Preventing Illness This Winter

Its the season for getting sick... A part from the normal concerns of the holiday season, we have the additional concerns of catching a cold or the flu this time of year.  Apparently, this years strain of flu is especially bad.  Specifically, the flu virus is H3N2 and has increased the number of hospitalizations for the flu compared to normal flu seasons.  The thing I always want to know this time of year is how I can prevent myself from getting sick.  There are a number of things that can be done to help prevent illness.  Of course we always hear to get vaccinated and to wash your hands.  But in addition to that, studies have shown reducing stress, meditation, getting enough sleep, exercising, drinking lots of fluids, maintaining a healthy weight and limiting sugar intake all help strengthen your immunity.  Unfortunately, this may be the worst time of year for getting enough sleep, reducing stress, and limiting sugar intake.  So I guess we'll all have to do our best.  Other interesting things I found were that the ideal house temperature for reducing illness is 68 to 72 degrees with about 50% humidity.  Viruses can survive longer inside with the lower indoor humidity this time of year, so having a humidifier is beneficial to your health.  There is also a lot of various information out there on how much exercise is ideal for boosting immunity.  From what I have read and sort of averaging a bunch of reports and research together, exercising thirty to sixty minutes, three to five times a week boosts the immunity the most. 

The Biology of Bread Making

The process of making bread is an extremely biological process.  Good bread bakers are experts at controlling the biological processes involved in making delicious bread, even if they don't know it.  There are two major biological components to bread, first is the wheat flour and specifically gluten, and secondly the yeast.  A typical bread recipe is very simple and includes water, sugar, salt, wheat flour, and yeast.  All of these ingredients work together to create an environment for the yeast that creates bread.  I will explain each of these components and discuss how they can create the ideal bread making environment.

First we will talk about sugar.  Sugar is very easy for yeast to consume and therefore helps the dry yeast off to a quick start.  This helps the yeast to quickly start growing and reproducing, causing the bread to rise.  Yeast also can consume the carbohydrates in the wheat flour, but these are harder to consume.  Depending on how much sugar is added, the yeast will normally consume all of the sugar in the dough.

Water in the bread making process is not extremely interesting.  It is of course a requirement for all of life and without it the bread would never form.  In bread making tough it is important to balance the amount of water to the amount of flour to get the right consistency in the dough.

While sugar helps speed-up the reproduction and function of yeast, salt slows it down.  By balancing the salt and sugar in the dough recipe we can balance the growth of the yeast, not too fast and not too slow.  Without salt, the dough would rise too quickly and collapse.  With too much salt though the bread would rise extremely slow. 

Wheat flour of course is what actually composes the bread.  I say wheat flour specifically because wheat is the only type of flour that contains the protein gluten.  Without gluten the flour would not rise into a spongy loaf of bread but rather would turn into a dense heavy mass of cooked flour.  Gluten is a long sticky molecule that sticks to other gluten molecules.  This allows the yeast to form air bubbles in the dough, making it rise.   Gluten molecules stick together, making the flour in the dough to stick to itself so it can rise.  Without gluten, bubbles couldn't form and the dough would not stick together and the dough would not rise.  Flour also provides carbohydrates for the yeast to grow and function.

Lastly, yeast produces carbon dioxide that helps form bubbles in the dough, making it rise.  As yeast consumes sugars and carbohydrates it releases carbon dioxide.  Without the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast, the dough would not rise.  Yeast functions best at warmer temperatures so more time is needed for bread to rise when temperatures are lower.  When you finally bake your bread, the high temperatures of the oven actually kill the yeast and solidify the gluten and dough structure.   Baking ends the biological processes of bread making so it is ready to eat.

A lot more can be said about the origin of yeast and gluten as we find them in our breads today.  But the above are the essentials of the biology making bread.  Knowing these things can greatly aid your ability to come up with your own recipes and make the perfect bread.  Using the above, you can also come up with your own scientific process or experimentation in bread making by varying water, sugar, salt, and yeast amounts.

Science Education Crisis

Looking around the world today, its easy to see a significant number of science related problems. Climate change, ocean acidification, resource depletion, overpopulation, invasive species and so on, the list is depressingly long. On the positive side though, there are relatively straight forward solutions to a lot of these problems. Straight forward doesn't mean simple to implement through. For example, renewable energy has potential to easily offset burning of fossil fuels and therefore providing solutions to climate change, ocean acidification and resource depletion. Implementation of renewable energy though very plausible, will take a lot of work and changing of peoples mindsets. Probably the largest hurdle in this is simply education of the general public. I have worked in science education and biological research for about a decade now and have seen huge discrepancies between the two. Researchers with all their vast knowledge of extremely important scientific information that has the potential to help humanity simply don't communicate their concepts well to the masses. Scientists also have isolated themselves from the masses with the general belief that most people just can't understand science. The average high school or even college biology 101 textbook doesn't really paint the big picture for students to learn, but instead focuses on overly compartmentalized concepts. The average high school biology teacher's knowledge of the subject also seems quite limited to these overly compartmentalized concepts. As a result, the masses really don't get what is going on with subjects pertaining to science. I personally am of the belief that even though science is hard to understand, the average person is able to understand at least some of the more complex concepts. Students must be taught by teachers who know the concepts in the first place, and in a way that connects students to the bigger picture. Regardless of what anyone says, science is extremely interesting and people who say science is boring simply have a poor science education. Science is so diverse it can literally engage every field of interest possible, there is absolutely no room for boring with this great diversity. I'm not saying everyone should become scientists, I am simply saying that science should engage everyone in whatever profession they choose. Currently, science is highly compartmentalized in our society with the educationally elite. This should not be so and is highly damaging to our society. The educationally elite scientist is absolutely necessary to science but I would suggest needs to greatly improve communication of their research with the masses. Improving scientific communication and education with the average non-scientist is the goal of the Practical Biology blog. Hopefully I have begun to do this. I feel there is a lot more that can be done and a lot more depth that can be given to non-scientists, or even scientists, through this blog. Knowledge is power and scientific knowledge has potential to greatly benefit individuals as well as society.