By Loryn Schuetzle

Raver Staff

Several ghost stories swirl around the School of Mines. There was the believable sighting of Big Foot on campus a few years ago. It is rumored that there have been ghosts in the Connolly dorms in the past. There is a tale about a woman crying and two kids playing that can only be heard between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. by Rapid Creek. However, there is still one mystery that haunts the campus to this day.

It is a well known fact that the School of Mines is full of interweaving underground tunnels. The school does not allow students to see the tunnels, but long ago, a student took advantage of the underground tunnels that weave beneath the School of Mines.

“I have heard of students living in the tunnels under the campus,” junior chemical engineering student Eliza Gores said.

The student that moved into the tunnels has been known to sneak around campus late at night when no one is around; sometimes choosing to stay inside a campus school building through the night. There have been accounts of items in the classroom building disappearing and then the next day reappearing, footsteps in empty hallways late at night, toilets flushing when no one is in sight and music coming from underground.

“I thought something was a little weird when I heard the toilet next to me flush and no one was there,” junior civil engineering student Jesse Morris said about the alleged mystery.

How is this person sneaking around campus living in the tunnels and buildings without getting caught? It is simple: no one has seen this student. It is possible that this is not a student at the School of Mines at all, but rather a ghost here on campus haunting the buildings that reside on the School of Mines grounds.

“I have heard of ghosts haunting the campus,” industrial engineering senior Katie Harvey said. “I heard there was one living in the tunnels under the campus.”

Ghosts have been known to find shelter at the School of Mines. Many students go in search of these spirits but no one has found the man who haunts the underground tunnels.

Welcome to our new website! Scroll through the print version of the October 2009 issue of the Raver by clicking on the following link:

http://issuu.com/raver.sdsmt/docs/october_2009

(And yes, we are aware that there are a few grammatical errors. Please forgive us for not having a journalism department. We try our best but we don’t have time to catch everything.)

- Katie Aurand, Raver Editor in Chief

By Greg Midzak

Raver Intern

Have you ever wondered what the science is behind the “calories in calories out” hypothesis? Conventional Wisdom says that Americans eat “too many calories, too much fat, too much salt, and not enough fiber.” With more than 63 percent of America over-weight, and 31 percent clinically obese, you’d think it’s true. But is it really calories, and fat? I don’t see how I can be told that in order to not gain weight, I need to stick to a strict set of caloric intake. Here is the logic behind it (we’re going to use 2700 calories, since that is an average between men and women) : 2700 calories = 1,000,000 calories a year. This is 10 million calories in ten years. That’s the same as 12 tons of food. If you wanted to maintain your weight within 10lbs for that decade, you need a percent of error of only about .4 percent. That means that you have to accurately count your caloric intake to within 11 calories a day.  By this logic, if you weren’t able to maintain that accuracy, within 10 years you would be obese. Now, does this really happen? If this theory of calories in, calories out was right, why aren’t we all obese? If this “science” is so concrete that it is stressed over and over, why doesn’t it seem to work for everyone? Why does everyone blame obesity on overeating, and fat? The reason so many people are over-weight, is because weight gain and loss is determined by hormones. One hormone in particular, is insulin. Insulin regulation in our bodies is heavily influenced by carbohydrate (sugar) consumption.

