Love: Real or Chemical?

What do you think of when you hear the word love? Maybe you think about romance, Romeo and Juliet, chocolate, or even your own true love. Most people associate love with the feeling of complete happiness and attraction; the feeling of just wanting to spend time with one person for the rest of your life, the person who makes you happier than anyone else. Love is often though of with romance and marriage and the fairy tale ending of being happily together for life. Romantic love is a real thing, it’s an emotion that is described as stronger and better than any other, but what leads to love? The answer is simple: Chemicals.

Studies by many scientists have proven that a person falls in love with someone because of a chain of chemical reactions in the body. Chemicals such as estrogen (in women) and testosterone (in men) create the sex drive in love. The chemical norepinephrine is released when we fall in love, raising our heart rate. Dopamine and phenylethylamine are two other major chemicals released in our brains when we fall in love and can cause sweaty palms and flushed skin. Serotonin, a chemical that is found in very small amounts in people with OCD, is also found in small amounts in people who are in love. People in love usually feel a very strong obsession and addiction to their partner, purely due to the chemical reactions trigged inside our bodies when we fall in love.

Certain chemical reactions occur in our bodies when we first fall in love due to four major categories illustrated below:

Appearance: In most cases, the first thing that lovers are attracted to is each other’s appearances. A study conducted by David Perrett, a psychologist working out of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, revealed that a person is attracted to people of the opposite sex who look like their parents. Further more, you are more apt to fall in love with a person of the opposite sex whose appearance reminds you of your own.

Personality: A person is more apt to fall in love with a person of the opposite sex whose personality reminds them of their parents.

Pheromones: The best way to describe pheromones is as scentless prints of yourself, which the vomeronasal organ, located in the nose, of other people can detect. It has been proven that you are more attracted to a person with pheromones that indicate an immune system different enough from your own, so your offspring will be healthy.

Aphrodisiacs: Certain chemicals in foods like chocolate or asparagus trigger chemical reactions within our bodies, releasing sex hormones and making us more apt to fall in love.

Those four categories suggest major reasons why people fall in love with the people they do, but as animals we are also programmed to reproduce and to parent with our lovers too. We are chemically driven to reproduce and then to love and parent our offspring, in turn keeping people in love together for life.

Romantic love is a very real emotion that is unlike any other, but it is one that is created by chemical reactions that occur in our bodies. Therefore, I believe that love is both real and chemical, but chemical reactions and science can’t account for everything in love. Some things in love are simply unexplainable, and that’s what makes romantic love and attraction such an interesting topic, one that I believe is better left unanswered.

Source: http://people.howstuffworks.com/love.htm

Link From Obesity to Type Two Diabetes: "Diabesity"

Link between Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes on Prezi

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-15/obesity-link-to-diabetes-found-in-white-blood-cells-australian-study-says.html

Osmoregulation in Dolphins

          The study of osmoregulation in organisms is a very widely studied topic, and the comparisons between terrestrial and aquatic, and salt water to fresh water are very interesting. Certain organisms that live in either hypotonic or hypertonic solutions are forced to adapt to regulate their osmosis. These animals are called osmoregulators, and the one that I focused on is the Bottlenose dolphin.

          
           Bottlenose dolphins are aquatic organisms, but they can be found in two different types of water environments. The first kind of water they can be found in is fresh water. Dolphins that live in fresh water are hypotonic to their surrounding environment (the solution within them is more concentrated then the solution outside of them), which can pose a problem because certain nutrients that dolphins need to survive could theoretically diffuse out of their body, while water could diffuse into them to create an equilibrium. In order to avoid this problem, dolphins take in fresh water (70% diffuses in through their skin, and 30% is inhaled through their mouth) and urinate it right back out. Their ufr (urine flow rate) increases immensely, and their urine is extremely diluted (meaning that it has a very high concentration of water, and a very low concentration of substances, such as chloride and sodium). By urinating often and a diluted urine, dolphins are able to keep their high concentration of nutrients and substances within their body, while getting rid of all the extra water that is being diffused through their skin and inhaled through their mouth.
          
          The second type of water environment that dolphins can be found in is salt water. Bottlenose dolphins are hypertonic in relation to their surrounding salt enriched environment. In order to achieve an equilibrium, the water within the dolphin would diffuse out into the salt water, and the salt water would diffuse in (the same way as fresh water, 70% through their skin, the rest inhaled through their mouth). However, the Bottlenose dolphin is an aquatic animal which needs to retain a certain amount of fresh water in its body to survive. In order to obtain this amount of fresh water they take in the salt water, filter and pee out the salt, and then retain the fresh water. Bottlenose dolphins living in a salt water environment have an increased ufr, and their urine is highly concentrated with salt.

        
         Bottlenose dolphins have to osmoregulate in both fresh and salt water environments to keep the right balance of ions within their body, and the correct amount of fresh water in their body. In both cases they osmoregulate by urinating more often, and they get rid of the unnecessary fluids (in the freshwater environment) and substances (in the salt water environment) through their urine.