Upon getting information about an upcoming school science fair and the need to consider a topic of interest, many students will typically have no idea where to get started. While the science fair is typically a common occurrence in any school at any grade level, there are different types of topics that should be taken a look at depending on the age of the student. After first taking a look at the many different categories of science projects, you will be able to locate a suitable choice of topic to take to the next level.There is a wide variety of categories that fall under the types of science projects that can be chosen for a school science fair. These include biology, chemistry, physics, microbiology, biochemistry, medicine, environmental, mathematics, engineering, and earth science. While you may not have yet learned very much in any of these categories, don’t be afraid to see what each one entails. Taking a good look at your interests will allow you to focus on the right direction to take.Many resources are also available for those who are unsure as to the topic they are wanting to use to create their science projects. If you take a look at the topics that fall under the biology category, you will likely notice that there are topics that deal with plants, animals, and humans. For those who are in 2nd grade or 3rd grade, an interesting topic may be to determine if ants are picky over what type of food they eat. While this topic might not be of interest to an 8th grader, it is certainly something in the biology category that an elementary school student would enjoy.Along with the biology category, a high school student may want to take a look at diffusion and osmosis in animal cells as this would be a more appropriate topic for the grade level. A student in 6th grade would be more advanced than an elementary school student, but not as advanced as a high school student. At this middle school grade level, a topic of how pH levels effect the lifespan of a tadpole may be of interest.Whichever resource is used to locate a topic for science projects, it is always a good idea to consider the grade level of the student prior to making a selection. It is always assumed to be best to have a project at an appropriate level in order to keep the attention of the student and provide a fun and enjoyable learning experience.

The anti-aging skin care field has boomed, with hundreds of new products being introduced to the market on what feels like almost on a daily basis. This has resulted in what we may call “skin care overload.” People have become overwhelmed and confused by the countless number of ingredients we are told are necessary for anti-aging. It has become impossible to access and apply even a fraction of these ingredients due to the cost and time involved. We feel compelled to buy multiple products every month and layer them on in order to do the most for our skin. But, as we fill our medicine cabinets with creams and serums, we are faced with the daily questions of which shall we use, which are safe and which actually work?It has been long overdue that the various categories of anti-aging and the anti-aging ingredients themselves be ordered and categorized so that a comprehensive approach to anti-aging may be put into place. Firstly, there are many features to skin aging and people will show one or more features over time, but may differ in the features of skin aging that plague them. For example, some people develop sagging or laxity to the skin due to genetic factors, but may have little or no sun damage. Others may be covered with sun spots but have no sagging or wrinkling. The following is a validated classification scheme which allows for each clinical feature of skin aging to be assessed separately on a 4-point grading scale (mild, moderate, advanced, severe):Classification of Skin Aging:
Laxity (Sagging)
Wrinkles
Redness
Brown discolorations
Solar elastosis (Yellowing)
Irregular texture
Abnormal growths (keratoses).1This classification scheme of skin aging includes a severity scale as mentioned above (0=None, 1=Mild, 2=Moderate, 3=Advanced, and 4=Severe) which allows researchers or users to rank each individual person’s skin aging according to feature and severity. This scale was shown to be very useful in testing anti-aging treatments and has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.1 Older scales tended to lump different features together into broad categories, which became less useful as treatments became more specific in targeting various facets of skin aging; for example as anti-pigment or anti-redness or anti-wrinkle. With this current anti-aging scale, our anti-aging products may be quantitatively tested to determine which individual categories of skin aging they treat and how effective they are in each category. This also allows us to hone our anti-aging regimen to our needs and to compile or group the ingredients in each category that are most effective so as to cover all categories of anti-aging in a logical manner.The next challenge was to classify the plethora of anti-aging ingredients on the market based on the features of skin aging that they targeted or treated. I then created a classification scheme of the categories of anti-aging targeted by the ingredients that have emerged over the past decade:
Anti-Wrinkle – DNA Defense - Barrier Fortification
Anti-Redness - Cellular Restore - Emollient/Moisturizer
Anti-Brown Discoloration – Damage Reversal – Pro-Skin Thickness