Since 1977 our country has followed governmental guidelines for nutrition. This dogma (which was recommended even after many scientists and researchers pleaded against) was for America to lower its fat intake to below 30 percent, and increase its carbohydrate intake to over 45 percent.  Can you guess when the obesity epidemic started? Let me explain what carbohydrate (sugar) consumption does to your body.  First, you need to understand that all carbohydrates brake down into sugar. No matter how high or low of a glycemic index the food item has. As soon as you put that whole-grain piece of bread is in your mouth, it breaks down into sugar. Our bodies aren’t designed to take in lots of sugar. So in order to cope with large quantities of sugar, our body produces insulin. Insulin has many roles in our body. One role is to knock down sugar in our blood after eating. When you eat that piece of bread, it is quickly broken down, and the resulting sugar floods into your blood. Our bodies keep a 4 gram homeostatic amount of glucose in our blood at all times. If we eat a baked potato, we ingest about 50 grams of glucose (potato starch is made of pure glucose), which is more than ten times the amount regularly circulating in our blood. So in order to deal with this excess amount of glucose, our bodies produce insulin to drive the glucose into storage. This is where the problem is. When our bodies are forced to utilize sugar as energy, we have to constantly replenish our energy. This falls into why you get ravishingly hungry when you skip your lunch, and you start feeling groggy. This is what happens to everyone that lives this lifestyle. Over time the constant need for insulin to knock down sugar causes tissues in our body to become resistant to its affects. This is called Insulin Resistance, and can later turn into diabetes.  This is the reason why you see so many over-weight people. You are witnessing the progression of insulin resistance. When this starts to happen, your body will start storing more and more sugar into its adipose (fatty) tissue. This isn’t regular fat that your body can utilize easily for energy. This fat will be harder and harder to remove if you continue to eat a diet of carbohydrates. There was a laboratory test done on Zuker rats. The experiment showed that after becoming obese on a carbohydrate diet, then put on a calorie restricted diet (they basically starved the poor little fellas), the rats would die obese. Their bodies would not let go of the adipose tissue. This is because once they were given less nutrients; their bodies slowed their metabolism down. Less energy in (calories) means that you will have less energy out. This is also the case for so many over-weight people that have gone on diets. The person didn’t fail, the diet failed them.

This is where my “diet” comes into play. If you put the human species on a timeline, you will see that we have been around for just about 2 million years. We’ve only been eating grains for about 10,000 years. Before grains we ate meat, fat, wild berries (the fruit that is available today is nowhere near what it once was), nuts and root vegetables. As soon as we utilized agriculture as a means of survival, diseases and cancers started being observed in human remains.  Fat and protein are what our bodies are engineered to utilize for fuel. We have a hormone called “Ghrelin” that is used to tell us when we’re hungry or full. This comes into play with people over eating. Have you ever wondered why it seems you can continue to eat all day long and continue to stay hungry? They tell you that it’s because you’re keeping your metabolism running. This is true to a point. Really, carbohydrates don’t react with ghrelin to suppress your hunger. Although protein and fat will make you satiated (or full).

You could try to eat 10,000 calories in fat and meat, but I guarantee you that you couldn’t do it. You could maybe do 4000 to 5000 calories if you’re lucky. The added bonus to this is that you will not gain an ounce. You don’t even have to be a super active person. If you were to try cutting carbohydrates from your diet, and replacing them with fat, I can guarantee you that you will no longer feel hungry every hour, you’ll have more energy, and you will not gain weight, and if you are looking to lose weight, you will. An added bonus, would be saving money. Last summer, is spent close to $1000 just on food. My grocery list consisted of snacks and snacks, and more snacks, on top of the regular list. I hate being hungry! This summer, I spent half of that. I no longer needed snacks to keep me happy throughout the day.

You may argue that our bodies need glucose for ATP synthesis. This isn’t entirely true. The Kreb Cycle explains that carbohydrates, fat, and protein are broken down into ATP. When Hans Kreb was formulating the hypothesis for the Kreb Cycle, he initially believed that carbohydrates were the main source of energy for our muscles. He proved himself wrong; “…All three major constituents of food supply carbon atoms… for combustion.”

By Katie Aurand
Raver Staff

Engineers can dance; they just choose not to. Maybe it is because they spend so much time sitting while doing their calc homework that their feet do not remember how to move anymore. Maybe instead of watching Footloose they watched Three O’Clock High as a child. Maybe they worry that their left-brain dominated thinking will result in two left feet on the dance floor.

All of those hypotheses could be true, but I believe that the dancing deprivation at the School of Mines can be explained via this equation with the accompanying x-y plot:

f(dance)= d(boy-7girl)

where:
dance = any integer
boy is a constant that = 7
girl is a constant that = 1

(7:1 is the current boy:girl ratio at the School of Mines. See *** at the end of the article.)
and:
f(dance) represents the number of dances students will attend
dance represents the number of dances hypothetically held

Therefore, no matter what number is chosen for dance, the function will always = 0, as represented by the graph to the right.

One thing is clear: the School of Mines will perpetually suffer from a lack of dancing unless a solution is found. The only university-hosted dance during my time here so far was a “Welcome Week” dance for freshmen in September 2008. The dance was a moderate success, but only because the fire alarms went off in the dorms and the students had nowhere else to go.

