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This year, my friends and I decided to participate in a national science competition, called Exploravision. When we started, we thought that we were going to make something that prevented people from getting “roofied” on their first dates with people, which is a widespread concern. However, we found a solution to that that already existed. So we moved to somehow preventing marijuana addictions. But when we spoke to experts on the topic, they said that drugs like fentanyl or crack cocaine would be a better problem to tackle, because they are more potent and life-threatening. The innovation that we thought of to solve this problem is FCRS. FCRS stands for Fentanyl Control and Release System. FCRS gets injected as a chip in the spinal cord. 

It is better than just using a regular pill shaped capsule, because pills have only a fleeting effect, while FCRS will have a longer or even lifelong effect on neurotransmitters. It will accomplish blocking the effects of opioids by taking the fentanyl put into the body, storing it, and slowly releasing a set amount of micrograms at a time. In 2018, there were 70,237 people who died of overdose (“Drug Overdose,” 2019). FCRS will make these numbers drastically go down, because even if someone uses a month long prescription of fentanyl patches in one week, the excess fentanyl will stay in the storage of the device until the person who is on opioids needs it again (based on a physician’s prescribed amount). FCRS will also help with recovering from drug addiction, because if you regulate the amount of opioids that you use, and progressively make the amount smaller and smaller, people will eventually stop wanting these opioids just to get pleasure. 

FCRS will be put into the spinal cord, because that is where most pain signals get transmitted to the brain. It would work best in the spine, because “The spinal cord is the main source of communication between the body and the brain” (Rosefield, 2016). It is a part of the central nervous system along with the brain. Further, the spinal cord “remembers” pain throughout your body days or even weeks later. As Rosefield states, “When you experience an instance of great pain—you stub your toe incredibly hard, for example, or even break it—the neurons in your spinal cord will carry signals more easily to the nerves in your injured toe for several days, making the toe feel more sensitive” (Rosefield, 2016).  

However, it could be slightly difficult to market injecting FCRS into the spinal cord, because the spinal cord is many of the pain signals to the brain are. If it tries to block the high of fentanyl, FCRS could end up making one not feel pain at all, or even not feel any pleasure in anything they do. Also, if the surgeon’s hand slips while they are injecting the chip into someone’s spinal cord, they could end up paralyzing that person or hurting them severely in another way very easily. 

During a recent interview with Dr. Amit Om, we learned that using a chip in the spinal cord as our solution to the problem of opioid overdose would not be a very cost-efficient solution to the opioid addiction problem. He stated that implanting a device in the spine requires a whole operation, which would incidentally cost a lot more money, rather than putting it in something like the liver. We thought that this would be a better location for putting FCRS, because opioids such as fentanyl travel through the bloodstream, and go through the liver. Putting it in a place like this would not need extensive procedures. We are also contemplating changing the idea of using a chip in your body to a smart fentanyl patch. 

Because the most common prescribed form of fentanyl is a patch, we could change those patches to have our technology inside them. This would enable them to regulate the amount of fentanyl going inside the body, let alone after it is already on its way to someone’s brain. 

FCRS would be able to help if the person overdoses, because it could hold the antidote to prevent overdoses. We would incorporate this into our product, because overdoses don’t happen immediately; they take about half an hour to completely happen. Some good things about the smart patch idea would be that it is easy to use, it can have access to the bloodstream, and it can be refilled with the antidote to opioid overdose. However, people can just remove it and then take extra drugs, and overdose. 

However, there are still some good things about using a chip in the spine. It would always stay in the spinal cord, and one of the bad things about it is that if we do end up putting the antidote inside the chip, we cannot refill it. Some good things about the smart patch idea would be that it is easy to use, it can have access to the bloodstream, and it can be refilled with the antidote to opioid overdose. One bad thing about using a smart patch would be that people can just remove it and then take extra drugs, and overdose. 

This year I am trying out competitive basketball at my school. I have never played basketball competitively with other schools before this, so I was really nervous. I also didn’t want a coach who would only put in the better players, because inside I knew that the players with more experience would get more playing time that way. However, that is nothing like what happened this year. Our coach is extremely welcoming, and he will let everyone play in games and in practice, even if you never touched a basketball in your life before you stepped into the first practice. We don’t have designated positions, except for two people: Our point guard, who brings up the ball to half-court in our possessions and makes the decisions for which plays that we call in a game. We also have our main defender, who constantly darts around the court and yells at the offense for the ball, therefore pressuring them to make a pass quickly. The taller people on the team are usually towards the baseline of our side of the court, because they can block jump shots and layups easier than the shorter people. I have usually started for the first 5 games, even though I had never really played a game of basketball before that. I knew the basics though. In our team, we focus on passing, rather than dribbling. We have plays in the offensive side of the court, and the defensive. Our main offensive play is Flex. This is when 2 of the players go to the corners, 2 to the wings, and then one person to the block under the basket. We pass the ball between each other, and then screen for each other and cut into the middle of the block and make a layup. We do these as shell drills, which means that there is no defense guarding us while we do this. However, this is not a good thing because we don’t know what the other team is going to do in a game to counter this offense. This is just one of the many plays that we have for our games. That’s it for now! Thanks!

