This Week's Goals-done

 

This Week's Goals

This week we will be referring back to our recent Scientist Spotlight on Linlin Sun to understand skin physiology through the viewpoint of aging.  Aging turns out to be a very helpful context for our studies, since all of our major skin cells and chemicals have distinct roles in the aging process.  As a result, we can get a fairly comprehensive overview of skin anatomy and physiology through this one subject - aging!  We will additionally be working more extensively with an academic paper in order to practice our scientific article reading skills.

Given all of the above, we will seek to...

• Use evidence from a scientific article to describe the impacts of aging on skin cells, skin molecules, and normal skin physiology.

• Demonstrate increased comfort and proficiency while reading from a scientific primary source.

A Note About Studying Aging & the Skin

Our society puts a lot of pressure on us - particularly those who identify as women - to prevent and hide certain signs of aging in our skin.  This can create a lot of stress for some individuals!  To be clear, aging, including aging of the skin, can be a wonderful and beautiful process, and not necessarily a process to fear or avoid.  In this module, we will simply be looking at some natural changes that occur in the skin during our lives.  Some of those changes we might wish to prevent, since they involve a decrease in some of skin's functions.  However, there is no presumption or implication that there's a biological basis for wishing to prevent these changes for cosmetic reasons!