Anti-Oxidants - Aging Repair – Re-TexturizeWith this classification scheme, we can appreciate why people have become so overwhelmed and why they have accumulated shopping bags full of skin creams in order to meet their needs! Nevertheless, as anti-aging ingredients have emerged targeting each of these categories, ideally one would want to incorporate the best ingredients of each category in a single daily regimen to optimally treat skin aging.Each individual may differ in which category of anti-aging they need most, yet in order to prevent and reverse all the signs of skin aging, it is still optimal for all categories to be covered by an anti-aging regimen. It is important to familiarize yourself with which ingredients fall in each category, so that you can incorporate several of each group into your skin regimen, or look for a product that covers the various categories of anti-aging in a logical way. Examples of key active ingredients shown to yield resulst in each category of anti-aging include: peptides for anti-wrinkles, plant-derived polyphenols and bisabolol for anti-redness, amino acids for anti-brown discolorations, vitamins C, E and ferulic acid for anti-oxidant, DNA repair molecules such as acetyl tyrosine and proline for DNA defense, resveratrol for cellular restore, bark extract or phoretin for damage reversal, Helianthus annuus and Ilex paraguensis extracts for aging repair, dimethicone for barrier repair, glycerin and soy lecithin for emollients, hyaluronic acid for boosting skin thickness, and mushroom extracts and sodium lactate for smoothening abnormal texture.In sum, the field of anti-aging now has validated classification systems for the various categories of skin aging and for the plethora of anti-aging ingredients so that we can assess and determine which anti-aging actives we want in our medicine cabinet and to make certain that we cover the various categories of anti-aging in our daily regimen. With this scientific basis, we may now intelligently assess anti-aging products for their ability to comprehensively cover all the various categories of skin aging and include the various categories of anti-aging ingredients available. Finally, these comprehensive, validated classification and grading scales provide a framework for solving the anti-aging conundrum with a system for categorizing skin aging and classifying anti-aging actives to make sure you cover all your skin’s anti-aging needs.(C) NY Derm LLC, 2010.1) Alexiades-Armenakas, M, et al. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 2008 May;58(5):719-37; quiz 738-40.

There are a lot of misconceptions out there about sports nutrition and whether or not it’s appropriate for people who aren’t athletes. This is a somewhat understandable fear, as the media at large often likes to sensationalize the diets or supplement regimens of famous athletes. Adding in the media’s fascination with aggrandizing sports figures and elevating them onto pedestal and it’s easy to feel like the rules that apply to them don’t apply to you whether dietary or otherwise. The fact of the matter is, there is a lot that most people can learn from sports nutrition health, and they can gain a lot of benefits from incorporating the dietary insights athletes have learn for their own food consumption.The ironic thing about this public fear is the fact that most dietary changes over the least hundred years have started out in what it now known as optimum sports nutrition. If you look at the general and fairly predictable pattern for dietary changes and trends, you’ll notice that they tend to start with elite athletes and then trickle their way down to the rest of us. In fact, this is true for certain medical treatments in addition to diet.If you look at the trends closely, you’ll even see that dietary changes tend to start with the most EXTREME athletes out there professional bodybuilders. This is due to two simple facts. First, bodybuilders regularly experiment with massive body modulation and re-composition in order to compete in their sport. Secondly, bodybuilders tend to be the ones most willing to try absolutely anything. It’s true that most people don’t want to look like a pro bodybuilder or to go nearly as far as they go in their experiments, but those experiments are precisely the reason why meal replacements, protein shakes, multivitamins, weight training, and lower carbohydrate diets and many more breakthroughs have all entered the mainstream fitness world.In many ways, we are all eating the way we are because of insights found in the world of sports nutrition even if we’re not conscious about it.So now that I’ve hopefully dispelled some of the fear and unnecessary distance that might keep you from embracing sports nutrition as a great way to lose weight and build muscle as an amateur, what benefits can you expect from consciously incorporating these dietary protocols into your life?For starters, you are likely to drastically reduce the number of times that you get sick. Professional athletes can’t afford to get sick, and as such they have devised nutritional programs that tend to promote vibrant good health. Professional athletes are also unable to take too much time lying around sore and beaten up from their training, so you can expect to recover faster from your workouts.If you follow a solid sports nutrition health plan than you are likely to reach your fitness and performance goals much quicker than if you followed a standard American diet or a slightly healthier variation on it. There’s no reason to spend two months trying to lose five pounds when you go do it in two weeks with the right nutritional program.Overall, optimum sports nutrition is designed to allow the human body to function at its best. That’s something that everyone can benefit from- whether you’re a computer programmer who likes to row on the side, a new mother looking to lose your baby fat quickly, or just an average Joe who wants to look and feel better than ever before.