Study on the human kidney and kidney stones

Study on the human kidney and kidney stones There are normally two kidneys in humans. The kidneys are small organs which can be found behind the abdominal cavity in a space called the retroperitoneum. They are approximately at the vertebral level of T12 to L3. The kidney participates in whole-body homeostasis, excretion and releases important hormones. Small, solid masses called kidney stones may form when salts or minerals, which are normally found in urine, become solid crystals inside the kidney. These crystals are normally too small to be become aware of, and pass harmlessly out of the body. However, they can build up inside your kidney and form much larger kidney stones. If a stone becomes large enough, it may begin to move out of the kidney and progress through the ureter (a tube that carries urine from the kidney to the bladder). A kidney stone can become stuck at various parts of the ureter or kidney causing pain, infection and occasionally kidney damage. These kidney stones can be in many different shapes and sizes. The peak age for kidney stones is between 20 years old and 50 years old. The risk of having kidney stones in males is three to four times larger than in females. Other diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, chronic diarrhoea, or kidney cysts might increase the risk of having kidney stones as well. If the patient has previously had a kidney stone then he/she will have a 50 percent chance of developing another one within five years. A family history of kidney stones also increases the risk of developing kidney stones (cvstine stones). Kidney stones form when there is a decrease in urine volume and/or an excess of stone-forming substances in the urine. The most common type of kidney stones present contains calcium in combination with either oxalate or phosphate. Other chemical complexes that can form kidney stones in the urinary tract include uric acid and the amino acid cystine. Dehydration from reduced fluid intake, excessive sweating, or strenuous exercise without adequate fluid replacement may lead to the formation of kidney stones. Obstruction to the flow of urine can also lead to kidney stone formation. Kidney stones can also result from infection in the urinary tract; these are known as struvite or infection stones. Ingesting too much sugar, salts, and/or protein may lead to the formation of kidney stones as well. This is due to protein containing amino acids (which includes cystine); fructose is a sugar which some individuals metabolize into oxalate. Many different medical conditions may also lead to the fo rmation of kidney stones. These medical conditions include gout (which results in an increased amount of uric acid in the urine and can lead to the formation of uric acid stones.), Hypercalciuria (too much calcium is absorbed from food and excreted into the urine, where it may form calcium phosphate or calcium oxalate stones.), hyperparathyroidism, cystinuria and hyperoxaluria. Medication may also lead to kidney stone formation. These medications include some diuretics, some chemotherapy medicines for cancer and some medication used to treat HIV and AIDS. The presence of kidney stones may cause the patient to have symptoms of sudden pains in their abdomen, lower back, or/and groin area. Renal colic may occur in severe cases, which is accompanied by nausea and vomiting. Kidney stones also cause blood to be present in urine; this is caused by the kidney stone rubbing with the wall of the ureter. Sometimes symptoms such as frequent urination, difficulty in urinating, and testicular pain may also occur. Fevers and chills may occur as well when the patient has kidney stones as well as an infection in the urinary tract. The diagnosis of kidney stones is suspected by the typical pattern of symptoms when other possible causes of the abdominal or side pains are excluded. Imaging tests are usually done to confirm the diagnosis. There are 2 methods that can be used to detect kidney stones, the helical CT scan (which detects any obstruction in the urinary tract without any contrast material) and the intravenous pyelogram (IVP: an X-ray of the abdomen along with the administration of contrast dye into the bloodstream). Helical CT scans have been shown to be a significantly more effective diagnostic tool than the IVP in the diagnosis of kidney or urinary tract stones. In pregnant women or those who should avoid radiation exposure, an ultrasound examination may be done to help establish the diagnosis. There are many methods of removing a kidney stone. Most kidney stones eventually pass through the urinary tract on their own within 48 hours, with ample fluid intake. Pain medications are used for symptom relief. For kidney stones that do not pass on their own, a procedure called extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy is often used. In this procedure, shock waves are used to break up a large stone into smaller pieces that can then pass through the urinary system. Surgical techniques have also been developed to remove kidney stones when other treatment methods are not successful or helpful. This may be done through a small incision in the skin (percutaneous nephrolithotomy) or through an instrument known as an ureteroscope, which is passed through the urethra and bladder up into the ureter. Rather than having to undergo treatment, it is best to avoid the formation of kidney stones in the first place when possible. It can be especially helpful to drink more water, since low fluid intake and dehydration are the major risk factors for kidney stone formation. Depending on the cause of the kidney stones and an individuals medical history, dietary and lifestyle changes and/or medications are sometimes recommended to decrease the likelihood of developing further kidney stones.