Today I read a New York Times article about the Newark water crisis. This is not yet as bad as the Flint, Michigan one, where the tap water even in hospitals was clearly brown, but I think it certainly has the potential to get there. And what makes matters worse over there is the mayor, Mr. Ras Baracka. He even hired a former inmate as the manager of the water purification in the town. This article interests me because I was really into the Flint water crisis, about specifically how the pipes had corroded and how they released the lead into the water. I learned that the water purification people put chemicals into the water to make sure that doesn’t happen (phosphate). I guess they just didn’t have enough phosphate, or they were just being careless with the water. One of the main reasons that Flint happened was them switching the main water source from Detroit Lake to Flint Lake. Studies show that the water in Flint Lake is more corrosive, therefore making it easier for the pipes’ coating to wear off and that chemical plus the lead goes into the water. As you can see in this diagram, the water that does not have phosphate put into it is significantly more colored than the water with it. The lead and iron compound also looks like it is a stronger coating than the lead or the iron pipes on their own. Also, the phosphate one has the passivation layer which is probably a new feature of pipes. Passivation is the act of reinforcing metals so that they are less likely to corrode and release their chemicals into the water or whatever the pipes are carrying. The problems probably arose because of the poor maintenance of those pipes. It is quite expensive to dig up the old pipes, but I think the people there’s health and safety is much more important than the cost of it.

Thanks for reading this blog post about the upcoming Newark water crisis! I hope you learned a lot (as I did) and enjoyed reading this blog post! If you liked it, I have a lot of posts on this website. See you next time!

Last Friday marked the end of my cyber camp that I participated in. Now, I usually go to camps because of either the food, or my friends going. But this one was certainly the latter. Lunch was from 11:30 to 12:15, and all of the lunches were, well, just bad. They had a choice between 5 sandwiches, Turkey Swiss, Ham and Cheddar, Chicken Salad, Hummus, and PB&J. Now, these might sound okay, but for example, the Turkey Swiss sandwich was 2 slices of swiss and one slice of meat. (Okay, so that might be a little bit of an exaggeration…) But still, it was pretty darn bad. And it was this way the whole week! There was a cafe there in the building, but I didn’t want to use my money unless I absolutely had to. But anyway, back to the actual camp. Overall it was pretty fun, but the first few days were a little slow. The first day was all lecturing about the introduction to cybersecurity. I was literally about to fall asleep. The second day was a little bit better, because we actually got on the computers and looked at things in the settings, but it was still mostly lecturing. On the third day of camp, things got a little more interesting. We went to an escape room in Champaign called LabEscape at the Lincoln Square Mall. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with Cybersecurity, but it certainly was a pleasant break from listening to someone talking about it and taking notes. Unfortunately, we couldn’t finish the room, because someone was messing around with the safe that we had to open to get the laptop to get the access codes. And we could have just waited for 5 minutes for it to reopen, but the people there said that it was over and that we had to leave. I still don’t get why, because we had the right code and they wouldn’t let us finish it. But anyway, when we got back it was time for lunch and then we would start on Linux. However 30 minutes after lunch we left the lab again to go on a building tour of the ECE. We went through the building and we explored the classrooms. The co-creator of Tesla, before Mr. Elon Musk bought it, made a very basic battery for a car there. We then went to some other places in the building. And finally, Friday had come. We had the competition. I can’t tell you too much about it, because it’s confidential, but I can tell you that it was pretty darn hard. We had to do a number of tasks on two different operating systems in two hours. It was very stressful! We ended up taking 2nd place. I was a bit sad we didn’t get first, but 2nd is still good. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this blog post!

