Aayush Koirala

Exploring the Science Behind Allergies

As alarming as it sounds, even a lick of peanut butter could be life-threatening. Allergies. What is it? Let’s see. Had the peanut in peanut butter been harmful to everyone it wouldn’t be called an allergy. Only if something reacts in an unprecedented way to a select few is then called an allergy.

So the question arises, How do I know if I’m allergic and what I am allergic to?

Allergies come in forms, ranging from water to even nickel coins. One can’t possibly predict what substances react weirdly with your body without ever being exposed to it. This is why allergy tests are done.

Well, Only a medical professional could let you know your allergies unless something you had eaten or been exposed to previously didn’t sit right with you. Symptoms of an allergy range from a runny nose to breathlessness and of course, the scary and itchy hives. 

Let’s take a look at what the doctor is doing behind the scenes, shall we?

An immunologist or allergist usually does the test which involves a skin prick or a patch test. The image above, from Westhillsaaa, illustrates a medical personnel checking for unusual reactions in a patient’s skin through various triggers.

The tests could range from injecting the allergens into your skin from an injection to taking out a blood sample. The choice of tests varies according to the patient’s data including their medical history, their condition, and suspected triggers.

Something to note about allergies is that a person can outgrow them with time. This is commonly seen in children getting rid of food allergies but some allergies like that of pollen and medications persist for a long time or even all your life.

Although you can’t possibly get rid of an allergy that still persists in adulthood, you can take certain medications and tests described accordingly to reduce complications.

A common medication is desensitization which is basically building tolerance for your allergen by exposing your body to it periodically under small concentrations. 

A personal suggestion is that you should have an emergency action plan including an EpiPen ready just in case things go south after eating/reacting to something new.

In the near future, who’s to deny that at the rate medical technology is growing, maybe we could even have a permanent remedy for allergies? That’s a topic up for discussion.

The Fading Stars: Exploring Global Light Pollution

A pollution that you can expect no one to talk about, is Light Pollution. Harmless at a glance, but poses an underlying depth of detriments. 

According to the Oxford Dictionary, Light Pollution is the existence of too much artificial light in the environment, for example from street lights, which makes it difficult to see the stars. But do the effects stop here? Most certainly not.

Disrupting the natural patterns of wildlife, an increase in the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and complicated health problems are just fractions of the effects that the majority of the populace in urban areas are turning a blind eye to. So much coming from a small bulb hanging in your room huh? But why is the light radiation coming out of a simple light bulb posing such a threat you may ask?

Well, as the Nepali saying goes “Too much sugar is bitter”, and so is the case with bulbs. Few of them pose almost zero to negligible effect but in the context of urban areas housing 4.4 billion inhabitants, things get complicated.

Diving into the sole causes responsible for light pollution, the ones making the headlines are the residential lights and the dense populace.

This image helps us depict how light radiation in different areas across the United States varied over the past few decades. A general trend we can notice is that, as the population increased the brighter the night was.

When a lot of sources of light emitting devices are concentrated in a small area, light emitted from say a bulb usually directed towards the ground covers a broad surface area while also increasing the space of the glare region. And like all mediums, the ground also acts as a medium for reflection, and the waves of light travel onto the sky only to be deflected by the heavy clouds. This causes for the light particles to be trapped and its appearance is that of a haze during night time.

The image by Anezka Gocova, in “The Night Issue”, Alternatives Journal 39:5 helps for better visualisation.

To bring forth the gravity of this situation, a prime example would be the L. A power outage, caused by an earthquake in 1994. Panicking residents rushed to inform authorities through 911 to complain about the Milky Way Cluster they were seeing. (similar to the image below taken by Forest Wander)

Mind you, this astounding night view was something all humans around the world could see at night back when proper lighting hadn’t been invented.

Scientists fear that with time, even the brightest stars would stop shining if the light pollution isn’t controlled and that children in the coming generations won’t aspire to study astronomy as there would be nothing to see in the night sky.

Relating to the Nepali saying again, It’s the collective effort that counts. Some little countermeasures that one can take to reduce the drastic effects of light pollution are:

  • Use motion-sensor lights.
  • Direct outdoor lights downward.
  • Replace bulbs with energy-efficient LEDs.
  • Dim or lower-intensity outdoor lights.
  • Install lighting only where needed.
  • Use window coverings to block light.
  • Don’t leave decorative lights on all night.

Unmasking Antimatter: CERN’s ALPHA-g Experiment Sheds Light on a Puzzling Universe

Though it sounds obvious, theorists and physicists could argue otherwise. A recent Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) experiment concludes a reasonable answer to the two decades of assumption.

When exploring the depth of particle physics, one is bound to stumble across antimatter early on. So the question is what is antimatter? Simply, its matter consisted of antiparticles; counterparts of particles making up matter. And it falls down? I Guess Newton’s apple test stays true even for an apple made up of antimatter.

After The Big Bang, There should have been equal amounts of Matter and Antimatter in the universe. But a big open physics thought is why it seems that we only have matter left. Matter and Antimatter cannot coexist. If they meet each other, they annihilate. A truly violent reaction indeed. So it is hard to find it in the universe.

According to Dr. Jeffrey Hangst, experimental physicist at CERN, “Theory says matter and antimatter behave the same. We test it”

As antimatter isn’t available anywhere, scientists have to create it. Scientists do this by relating to the mass-energy equivalence principle.

As to how the experiment itself was conducted; scientists working on the ALPHA-g started by introducing anti-protons and negatively charged hydrogen ions into an electromagnetic device (Penning Trap). Their mass-to-change ratio was calculated by monitoring their frequency after they were seen to follow a repetitive path in the confinement system. Had the mass-to-charge ratio been different, variation in gravitational interactions would be seen.

Within the uncertainty of the experiment conducted, antimatter behaves just like normal matter. This showed how the experiment was a huge step in antimatter science- not limited to theory but experiments also while helping us uncover big questions in physics.

  • https://home.cern/science/experiments/alpha
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03043-0
  • https://www.universetoday.com/163439