Essay --

R.K. Narayan’s initial works drew inspiration from his own childhood and school days. In his first few books, he tries to introduce Malgudi and its characters to his readers. This had helped in creating a strong base among his readers about the settings of his books. As in seen in his initial four books, starting from ‘Swami And Friends’ to ‘The English Teacher’ , the characters are confined to Malgudi and most of the story takes place in that town. ‘Swami and Friends’, R.K. Narayan’s first book was described by The Guardian,in 2011, as one of the best novels ever written by an Indian author. Undeniably, an average Indian always thinks of ‘Swami and Friends’ and ‘The Guide’ as Narayan’s best work. The novel follows the life and adventures of Swami, a schoolboy in British India. The characters in this book are very typical of an Indian village: a dominating father, a submissive mother, a religious grandmother who mollycoddles her grandchildren, a stern headmaster and of course, the playful Swami. After having been dismissed from Albert Mission School, Swami is made to join Board High School. While his close friends, Rajam and Mani from his previous school decides to form a cricket team called Malgudi Cricket Club (MCC), Swami has little choice but to skip his Drill classes and go for daily evening practice. Problems ensue when he decides to leave Malgudi after being reprimanded by his Headmaster. After a series of dramatic events, Swami misses the much anticipated and much prepared for match, against Young Men’s Union, a team from Chennai, to Rajam’s ire. The novel ends with Rajam leaving for Trichinopoly, while Swami and Mani bids him farewell at the Malgudi Rail way Station. As with a lot of his other novels, Narayan leaves the ... ...is wife to return home, assuming that it was just another tantrum that she throws. Though the novel ends on a negative note in regard to women rights, it makes a successful attempt in at least bringing the issue to the forefront. With ‘The Dark Room’, Narayan tries to bring to the attention of his readers the plight of women at that time. While Savithri’s house is symbolic for the conservative and orthodox customs, practices and beliefs in Malgudi, the dark room in her house where she seeks refuge from her husband’s tantrums represents the space where a woman is separated from the rest of the world. The dark room is just a temporary retreat for women struggling to survive in an old-fashioned world. The author, in all probability gained inspiration for this work from the women’s movement that gained strength in the 1930’s along with the nationalist movement in India.