If you have read one of my recent posts about going to Zion and Bryce, then you will know that my family and I just got back from a trip to Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. We went to those two national parks, and then we drove to Las Vegas, Nevada. We planned to fly out from there the following night. When we arrived in Vegas, we unfortunately were not greeted by the famous sign outside of the city, because we came in from one of the other routes. But when we pulled into our hotel, my sister and my mom were completely blown out of their minds. It was a really fancy hotel, and we had never been to one of those. Sadly, we were only staying there for one night, but that was enough. The hotel had two pools, one on the rooftop and one on the fifth floor. And what was even better was that it was in the shade, so we didn’t get sunburned while we were in the water. There was a huge TV in front of the pool, and ESPN was on. But besides the pool, there was also a lot of other cool things about it. There was an activity room, where you could play air hockey and Xbox, and there was a whole restaurant in the lobby of the place! The first night that we were in Vegas, we went to the Dancing Fountains at the Bellagio and to eat at P.F. Chang’s. That restaurant was one of my parent’s favorites when they used to live in Texas, but there it was a little bit of a letdown. The service was pretty bad and the food wasn’t that great either. The only saving grace for me was the fried rice. That night, we looked out of our window and just took in the magnitude of the city of lights, and then turned in to sleep. When we woke up the next morning, we immediately went downstairs to the pool because no one was in it at the time. But 30 minutes after we got in, a woman came and announced to everyone there that there would be an Aqua Fit class and anyone was welcome to join. At first my sister was reluctant to go to the class, but then she succumbed to my mom’s asking and went to the center of the pool to join the others doing the class. After we finally got out of the pool and went to shower and change, we checked out of our hotel and went to the mall. We looked at shoes for my sister as she needed new ones for the coming school year, and we just walked around and looked at different things. The highlight of the day for me was going to the Pinball Hall of Fame. It’s not the biggest and most fanciest of places, but it was really fun to play old-school pinball games for just 25 cents! We stayed there for about half an hour and had fun on the machines there. They have almost 200 games there! We were in that part of Las Vegas because we were just using time before we got to the airport for our flight. We also went to a local Indian store, just to see how it would be in other places compared to ours. It was gigantic! It probably used to be a warehouse judging by the size of it. It also had a little cafe/restaurant inside it where it had a lot of Indian street foods. However, the food that we ordered wasn’t that good. While we were there, Spirit, our flight company, sent my dad an email that said our flight was delayed until 1:30 AM! We were all really frustrated at this, and we were looking for another place to spend time, like the movies, but then 30 minutes later he got another email! This one was saying that our gate had been changed and the timing would go back to what it originally was, 10:50 PM. So we rushed to the airport and went through security. It was really lucky that my dad saw that email in time, or else we could have missed our flight! But anyway, that was the last part of our trip to Vegas. It was a lot of fun, and we saw many different places than we saw last time that we went there (two years ago with some of my relatives from India). Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this Blog post about our trip! Please leave a comment about this post if you liked it, and if you did, you can read some of the other posts on this website. Bye!

Recently I read an article called Hit the Mute Button by Richard Goodwin. It is about how silencing everything around us could be potentially very bad. Uber has started a service on their app in which you can ask for a quiet driver so that you can enjoy sitting “alone” in your ride home, or to wherever you are going. But in the front of the car, things are a little bit different. An Uber driver even stated that if you push that button, it’s pretty much telling the driver, “Shut up, or I will give you a bad review.”  This just takes us one step closer to being able to choose who we talk to and who we don’t want to be talked to by. This is also helped by noise-cancelling headphones. These can take out the ambient noise around you and absorb you into your own world, where your pesky sibling or annoying colleague can not interrupt you. At the end of 2018, Spotify users shared their music and many of the tracks that they were listening to were rain sounds, or even wave noises, all purely to detach them from the outside world. This could potentially be very bad in our social system, because if we could choose who we wanted to mute, we would never make new friends or learn things about other people. And as technology progresses more and more every day, we are on out devices more as well. Another major company, Instagram, made a “mute” mode for people who don’t want to see their friends’ stories, but they still want to remain friends to not look like a mean person. This is a good idea, but again, it’s like being able to silence people at your own will. Instagram chose to put this feature into the app because other people were doing extraordinary things that you know, while you might not do any of that type of thing. Some people just don’t want to see those things, so they can feel better about themselves.

At the end of this article, the author asks the readers to isolate 5 sounds that you value and enjoy in your daily life. In fact, you readers should do that too. People, (including me), should be more aware of our surroundings, and the things that make us, well, us. Some of the things that I enjoy could be the sound of the water rushing from the tap, footsteps on the dried leaves, or the creak of my old sofa when I sit down on it. So if you are reading this, post a comment on this write-up and tell me 5 things that enrich your daily life. Thank you for reading this blog post! If you did, please read the other posts on my blog, and please recommend it to your friends. If you didn’t like it, then still tell your friends how utterly horrible it was and they can read it too. See you next time!

