeping stages. Put it in the simple explanation, we feel like we've take enough sleep, our brain said so, but our body haven't take enough "sleep". Still hard to follow? okay, our brain count 1-2-5, but our body still counting at 1-2-3-4-5. This is when sleep paralysis could happen, we try to wake up but our body still in the sleep state, so we couldn't move it yet.

The Causes
Sleep paralysis often caused by narcolepsy (sudden sleep attack), sleep apnea (snoring), depression. If you ever felt like you had enough sleep, but sometimes without notice, you fell asleep, that's narcolepsy.
Lack of sleep also considered as the cause. Next, your sleep position could affect this Sleep Paralysis, it happened that people who slept with supine position (lying with face upwards, or simple word :Terlentang!) has more chances to caught sleep paralysis when they're too tired.

As for me, i've had this feeling once, and i thought i was dead, because in my case, i'm fully awake but i can't opened my eyes at all....Thank God i'm still living till now.

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Veda #5 : Tri-Colored Cat 9:22 PM

Day 05
Question by : Me, just curious - "Is it true that when a cat gave birth a tri-colored male, the parents will eat it?"

A dog once said "This person is so kind to me and feed me, he must be a God"

but a cat said "This person is so kind to me and feed me, I must be a God"

It's a lil bit interesting tonight, I ran across some news about a person saw his cat eat its newborn male kitten, just because it has 3 color. The question is why?is it a myth?a beliefs?or there are actually a logical explanation to these phenomenon?

Not just that, i've found out too, that a male tri-colored kitten, alive, are actually expensive. Any idea how much?30 - 100 millions IDR. Some said it can bring good luck to the owner, but believe it or not, it's up to you to decide after read what i've found.
Oh yeah, in this case, we're not talking about breed cat, just a stray cat, or general cat.
So, i've found the answer, 3 type of answers, mythically, medically, and rationally.

First, Mythically.
In Javanese beliefs, male tri-colored cat called "Kucing Telon". Usually, tri-colored cat is a female, rarely or close to none male. Javanese beliefs said that the parents will eat the male tri-colored kitten, because it was meant to prevent the kitten grow bigger and become a leader of the cat, grow a horn (yes, horn!) and then eat its own parents (hey, i'm not made that up, it's an old belief).

The ancestors once said that if you have a male tri-colored cat in your house, it'll repel bad things and bring wealth to you, it also have some kinds of mystical power. Maybe this is the explanation why this male tri-colored cat is expensive.
Here's a fun fact : Have you ever known about "good luck charm" cat that always waving?apparently, it was made based on this story

Second, Medically.
First off, a tri colored cat is called "Calico" cat in medical term. A calico cat is not a breed of cat, it is a color pattern. To be called "calico", three colors must be present: black, white and orange (or in Indonesian, they said it was yellow). Variations of these colors include gray, cream and ginger. A "true" calico cat has large blocks of these three colors. The interesting part is, Calico cat nearly as always FEMALE, not a male.

This is what Calico Cat looks like...

Now that a calico cat has been defined as a cat with three colors, the question is: why are they nearly always female? The answer is in genetics. Coat color in cats is a sex-linked trait, a physical characteristic related to its gender. Female animals have two X chromosomes (XX), males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome (XY). The genetic code for displaying black or orange color is found on the X chromosome. The coding for white is a completely separate gene.

Since females have two X chromosomes, they are able to show two colors (orange and black, or variations thereof) and white; creating the 3-color calico mix. Since males have only one X chromosome, they can only be orange OR black. It is more complicated than simply having the color genes.

Can a calico cat ever be male?in rare cases, yes. In this situation, the cat has two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome (XXY). Cats with this chromosomal configuration are usually unstable and not able to breed. This is similar to a condition in humans called Klinefelter's syndrome, or XXY Syndrome. To give you a picture how rare this case, based on research, 1 out of 3000 calico cats is male. and only 1 out of 10000 male calico cats is able to breed.

Third, Rationally.
Actually, this is also could be considered right answer about why the parents will eat their male tri-colored kitten. They did it on purpose, forced by nature fact that the male calico usually born unstable, caused by over-amount of chromosoms, and that made the kitten had an abnormal hormon condition that made it unable to breed. The parents didn't want this condition contaminate the other newborn kittens. It just natural, in fact, rats also have this "cannibalism tradition".
Maybe that's what we called an "Animal Instict"...

So why don't you check your cat at home? :p
Satisfied? :)

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