wordsworth

I watched a video on cancer again today. It was very interesting. The first section of the video talks about how smoking can cause cancer, and I found it rather interesting. The video says that lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the leading cancer for women. The smoke acts as an environmental carcinogen. The smoke acts as a mutagen that causes cancer and it also causes tissue damage. It does the same thing that alcohol or asbestos can do to the system. It causes increased proliferation, meaning that more cells are created, and an increase in mutations, which means that there are more cells with a replication error or damage. There are about six different cancer-associated mutations that affect the cells: an increase in proliferation, a decrease in cell death, angiogenesis – blood cells within the tumor, an increase in cell motility, an increase in invasion, and some other issues. There are people that have developed treatments that can target precise mutations. Apparently some doctors have developed molecularly targeted therapies, also called personalized medicine, which could make chemotherapy obsolete. I also learned about oncogenes which are mutation altered genes that can cause cancer.

I also worked on some more of the math problem sets. I worked on the graph one again. Finally got five in the row on the really hard problems. I also watched some videos and worked on a new problem set about graphs of functions and their derivatives. It is about as fun as the last one. It tends to be frustrating when I can’t get five in a row correct. Especially when I am really sure that I got it right.