Recently Google has come out with their new gaming platform, called Google Stadia. But this isn’t any console, or PC. This is a software that can play games right from your browser, no download necessary. It can do 60 FPS, 1080p. This could be the game changer for Google, as it could be a big competitor for game consoles, such as the PS4 or the XBOX 1. This could be the leader for the next evolution of games. Another one of the good things is the availability to anyone that uses the google browser. They don’t use the computer processing unit, but they reroute all of it to their servers so you can get 60 FPS on any device on their browser. They even made a specific controller for Google Stadia. You can still use some other allowed controllers on Stadia, but this one connects directly to the game and not the server, therefore eliminating any chance of lag between the controller and the game. And as the cherry on top of all of that good stuff, Stadia works very well with Google Chromecast. You can connect your controller to the computer and game like you are playing on a console. But now, lets move to the worse parts of the cloud based gaming platforms. First, the controller colors. Honestly, who came up with those color schemes? Wasabi? Really? Of all the colors, you choose the weirdest type of green. I love green, but this kind? No. They also made a Founder’s Edition Pack that offers a free Navy Blue controller. I mean, it is cool to see the game first, but it costs double the price of a regular bundle when it does come out. Another problem with their idea of cloud based gaming is the fact that you need a very good internet connection to be able to play at 60 fps and with no lag between the servers and your computer/device. The whole idea of this platform was about giving everyone a chance to game, without needing a high end gaming desktop.

As you probably already know, I love to play Fortnite. A lot of my past posts have been about it. But if you have not been on the blog lately, I will give you a quick little overview of the amazing Battle Royale game. There are 100 players in the lobby, and you have to kill everyone with varying weapons from the worst (pistols) to the best (in my opinion, snipers). Whoever climbs to the top, by either being very aggressive or just hiding in a bush the whole time, gets the amazing Victory Royale. I am not the best at this game, but I still find it very fun because you can play with 3 other friends. I think one of the main reasons that Fortnite has gotten so popular is that it has cartoon violence, which means that there is no blood in it, but only animations of the character falling down on the ground and then disappearing. But after the overview, here are my first looks of Season 8.

Season 8’s theme is based off of pirates, so a lot has changed all around the map: The first thing I noticed about Fortnite was the new map changes. Every season, some things on the map of the island change. Last season, there was a huge storm that made everything snow-covered, and it added a few new places. This season, they added 3 new areas of the map. Lazy lagoon, the long-awaited volcano, and a sandy place that no one knows the name of yet. The second thing I saw about the game was the battle pass. You see, Fortnite had some challenges to do in game to acquire the Season 8 Battle Pass for free. This was a big deal, as you had to pay for the Battle Pass in all of the previous seasons. This season’s Pass is very good in my opinion, but the very best skin in the whole game now is the banana skin. Don’t ask me why they added this, but it is very cute and funny to look at.

If you have never played Fortnite: Battle Royale before, then you are really missing out. But for right now, I have to go. Thank you for reading this blog post, and I hope you enjoyed it. If this was interesting, feel free to check out my other Fortnite posts on my blog. See you next time! Bye!

This year the Olympics are being held in Rio and team USA has won the most medals. The 31st olympics is the time that Michael Phelps stopped swimming and Usain Bolt stopped running. As well as those tragedies, Samir Aït Saïd, a French athlete, broke his Tibia and Fibula and his leg was hanging from  his knee like that. When he was on his stretcher, the paramedics dropped his stretcher with him on it. So much for good doctors. Currently I am watching the woman’s triathlon and they are on the last event – the running part. It is swimming, biking, and then running. A US athlete got first and a swiss athlete was behind her. Every day I looked forward to watching the olympics at night. My favorite event in it is diving because I think it is very cool when they jump off of the platform or springboard and enter the water with such a small splash. Also, I like the 4×100 relay that has four men or women that are representing their country and each of them does two laps. Continue reading “The 2016 Rio Olympics!”

Recently my sister and I got an early Christmas present of a trampoline. When my dad first ordered it, he didn’t tell us what it was but when we got it I saw for myself. If you are wondering why there are those balls there? We play something called poison ball, in which you have three lives and you are jumping/bouncing to avoid the balls. We make it harder by adding more balls and sometimes when you are dead you can kick the balls back at the people that are still alive just for fun and also to get them out if you want to. When we got it we did not assemble it right away because I had just come back form my tennis class and I was seriously dead tired. When we finally got around to actually making it we did a lot of it on the first day of doing it, and the second day we just put the finishing touches. I think it is really fun to use and I recommend you getting a trampoline for your kids if you are a parent of a young child reading my blog.  Bye! I have to go. I hope you will stick around to read my other blogs that I posted before this one and I will write more soon.