Registered for an Open Network Learning course, and I need to start my own blog; so I am a social media person now. Yeah!!!

I have read the introduction of the course carefully, and it said that I even could explore an opportunity of work, presentation etc through the blog. Do the organizers of conferences or meetings have time to surf on blogs? Or maybe they have their secretaries or assistants to do that for them, who knows. I am curious how this will help for teaching? Let the students to read my blogs?

One of the requirements for the course is five blogs with 400 words contents. I really do not know what to say. Nowadays we are in an era of information explosion, people can get the information they want anywhere, and it also makes people have to speed up their pace, have to rush all the time. Does anyone really want to read others’ long blogs? For myself, I prefer only 3 lines for each blog, like the Chinese version of Twitter, Weibo. You need to be straight forward and to the point because the maximum character limit for one Weibo is 140 words . So I want to know why and how I need to write so long. What contents should be included in my blog. 

Anyway, I am Amy, a lab executive from National University of Singapore. I work in a Human Genetics Lab, do research on genetics diseases, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), Retinoblastoma (RB) and telomere length (TL) etc. and teach students to do their experiments.

Recently I presented a research project about telomere length, a indicator of biological aging. It shortens when cell divisions occur, when it shortens to a limit, cells will stop replicating or die. It will shorten when people have physical and psychiatric diseases also, such as cancer, dementia, diabetes or schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety and depression. It reminded me that we need to live with a healthy life, at least we should do our part; eat more plant diets, less fat and carbohydrates, do moderate exercise, walk at least 10,000 steps a day, swim 3 times a week; sleep at least 7 hours a day etc.

Talking about sleep, I found that sleep really affects my health. I participated in a national sleep challenge, to sleep 7 hours a day. I sleep 5-6 hours per day previously and I had a mild pharyngitis, felt a little sore throat. After I sleep more, the sore throat is gone; I believe that sleep increases my immunity. 

That’s it for today, see you on my next blog.