After spending months analyzing such things as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Gibbs free energy, I stumbled upon a solution while listening to Relient K’s song “Sadie Hawkins Dance.”

There is a way f(dance) can be > 0 thanks to the discovery and consequent introduction of the Sadie Hawkins dance factor(“s”).

Of course, after the Sadie Hawkins dance factor was added to the f(dance) equation via addition (eq. 2), the khaki pants variable had to be integrated into the dance productivity equation (eq. 3) to determine how many dancers could possibly show up based upon the current male student population.

Now I’m not saying that everyday should be a collegiate rendition of High School Musical with Troy Bolton dancing around the quad (although I wouldn’t mind). What I am saying is that the university, and especially the students themselves, could really benefit from some healthy, endorphin-increasing movement.

There may be some mathematical flaws in these equations, but the School of Mines student body is much more difficult to calculate than rocket science. Anyways, instead of trying to rework these equations, hopefully students will start rockin’ out to some sweet tunes (but not on iPods- that encourages antisocial, individualistic listening).

Students! It is time to get up from those homework desks, wiggle awake those sleepy feet and become foot loose.

*** The school’s website says the boy to girl ratio is 2:1, not 7:1, but they also say that there are 606 girls at the school. Show me 606 girls who attend the School of Mines and I’ll show you a dinosaur ice skating hand-in-hand with a llama (in other words that is an absurd and highly unlikely statistic). I have had classes where I have been the only girl… so 7:1 seems like a fair ratio to use. However, if we wanted to use the 2:1 ratio, we could just tweak the coefficient in front of “girl” in the equation so that it is a 2 instead of a 7.

According to Relient K, there’s nothing better than going to a Sadie Hawkins dance dressed in khaki pants (oh oh oh). Could that be the solution to the deprivation of dance at the School of Mines?

By Scotty Nelson

Guest Writer

Last year I wrote an article in the Raver giving suggestions about how to avoid gaining the excess body fat that some freshmen gain during their first year of college (The Freshman Fifteen). I am writing this article to apologize for making those weight loss suggestions. I made those suggestions based on conventional knowledge of, not on the actual science behind the regulation of weight. I hope this article will debunk the reasons why we gain body fat and in return allow whomever it may concern to make healthy dietary choices. In this article I will explain that obesity is a form malnutrition caused by abnormally high levels of insulin which in return starves the body at a cellular level.

In last year’s article I implied that one gains excess fat tissue (adipose tissue) by overeating and not exercising enough (gluttony and sloth). This is not the case and the scientific world seems to be absent of any long term clinical trials suggesting that gluttony and sloth will cause one to gain weight. I am sure that at this time you are referring back to your thermodynamics textbooks to make sure that you have the First Law of Thermodynamics memorized correctly, and most likely you do. It states: The change in energy in a system is equal to the energy in minus the energy out. Your body is as a system of energy and is no exception to this law, but simply claiming that overeating and under-exercising   are causes of obesity is a misinterpretation of this law. Either way let us test the hypothesis that excess fat tissue is gained by gluttony and sloth (technically known as the positive caloric balance hypothesis).

The first question to ask with any hypothesis is: Can this hypothesis explain the observations in which it encounters? Let us derive our own observations with the following questions:

Do you know someone who is constantly trying to lose weight by cutting back on the calories and exercising, yet is still “overweight?”

Do you know someone who is “not overweight” who never stops eating and who does not exercise often?

Chances are you answered yes to both of them. If you answer yes to the first one, the only option according to the positive caloric balance hypothesis is that overweight people are lying about how much they are eating and exercising and that they have no self control. This is clearly not the case. If you answered yes to the second question, according to the positive caloric balance hypothesis is that all skinny people who “over eat” are lying about how much they eat and are closet athletes. This hypothesis also fails explain why obesity is has the highest association with poverty stricken areas (for example: all Indian reservations) in which the people of these are eating less and working more than us skinny rich people.

The previous observations are not and cannot be explained using the positive caloric balance hypothesis. Nor does this hypothesis explain why obesity and malnutrition exist together in the same societies. So why do we gain excess adipose tissue? Let me explain using very basic metabolic science.

