Tanning and its Risks :: Skin Cancer Health Beauty Essays

Tanning and its Risks Liza Schenkel, a 2002 graduate of Ball State University, visited her dermatologist for a routine checkup, and asked her doctor to take a look at some spots on her body that looked abnormal. She said: "I had noticed a spot on my chest that didn't look right. This spot changed colors during the summer months, was raised from the skin, and had a peculiar shape." These were all warning signs of melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer. Schenkel’s doctor immediately removed the spot and sent the skin cells to a lab to be tested. The cells proved to be cancerous and Schenkel was diagnosed with melanoma at 22. She is representative of the growing problem of skin cancer among college-age persons. The increase in cancer among young adults is a result of a growing obsession with tanning. Unlike some of her friends, Schenkel does not believe that she was obsessed with lying out in the summer months and visiting the tanning bed. She did not visit the tanning bed until her junior year in high school and that was at the most, once a week, with exceptions for special occasions. At her lake home, she would generally tan on the weekend by boating and swimming. She never thought that these habits would lead to skin cancer at such an early age. "Compared to my friends who went to the tanning bed every other day, I thought I was responsible. I had my moments of irresponsibility but I never thought it would happen to me." Schenkel represents the growing trend of younger people tanning for the sake of vanity despite possible health risks. The Los Angeles Times reported a study in May 2002 that said from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, melanoma rates rose 60.5 percent among women age 25-29 and 26.7 percent in the same category for men. The age group of those developing cancer is emerging from high school and college, where tanning has become a fashionable trend. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that skin cancers are the most common forms of cancer in the United States. Skin cancers are also the most preventable and curable cancer.

Two Men’s World – an Analyses of Godfather

Wen 1 Hang Wen Dr. Nirmal Trivedi English 1102 January 30th, 2010 Two Men’s World —-An Analyses of Godfather and Apocalypse Now Godfather and Apocalypse Now, both are great movies, and both are the first windows, through which I first saw America. At the first sight, these two movies seem to have a lot of similarities: both are one of the best hits in history, both starred by Marlon Brando and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, both slow-paced and 3-hour long, and both had a deep influence in the American society.On the other hand, two movies have so little in common: one is talking about the Mafia in New York, yet the other is demonstrating the wars in the Indo-China Peninsula; one is completely rational and calm, where the old Don hearing that his son was killed, just showed his grief for one second and then turned to business, yet the other went to another extreme, showing an entire insane world, where men were either mad or going mad.However, if we examine the two mo vies carefully and only grasp the kernel, we’ll find that both movies are actually between two men Don Vito Corleone and his counterpart in the other film Colonel Kurtz, who are both strong in mind, worshipped by people and is the center of power in his world, Thus, both movies together, the Godfather Wen 2 and Apocalypse Now are demonstrating a two-man world, filled with philosophy, wisdom and a strong will. Let’s look at the Godfather, Don Vito Corleone first.Don Corleone appeared at the very start of the film, which was the wedding party of Don’s daughter Coney, and the beginning scenes already fully demonstrated the Godfather’s high and divine place. As Sicilians never refused any requests on a wedding day, many people came to the Godfather for â€Å"justice†, one of whom was Bonasera, an Italian-American undertaker. The film started by his famous line, â€Å"I believe in America†, at which time the screen was still dark; then his face a nd forehead appeared on the screen, and he continued â€Å"America has made my fortune†.However, America failed to give him justice: His daughter was beaten to disfigurement and almost raped but the suspects only received a suspended sentence. Thus he came to Godfather, who was awed y because of not only his personally charm but also influence and deterrence. Interesting the reply of the Godfather was that he didn’t agree or decline at the beginning, but he began to mock that Bonasera never treated him as a friend and never invited him to cafe. Sadly, the obtuse Bonasera didn’t get Godfather’s