Dylan Holly, M.Ed.Skeletal muscle is a complex and dynamic tissue that can adapt to mechanical stress or lack thereof. Muscle is not only responsible for human movement in a three dimensional world but is also a major storehouse for amino acids and metabolic machinery. When subjected to an unloaded state typically seen in a bedrest, casted, or microgravity situation the muscle atrophies, or in other words wastes away. Along with this wasting comes a decrease in muscular strength and enduran...

Song Yi Shin, M.S.How can you improve your vascular health? You would undoubtedly answer that it is the exercise, and it is true. Your arteries deliver blood and oxygen to organs and skeletal muscle. When you start to exercise, your legs would need more blood to match the metabolic demands. At rest, a majority of your blood volume is in your veins. But during exercise, blood flow through tissues change dramatically, with 85% of blood going to your active muscles through arteries in hea...

Jing Chen, Ph.D.Aerobic exercise can help motor skill learning by protecting previously learned procedural memory from subsequent interference tasks (for example, subsequent declarative memory). The primary motor cortex may play an important role during this process. When we examine this has happened, we will perform three experiments to see if our hypothesis is true. In the first two experiments, we let participants perform procedural memory immediately followed by declarative memory or a ...

Jessica Cardin, M.S.Skeletal muscle has a high degree of plasticity that allows the tissue to respond to environmental cues (exercise, disuse, starvation, etc.). The majority of research has focused on the building of muscle. However, atrophy has vast implications across many disease states (cancer cachexia, renal failure, COPD, and Type II Diabetes). The understanding of how atrophy occurs as an "unpacking" process of the muscle fiber is limited. Pioneering research is important as it...

Yiyu Wang, M.S.In the real world, students are required to be competitive to face more challenges in the future as tension increases in energy, finance, territory and human resource. The huge amount of homework is assigned to students in order to help students achieve their goal and face a challenging future. Traditionally, teachers and parents believe that study achievement is equal to time spent in homework or assignments. People often overlook the function of physical...

Christine Latham, M.S.Currently, rodents are the most commonly used model for human aging, but because they have much shorter lifespans and many physical dissimilarities from humans, they may not be the best possible model for humans. So, what should we use if the time-honored rodent model is not the best option? Interestingly enough, horses may be able to fill the gap between easy-to-use mouse models and hard-to-control human studies. But why horses? Horses are an athletic species, they have th...

Jihye Lee, M.Ed.Achievement goal theory (AGT) has emerged as a major theoretical perspective to understand and explain individuals’ motivation and related outcomes in classroom and physical education (PE)/physical activity (PA) settings. AGT is concerned with how individuals evaluate their personal competence in achievement settings and how this influences the ways they participate in and manage physical activity involvement. For the last 30 years, AGT has evolved from the dichotomous...

Chelsea Goodenough, HBScBreast cancer is the most common type of cancer that kills women world-wide [1]. Emerging out from under the emotional and financial burden of this disease is the united front of patients, families and researchers alike seeking to understand the complexity of this disease. With exercise's noted benefit to a 30-40% reduction in breast cancer risk, investigation into mechanisms that may be attributing to these findings have unveiled a frontrunner - microRNA. MicroRNA ar...

Rahma Mkuu, MPH, CPHGlobally, the consumption of alcohol is associated with increased risk for leading causes of death such as heart disease, injuries from automobile accidents, liver disease, HIV infection and others. In order to address and understand the extent of alcohol consumption, it is important to first be able to measure how much is being consumed and who is consuming.In developed countries such as the United States, most of the alcohol that is consumed is recorded, meaning that the al...

Tyler Grubic, M.S.Intense weight lifting and/or sprints, including acute single bouts, can promote exercise-induced stress responses, characterized by muscle damage and inflammation similar to stress associated with cardiovascular events and illnesses [10-12]. Decreased performance due to muscle soreness is not the direct result of inflammation, but rather a product of pain and mechanical receptor sensitivity to products of muscle breakdown, such as circulating chemicals and intramuscular protei...