Technically the only valid statement when can get when we apply the first law of thermodynamics to the body is that obesity is caused by excess fat accumulation in the body. So logically the next question would be: What controls the accumulation of fat in adipose tissue in the body? The answer is hormones. (i.e. women tend to gain fat around their hips, men in their bellies; , women gain fat during puberty, men lose fat during puberty etc.). The hormone that has the largest control over excess body accumulation is insulin. Insulin stops our body from converting triglycerides (stored in adipose tissue) to fatty acids which our body uses as energy when we are done eating. Insulin is naturally secreted by the body before and during meals to trigger hunger and insulin levels slowly decrease as time passes allowing us to retrieve fatty acids from our fat tissue and thus allowing us to live without constantly eating. So the next question would be: What causes our levels of insulin to rise above what our body naturally secretes? The answer is carbohydrates cause increased levels of insulin.

So why do we gain weight in the form of fat? Let me explain. Our body constantly needs energy, even when we are not eating, and the end user of this energy is our individual cells. If we have a healthy metabolism, our body will convert triglycerides in our adipose tissue into fatty acid and these fatty acids will then be broken down into energy for our cells. If we do not have a healthy metabolism when our cells call for energy they cannot get as much as they need because our insulin levels our abnormally high. Our body compensates by inducing hunger to get more energy (by secreting more insulin) and we eat more. When we are hungry we eat and if we eat more foods that induce high insulin levels (carbohydrates), this becomes a viscous cycle and we get and hungry again because our cells still cannot get the energy that they want. If our cells do not have the energy they need we also get tired. Gluttony and sloth are underlying side effects of weight gain, not the other way around.  In other words, we overeat and under exercise because we are getting fat, not the other way around.

I hope that this article gives you some insight on a scientific basis on the regulation of weight. In short, carbohydrates cause heightened levels of insulin and insulin prohibits our body from converting triglycerides into fatty acids to be used as energy. This prohibition causes one to become come hungry and over eat while limiting the amount of energy our bodies can use. Again I apologize for not basing last year’s article on science. I urge you not rely on conventional knowledge from our nutrition textbooks and the US dietary guidelines, but to rely on science and the accurate interpretation of observations relating to the regulation of weight. I also urge you to read the Raver’s nutritional column as it critical analyzes the nutritional topics from a scientific standpoint. So if you are looking to lose/avoid those freshman fifteen, next time you are hungry do not eat that that low fat cereal with skim milk (mostly carbohydrates) instead bite into some bacon and eggs with some heavy whipping cream. I am sure you will enjoy them and the lifelong health benefits that come with them.

By Jerika Ihnen
Raver Intern

Ever notice how Thursday and Friday classes seem to drop in attendance about every other week?  Yes, it is possible that some students are taking an early weekend, but for a select few student athletes, these days are spent on buses and hotel rooms. This past weekend, the Lady Hardrocker volleyball team travelled to Valley City and Jamestown, N.D. On this seven hour bus trip one could find setter Becky Keilholtz listening to her iPod, watching movies and studying her scouting report, middle hitter Paige Corcoran studying for her upcoming test in Engineering Economics while braiding Katherine Hanson’s hair and outside hitter Madi “X-factor” Lane dreaming about hitting through the Lady Vikings block and scoring the winning point of the match as she took a well deserved nap.

After the never-ending bus trip, the team then unpacks into what becomes a “home-away-from-home”: the hotel room.   The team must literally learn to live out of a bag for the duration of the weekend.  Finally after days of preparation, hours spent on the bus and countless time devoted to memorizing the scouting report, the big match arrives.

The stat leaders for the weekend games were sophomore Madisen Lane with 18 kills, 6 solo blocks and 7 assist blocks and junior Paige Corcoran 13 kills, 3 solo blocks and 7 assist blocks. The sophomore libero Reanna Roberson had 19 digs and freshman setter Alex Mader had 33 assists and 11 digs on the weekend.

Coach Tiffany Mastin commented, “We played great at times, but at other times we let both teams go on too many runs of points against us. We need to continue working hard at a consistent level , really pushing ourselves to get better. Jessie Guthals and Madisen Lane both had a great weekend for us. We need to continue working on offensively putting balls away when needed, as well as finishing matches.  We are working to continue to get better and be positive.  We need to take a good look at this past weekend, learn lessons appropriately, and then move onto pushing the other DAC schools in every match.”