fruitacatalyst

By Melissa Murphy, Reporter

             Every year the Fruita FFA chapter holds its annual cowboy Christmas event.  Cowboy Christmas is when members of the FFA all make five homemade items to donate to the chapter to sell.

            Mothers of the FFA will also be cooking and bringing in their crock pot dinners to share and be judged by all who attend.

            Items range from welding projects to homemade chocolate chip cookie mix. Some of the most popular items are welded crosses and welded cowboys.

            “Cowboy Christmas is a great time where members get to make personalized items and donate them to fund more FFA event,” Philip Frank, Treasurer of the FFA.

            This year cowboy Christmas is will be held on Friday December 14 from 9a.m. to 7p.m.

            Come support the FFA as they do the famous chili cook off and buy some homemade items for Christmas.

By Randy Hershman, Reporter

       Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer found among American women. Recent studies done by the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control have shown that overall the number of deaths from this disease have decreased; still there is a lot to be concerned about for African American women.

           Black women may be less prone to getting breast cancer, than their white counterparts, but they have a 41% higher chance of dying from it. In fact, they have the greatest risk compared to any other racial group.          

            These studies have also shown that African American women are less likely to receive the same treatments as white women. Part of this, is the fact that black women tend to have subtypes of tumors that are harder to treat, such as triple negative breast cancer.

           White women tend to be treated within 30 days of diagnosis, while it is often several months before African American women are treated. These death rates could be dropped by 20% if women of both races received the same treatment.           

            Many things are still left undetermined, including the actual causes of these deaths. This leaves scientists wondering how ethnicities can let to such drastic differences.

By Taylor Eatwell, Reporter

                Over the past months there has been a lot of missing people cases all around the world. Many missing cases are caused from kidnapping. Jessica Ridgeway, ten years old, went missing in Denver, Colorado on October 5, 2012. Ridgeways body was found five days later, 7 miles from her home.

                Christian Aguilar, 18, was another teenager who was reported missing. Aguilar was a student at University of Florida. Aguilar went missing on September 20, 2012 and his remains were found on October 12, 2012. On September 28, 2012, Pedro Bravo was fined to first degree murder. Bravo told the investigators that he had “an altercation with Aguilar” the night he went missing.

                  Aguilar’s backpack was found in Bravo’s closet. Police had found blood in Bravo’s car in several different places, they took the blood in for DNA testing to see if it matched Aguilar’s. Aguilar’s remains were found an hour away from the University.

By Adrienne Chiapuzio, Reporter

            The spade-toothed beaked whale is the world’s rarest whale, so when a mother and her calf washed up on a New Zealand beach they were completely taken aback.

            “This is the first time a spade-toothed beaked whale has been seen as a complete specimen, and we’re lucky enough to find two of them,” said Rachelle Constantine, a lead scientist at the University of Auckland when interviewed by Xinhua News agency, about her thoughts on the species. “It’s incredible to think that, until recently, that such a large animal was concealed by the South Pacific Ocean and shows how little we know about ocean biodiversity.”

            Scientists first discovered the species in 1872, but little was known about the whales. So when they found bone fragments in New Zealand and Chile in 2002, scientists from the university analyzed the DNA and found that their genetic profiles were all the same and didn’t match to any other known species. They are thought to dive deep for food and find their main food source of squid. But nothing else is exact about the species because of their rarity. Until 2010, it was unclear if the species still existed. When the mother and her calf washed up on shore, scientists though it to be the more common grey beak whale, but then when they did further evaluation, they discovered that the test results had matched the results they found in the bone fragments 8 years earlier.

            “There is a lot of marine life that is unknown to us,” said Constantine. The discovery of this whale has proved that there is still much to learn about our oceans.