message, and proposed that he could pay money.Then the Godfather had implicitly pointed out:†If you'd come to me in friendship, then the scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ † Then the most interesting scene comes: When Bonasera tentatively asked â€Å"be my friend†, Godfather did not answer and was just ca sually looking around; Finally Bonasera realized what he should do: he then bowed, kissed Corleone’s hand and called him â€Å"godfather†. And Corleone replied with â€Å"Good†, which was enough to bring justice to this Wen 3 poor undertaker.From the dialogue above, it is not hard to get the implicit message from the Godfather, that though he was asking people to come in â€Å"friendship† and to treat him to a cafe just like a friend, he did not really want to people do so; Every action he did and every word he spoke was suggesting that they did not deserve to call him â€Å"Corleone†, instead they should call him â€Å"Godfather† and bow and kiss his hand. It is this kind of worship, that though he stays close to you, he is always overlooking at you and that though he never forces you to do anything, he just makes you fear.Colonel Kurtz, also portrayed by Marlon Brando, built a similar worship in the other movie Apocalypse Now. Opposite fro m the Godfather, Colonel Kurtz did not appear until the last part of the movie. His image, however, has been impenetrate through the movie, though is vague most of the time. In this 3-hour-22-minute film, the first 2 hours and 28 minutes was used to describe Willard’s journey up the Nung River from Saigon to the remote Cambodia jungle, in which we only knew that Colonel Kurtz was probably mad and built a so-called colony. However, the feeling of madness and fear was augmenting among Willard’s team.They lost two men and became so nervous that they shot to the innocents. They saw the soldiers along the river losing control and going mad and finally they went mad themselves: Lance painted him with powders and did yoga anomicly. In such condition, they reached their final destination. On the fog-wreathed water, a group of people with mysteriously painted faces disciplinarily lined up in the river-boat; and half-naked corpses were hanged on the trees by the river. With the cryptic background music, the one-minute-long scene for the first time portrayed the colony that Colonel Kurtz had built. Wen 4People seemed to be submissive and unconscious and an atmosphere of fear and sacred was in every corner. Though Colonel Kurtz still did not show up, he had brought an inenarrable horror to everyone, as Willard described: â€Å"Everything I saw told me that Kurtz had gone insane. The place was full of bodies – North Vietnamese, Vietcong, Cambodians. If I was still alive, it was because he wanted me that way. † What a power Kurtz had put on this land. Then appeared the photojournalist, who being a big fan of Colonel Kurtz, crazy himself and hanging 4 cameras on his neck. Through his word, we knew Kurtz’s social standing here. Very cool†¦Very cool†¦But he can be friendly†Ã¢â‚¬ You don’t judge him†Ã¢â‚¬ He’s gone to the jungle. He disappears with his people. He forgets himself for his people†. Colo nel Kurtz was worshipped by the people here; he was their god and mainstay for their lives. He received the same kind of worship as the Godfather and they both demonstrated the same power which is a combination of personal charm and strength, making people coming to them, bowing their backs and bending their knees, without pushing them. They were just like producing a magnetic field around them, separating them from others and making them divine.They were both calm and did not talk too much, because they expected others to get the message from their eyesight and even from any tiny actions of them. And when it comes to a time they had to show their strength, they were still calm and elegant. The Godfather sent Tom Hagen to Hollywood to get his godson Johnny Fontane the leading role of a film. The director Jack Woltz, who was also powerful and even had dinner with the president, obviously did not regard this as a matter and arrogantly rebuked Tom Hagen’s proposal. Tom left peac efully for â€Å"Mr.Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad Wen 5 news immediately†. But in the next morning, he found the decapitated head of his beloved stud horse in his bed with him. And a week later, Johnny called back to say that he got this role. Godfather himself even didn’t appear in this event, but his great power could be felt. Even fewer scenes were in Apocalypse Now to directly demonstrate the power of Colonel Kurtz, except one midnight Colonel Kurtz grasped the Chef’s (who had been with Willard through the journey) head and silently put it between Willard’s two legs.Willard then woke up and screamed. For the first time in the movie, Willard showed some kind of fear and horror. Colonel Kurtz calmly watched him and walked away. Even without word, Kurtz let Willard know that if anyone was alive it was because that he let him alive and that if he was killed it was because that he let him to be killed. Generally speaking, two films demonstra te the main characters’ power in an indirect way, most from the third person’s angle, partly because that their power was too overwhelm to depict directly.Their power and worship received is essentially the same. Just as I have mentioned above, both are due to their personal character and magnet. However, some people may say that these two characters are essentially different, because Godfather is extremely rational but Colonel Kurtz is always characterized by the word â€Å"mad† or â€Å"insane†. This reasoning is not true. Colonel Kurtz is not that a mad man that you usually see in an asylum. He knows what he is doing and his logic is clear. And most important, he has his own philosophy, such as what he told Willard â€Å"We must kill them.We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army. And they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? Wen 6 They lie. They lie, and w e have to be merciful, for those who lie. Those nabobs. I hate them. I do hate them. † People in the movie say that he is insane because they do not understand his philosophy and the way he speaks: most of the time, he seems to be like talking to himself. He is really in his own spiritual world. But isn’t the Godfather?Don Corleone also has his own view of the world and is stick to it, such as â€Å"be close to your friend but closer to your enemy† and â€Å"Women and children can be careless, but not men†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ † He is so stick to his own value that he refused to get involved into the narcotics business, which resulted in big trouble, and he also conceals himself in his own world by saying â€Å"Never tell anyone outside the Family what you are thinking. † On the other hand, the Godfather and Colonel Kurtz are indeed different. Though with equal power and intelligence, Godfather seems to live in happiness while Kurtz in great pain.The last w ord of Godfather is â€Å"The world is so beautiful†, but the last word of Kurtz is the famous â€Å"The horror†¦The horror†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Then what is it that causes such a difference? The journalist gave one answer, â€Å"He’s clear in mind, but mad in soul†. And my answer is â€Å"the family†. Fighting away from home, Colonel Kurtz got no support from family, where everyone truly loved him. From his letter to his son (â€Å"I'm afraid that both you and your mother would have been worried for not hearing from me these past weeks. But my situation here has become a difficult one. I've been officially accused of murder by the Army.The alleged victims were four Vietnamese double agents. We spent months uncovering and accumulating evidence. When absolute proof was completed, we acted, we acted like soldiers. The charges Wen 7 are unjustified†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. †) and his conversation to Willard (â€Å"I worry that my son might not understand what I 've tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything – everything I did, everything you saw†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Willard, you will do this for me†) we can derive that he received unjustified charges in military but his wife and son did not understand him.Then he gradually isolated himself and escaped to this little-known place and ruined it. Alone and lonely, great pain he suffered and finally went insane. The Godfather, however, has always been putting the family at the first place, just as he said â€Å"If you never spend time with your family, you would never be a man†. He detested any disloyalty to the family and asked his sons to stick to this rule. He had a wonderful and happy family himself. He died when playing with his grandson, and found â€Å"the world is so beautiful†.In conclusion, both Don Corleone and Colonel Kurtz are great man, who are powerful and influencing people around t hem in a special way. They both have their own philosophy and spiritual word. They are quite similar in many ways except that the Godfather has a happy family, which makes their lives ending in so different ways. Wen 8 Works Cited Godfather. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Perf. Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. Paramount Pictures, 1972. DVD. Apocalypse Now (Redux version). Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Perf. Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen. United Artists, 2001. DVD.