History and development of Operating Systems Essay

At first, computers lacked any form of operating system. The computer user had sole use of the machine. The user would arrive at the machine armed with his or her program and data, often on punched paper tape. The program would be loaded into the machine, and then the machine set to work, until the program stopped. Later, computers came with libraries of support code which were linked to the user’s program to assist in operations such as input and output. This would become the start of the modern-day operating system. However, these machines still only ran a single job at a time. Originally, each user wrote all of the code necessary to implement a particular application, including the highly detailed machine level input/output instructions. Very quickly, this input/output coding needed to implement basic functions was consolidated into an input/output control system (IOCS). Users wishing to perform input/output operations no longer had to code the instructions directly. Instead, they used IOCS routines to do the real work. This greatly simplified and sped up the coding process. The implementation of input/output control system may have been the beginning of the concept of operating system. Under this system, the user has complete control over all of main storage memory and as a result, this system has been known as the single user contiguous storage allocation system. Storage is divided into a portion holding input/output control system (IOCS) routine, a portion holding the user’s program and an unused portion. The first single-user real storage systems were dedicated to one job for more than the jobs execution time. Job’s generally required a lot of setup time during which the operating system loaded, tapes and disk packs were mounted,  appropriate forms were placed in the printer and time cards been punched in. When the jobs were completed, they required considerable time to teardown, as tapes and disk packs were removed, time cards were punched out etc†¦. During the job setup and job teardown, the computer sat idle. Computer users soon realized that they could cut down the amount of time wasted between the jobs, if they could automate the job-to-job transition. The first major such system, which was considered by many to be the first operating system, was designed by the General Motors Research Laboratories for their IBM 701 mainframe beginning in early 1956 . Its success helped establish batch computing – the groupings of the jobs into a single deck of cards, separated by control cards that instructed computers about the various specification of the job. The programming language that the control cards used was called job control language (JCL). The Era of Timesharing and Multiprogramming 1960s: The systems of the 1960s were also batch processing systems but they were able to take better advantage of the computer resources by running several jobs at once. It was observed by the operating system designers that when one job was waiting for an input/output operation to be completed before the job could continue using the processor, some other could use the idle processor. They realized that running a mixture of diverse jobs appeared to be the best way to optimize computer utilization. The process by which they do so is called multiprogramming. To take maximum advantage of multiprogramming, it is necessary for several jobs to reside in the computers main storage at once. Then, when one job requests input/output, the CPU maybe immediately switched to another, and may do calculations without delay. One of the major developments was timesharing system which enabled many users to share computer resources simultaneously. In timesharing mode, the computer spends a fixed amount of time on one program before proceeding to another. Timesharing systems helped facilitate the software development process significantly. With turnaround time reduced to mere minutes, a  person writing a new program will not have to wait hours or days to correct errors. With timesharing, a programmer could enter a program, compile it, receive a list of syntax errors, correct them immediately and re-execute this cycle until the program is free of syntax errors thereby reducing development time significantly. The personal computer era Early personal computer operating systems were very diverse. Each vendor was producing one or more operating systems specific to their particular hardware. Nearly every operating system could have radically different models of commands, operating procedures, and such facilities as debugging aids. It was the development of microprocessors made inexpensive computing available for the small business and the hobbyist, which in turn led to the widespread use of interchangeable hardware components using a common interconnection (such as the S-100, Apple II, SS-50, ISA and PCI buses), and an increasing need for operating systems to control them. The most important of the early OS’s on these machines was Digital Research’s CP/M-80 for the 8080 / 8085 / Z-80 CPUs. It was based on several Digital Equipment Corporation operating systems, mostly for the PDP-11 architecture. MS-DOS (or PC-DOS when supplied by IBM) was based originally on CP/M-80. Each of these machines had a small boot program in ROM which loaded the OS itself from disk. The BIOS on the IBM-PC class machines was an extension of this idea and has more functions and features in the 20 years since the first IBM-PC was introduced in 1981. The decreasing cost of display equipment and processors made it practical to provide graphical use interfaces for many operating systems, such as the generic X Window, System that is provided with many UNIX systems, or other graphical systems such as Microsoft Window, the Radio Shack Color Computer’s OS-9 Level II, Apple’s Mac OS, or even IBM’s OS/2. The original GUI was developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the early ’70s (the Alto computer system) and imitated by many vendors. The significant types of Operating Systems Microsoft Windows has become the most widely used operating system for personal computers but there have been many others which have made a significant impact upon the development of the personal computer. CP/M : Considered to be the ‘first’ operating system, CP/M was developed by Gary Kildall DOS : A text based operating system developed into MS-DOS by Microsoft to run on IBM machines. MS-DOS (originally QDOS) is alleged by Gary Kildall to be based upon his CP/M operating system which IBM attempted, unsuccessfully, to buy from him, before they asked Bill Gates to create an operating system for their computers. OS/2 : Released by IBM in 1987, OS/2 was perhaps the first real multitasking operating system. It was designed by IBM and the code written at Microsoft. Although OS/2 was expected to outsell and eventually replace MS-DOS, its actual sales figures were very poor perhaps due to an increase in memory costs at the time. LINUX : An open-source operating system developed by Linus Torvalds. Linux was developed originally for use on home PCs but has grown to find homes on PowerPC, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, ARM, and many other computer platforms. Linux offers a number of different Graphical User Interfaces and can be set to look like a Windows or Mac operating system. It has been praised for its stability and speed and is, in a relatively small way, offering an alternative to the Windows operating system for PCs. MAC OS : The Apple operating system developed to run on Macintosh machines. The Mac operating system is unique to Apple computers and yet is the second most widely used after Windows. Macintosh computers have often been favoured by computer users working in graphical design fields. Apple and Microsoft have fought over the available market for operating systems with IBM  machines often considered as mainly Windows machines. Apple have lost out in the past but are regaining customers with their innovative approach to computer design and the perceived reliability of Mac OS when compared to Windows. Windows : Now the predominant operating system for personal computers, Windows offers a Graphical User Interface based upon a ‘desktop’ metaphor. Windows has also enabled applications to perform in a consistent manner which means that menu options look similar from one package to another. The Functions of Operation Systems Operating Systems are the software that makes the hardware usable. Operating Systems makes the Hardware conveniently available to users, by managing the hardware carefully to achieve good performance. You may consider Operating Systems to be managers of resources as it determines which computer resources will be used for solving which problem an the order in which they will be used. The three principal types of functions an operating system has are : Assignment and allocation of system resources such as input/output devices, software, central processing unit. Scheduling : This Function coordinates the job an resources and follows certain giving Priority. Monitoring : This function Monitors and keeps track of the activities in the computer system. It maintains logs of job operation, notifies the computer operators of any abnormal terminations or error conditions. This function also contains security monitoring features such as any authorized attempt to access the system as well as ensures that all the security safeguards are in place. Modern operating systems often provide users and applications with a virtual  machine, an interface to the underlying hardware that makes it appear as though the user is the only user of the machine and it’s hardware. Whether the computer has one CPU or several CPUs, it is usually the case that there are more processes than CPUs. Therefore, the operating system is responsible for scheduling the processes on the CPU. There is a finite amount of memory that must be shared among the processes. The way this is done varies between different operating systems, but a commonly used mechanism is that of virtual memory. Several different processes may be trying to access a single IO device and the operating system must manage these accesses. This is a different issue than processes scheduling since often IO is being performed for processes that are not currently executing. Some devices (e.g. disks) have resources that can be shared among users and/or user processes. The operating system is responsible for managing and protecting these resources. Another important operating system function is providing support services for processes. These include: Support for IO operations. File system management. Networking. Protection. Interrupts and Traps. An interrupt is a CPU event that is triggered by some external device. The OS manages these devices. Each device has a diver which is used to communicate with the OS and the device. A trap is a CPU event that is triggered by a program. Traps are sometimes called software interrupts. They can be  deliberately triggered by a special instruction, or they may be triggered by an illegal instruction or an attempt to access a restricted resource. The reason why OS are so critical The main reasons why operating systems are so critical is by the functions that it performs which i have expalined in the last few pages. It is also so critical as it provides a layer of abstraction between the user and the bare machine. Without an OS, it would be very hard and time consuming to do a lot of the jobs on the computer that we take for granted. The users and applications do not see the hardware directly, but view it through the operating system. It is the operating system that lets us to communicate with the external devices. Conclusion Operating systems influence the way in which we communicate with personal computers. They have been developed to manage new technologies. The development of the PC has seen Microsoft grow to be the largest supplier of operating systems. The need for reliable and easy-to-understand operating systems has prompted development of suitable systems to progress at a very quick pace. It is possible that a greater number of competing operating systems will become available to the consumer in the future although this does mean that users may find it difficult to move from a machine running one operating system to a machine running something quite different. The market for operating systems will continue to grow as the number of devices that can use them increase and it is sure to be a competitive area. Bibliography http://computer.howstuffworks.com/operating-system.htm http://www.osdata.com/kind/history.htm http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs1104/VirtualMachines/OS.1.html http://www.computinghistorymuseum.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system http://vaidila.vdu.lt/~project2/index.htm http://faculty.kutztown.edu/rieksts/343/notes/osdevpt.html

