Biochemistry Week 13: Living Diversity

Examine your own immediate environment for diversity of species.

Okay, so technically I know this challenge has more to do with species outside the human race, but I cannot help but take this golden ghetto opportunity to shed light on the peculiar diversity of creatures of San Francisco’s 16^th and Mission barrio. Just this past week, I have seen hookers, crackheads, a tough Mexican homie with a mohawk checking me out, fashionistas, crazy schizophrenics (or maybe meth heads?) screaming at people who didn’t exist, skinny pissed off crackheads, Jesus freaks trying to save the crackheads, sweet Mexican women serving me huevos con nopales, Occupy yoga girls serving free food and teaching free yoga on the crackhead corner, revolutionary squatting roommates who have given up on capitalism and have a Free Store, alterna girls with tattoos, bike punk clown types downstairs at the experimental venue “The Lab,” and my favorite star of the ghetto- whom my boyfriend and I lovingly refer to as “Homie.” Homie is our wheel-chaired beggar friend outside of Walgreens who sounds like he had his vocal chords half ripped out of his throat and who won our hearts with his “I love my Mom” tattoo on his chest and the day he lovingly ushered me into Walgreens like the Queen of the Ghetto. Other than that, I’d say the only other “species” that live in my immediate environment are my tattooed Colombian rockstar boyfriend and the mold that lives under the fridge. There’s probably some microscopic bacteria and other things I don’t want to know about that live in our studio apartment in the Red Brick Building on 16^th St.

May Chocolate help keep people slim?

Whose to say if the catechins in chocolate that improve lean muscle mass and reduce weight- balance out the amount of saturated fat and sugar in the chocolate that most people eat? I think a more informative article would have included what percentage dark chocolate bars in the standard dark chocolate bars that people eat still helps reduce weight. Obviously, ingesting a raw cacao treat with low glycemic agave nectar is going to have different effects on the body than a 60% dark chocolate bar loaded with cocoa butter and sugar. And let’s not even talk about the abomination of chocolate known as milk chocolate. I think adding raw chocolate to smoothies with banana, kefir, almond milk, almond butter, green food powder, and protein powder is one of the best combination of ingredients I ever thought up to put in a blender.

Plutonium

After our conversation about the stockpile of plutonium held in Japan and its cooperating countries, I decided to do a little online research about plutonium, and this is what I found:

The main carcinogenic property of plutonium-239 comes from the energetic alpha radiation it emits. Once in the body, plutonium-239 is preferentially deposited in soft tissues, notably the liver, on bone surfaces, in bone marrow and other non-calcified areas of the bone, as well as those areas of the bone that do not contain cartilage. It can have especially harmful effects in the bone marrow, where blood is produced.The greatest health danger from plutonium-239 is from inhalation, especially when it is in the common form of insoluble plutonium-239 oxide. The risk from absorption into the body via ingestion is generally much lower than that from inhalation, because plutonium is not easily absorbed by the intestinal walls, and so most of it will be excreted.