The Big Bang and the Origin of Everything

How did the universe begin? Thats a question scientists and philosophers have pondered throughout history as they looked at the starry sky above. Its the job of astronomy and astrophysics to provide an answer. However, its not an easy one to tackle. An artists concept of what the Big Bang might have looked like, if anybody had been around to see it. HENNING DALHOFF / Getty Images The first major glimmerings of an answer came from the sky in 1964. Thats when astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a microwave signal buried in data they were taking to look for signals being bounced from Echo balloon satellites. They assumed at the time that it was simply unwanted noise and attempted to filter out the signal. The antenna that Penzias and Wilson were using when they stumbled across the signals from the cosmic background radiation heralding the birth of the universe. Fabioj, CC BY-SA 3.0 However, it turns out that what they detected was coming from a time shortly after the beginning of the universe. Although they didnt know it at the time, they had discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The CMB had been predicted by a theory called the Big Bang, which suggested that the universe began as a densely hot point in space and suddenly expanded outward.  The two mens discovery was the first evidence of that primordial event. The Big Bang What started the birth of the universe? According to physics, the universe sprang into existence from a singularity — a term physicists use to describe regions of space that defy the laws of physics. They know very little about singularities, but its known that such regions exist in the cores of black holes. Its a region where all the mass gobbled up by a black hole gets squeezed into a tiny point, infinitely massive, but also very, very small. Imagine cramming Earth into something the size of a pinpoint. A singularity would be smaller. Thats not to say the universe began as a black hole, however. Such an assumption would raise the question of something existing before the Big Bang, which is pretty speculative. By definition, nothing existed prior to the beginning, but that fact creates more questions than answers. For instance, if nothing existed prior to the Big Bang, what caused the singularity to be created in the first place? Its a gotcha question astrophysicists are still trying to understand.   However, once the singularity was created (however it happened), physicists have a good idea of what occurred next. The universe was in a hot, dense state and began to expand through a process called inflation. It went from very small and very dense, to a very hot state. Then, it cooled as it expanded.  This process is now referred to as the Big Bang, a term first coined by Sir Fred Hoyle during a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio broadcast in 1950. Although the term implies some kind of explosion, there really wasn’t an outburst or a bang. It was really the rapid expansion of space and time. Think of it like blowing up a balloon: as someone blows air in, the exterior of the balloon expands outward. The Moments after the Big Bang The very early universe (at a time a few fractions of a second after the Big Bang began) was not bound by the laws of physics as we know them today. So, no one can predict with great accuracy what the universe looked like at that time. Yet, scientists have been able to construct an approximate representation of how the universe evolved. First, the infant universe was initially so hot and dense that even elementary particles  such as protons and neutrons could not exist. Instead, different types of matter (called matter and anti-matter) collided together, creating pure energy. As the universe began to cool during the first few minutes, protons and neutrons began to form. Slowly, protons, neutrons, and electrons came together to form hydrogen and small amounts of helium. During the billions of years that followed, stars, planets, and galaxies formed to create the current universe. Evidence for the Big Bang So, back to Penzias and Wilson and the CMB.  What they found (and for which they won a Nobel Prize), is often described as the â€Å"echo† of the Big Bang. It left behind a signature of itself, just like an echo heard in a canyon represents a â€Å"signature† of the original sound. The difference is that instead of an audible echo, the Big Bangs clue is a heat signature throughout all of space. That signature has been specifically studied by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Their data provide the clearest evidence for the cosmic birth event.   The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from seven years of WMAP data. The image reveals 13.7 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. NASA / WMAP Science Team Alternatives to the Big Bang Theory While the Big Bang theory is the most widely accepted model that explains the origins of the universe and is supported by all the observational evidence, there are other models that use the same evidence to tell a slightly different story. Some theorists argue that the Big Bang theory is based on a false premise — that the universe is built on an ever-expanding space-time. They suggest a static universe, which is what was originally predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Einstein’s theory was only later modified to accommodate the way the universe appears to be expanding.  And, expansion is a big part of the story, particularly as it involves the existence of  dark energy. Finally, a recalculation of the mass of the universe seems to support the Big Bang theory of events.   While our understanding of the actual events is still incomplete, CMB data are helping shape the theories that explain the birth of the cosmos. Without the Big Bang, no stars, galaxies, planets, or life could exist.   Fast Facts The Big Bang is the name given to the birth event of the universe.The Big Bang is thought to have occurred when something kicked off the expansion of a tiny singularity, some 13.8 billion years ago.Light from shortly after the Big Bang is detectable as the cosmic microwave radiation (CMB). It represents light from a time when the newborn universe was lighting up some 380,000 years after the Big Bang occurred. Sources â€Å"The Big Bang.†Ã‚  NASA, NASA, www.nasa.gov/subject/6890/the-big-bang/.NASA, NASA, science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-powered-the-big-bang.â€Å"The Origins of the Universe.†Ã‚  National Geographic, National Geographic, 24 Apr. 2017, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/origins-of-the-universe/. Updated and edited by Carolyn Collins Petersen.