For My Case Analysis, I Will Be Focusing On Some Of The

For my case analysis, I will be focusing on some of the mythical aspects of the Buddha’s life as I believe mythology can be very useful to gaining psychological insight. In the mythical realm, Siddhartha Gautama was named Buddha by Buddha Dipankara, who was also once a Buddha on Earth. This is parallel to the Brahmin who told Siddhartha Gautama’s father that he was to one day become a great ruler or a great sage. I believe this is symbolic of the universal truth, as above so below. What is happening in the esoteric realm in happening in the earthly realm. What is happening in the mind, is happening in reality. Siddhartha grew up peaceful and pampered, as his father made all attempts to keep him from pursuing life as an ascetic. He†¦show more content†¦He sent a messenger back to the palace to tell the King that he had not left out of anger but to seek truth. He rationalized his abandonment of his family by stating that he would have had to part ways with his family eventually, due to the impermanent nature of existence. Siddhartha then joined a hermitage, where he learned both philosophical knowledge and meditation techniques. He soon became equal to his teacher in knowledge and technique. He was unsatisfied. Mastering the knowledge and techniques of this hermitage did not lead him to the state of perfect enlightenment he was seeking. Nevertheless, he persisted. He joined another hermitage. He acquired all the knowledge there had to be gained, only to be met with the same disappointment. He ventured off into the forest, finding a little spot for himself to sit and contemplate. As he was making himself comfortable, he came across a small group of beggars, who asked to be his students. He agreed. He started to practice very difficult yogas and meditations, since nothing else he had learned had worked for him. 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