Caltech

The ABCs of Caltech: Part IV

Jorgenson Laboratory: One of the newest buildings on campus, this lab

Kerchoff Library: This library is located on the second floor of Kerchkoff building and houses an extensive collection of chemistry and biology textbooks. The room is often used for very distinguished and important events, like my lab's Halloween party during which a grad student dressed up as a .. chicken. The light fixtures contain DNA helix designs, and the walls of the library are lined with portraits of donors.

Linde Center:

So Begins Week Two

Hi again!

Today (may or may not be true depending on when this ends up being posted) starts my second week of SURF at Caltech. I'm working in Maria Spiropulu's lab, with Javier Duarte as my co-mentor. Everyone in my lab is cooler than me. (Anyway, they all know what they are doing more than I do...which is really not that suprising). This is a pretty common phenomenon for freshman SURFs. Expect to learn a lot. 

Right now I'm waiting for the cluster we use to be rebooted so I can submit a job. I'm trying to use the cluster to simulate collision events between protons, which I want to result in the creation of dark matter coupled to squarks as mediators.

I spent the weekend in San Diego with some friends; we went to the house of one of our friends and ate the delicious food her parents gave us. It was lovely. For three glorious days, my dreams of good food came true. 

Thought, to be honest, Caltech food is really not that bad. For a dorm, it's nothing to complain about at all. Chandler is pretty good, and dinner is decent. It's just that sometimes I get tired of eating the same thing over and over...which makes it actually really nice that Caltech doesn't have a meal plan on the weekends.

We spent some time going about Balboa park and looking at the museums. We went to the free ones, and to the Museum of Man. Just walking around the park was really pretty:

 

 

The Museum of Man attempted to talk about human civilization in around five exhibits--a bit of an undertaking, in my opinion. Nevertheless, they had some interesting exhibits. There was an exhibit on beer which was actually very interesting (apparently beer was more like fermented oatmeal in Egypt, and people were paid in beer or something????) 

We tried to go into the Japanese Friendship Garden, but it was under construction. 

Afterwards, we went to the beach and saw a herd (????) of seals. Seals are ridiculous. They look like huge inflated slugs without the disgustingness just lumping around, and when they move they look like they're trying to role, but are too fat, so just have to lump there.

However, almost as importantly, I discovered something wonderful--my friend has too incredibly fluffly kitties!!! DA FLUFF!!!!!!!

JPL Machine Shop Tour + moar cuteness!

Yesterday I managed to miss a meeting due to a tour running over time (I am an independent entity from Caltech; the actions and viewpoints expressed herewithin do not in any way reflect Caltech's recommendations towards conduct in the workplace.) but boy was it worth it! Even though I've never thought about being a mechanical engineer, taking a tour of the very machine shops where parts for the space shuttles and the Deep Space Network were built is an incredible experience that could very well change anybody's heart!

Well, that's the inside of the fabrication lab, along with one very excited mechanical engineer/friend! The machines are apparently far far bigger than the ones at Caltech, and much cleaner too. Since Caltech and JPL are so close, a lot of interns come to JPL to work over the summer, and judging from my friend's reaction the mechanical engineers are somewhere between ecstatic and believing they've ascended to a higher plane of existence.

We got to look at some really cool things, including a water jet in action (they cut a solid chunk of Aluminum (I think) in a perfect circle for us!), lasers galore of course, and a lot of computer controlled systems that did everything perfectly. There were so many machines for all sorts of tasks (though not a lot of redundancy between the machines; it's not a very big lab after all) and our guide (one of the engineers) boasted they get many of the single parts from design to finishing cutting in under an hour. He was super-excited to show us all the things that they do, and I think it's a sort of excitement that feels very homely coming from Caltech, where everybody is also quite open about their excitement in their work.

That's one of the great things about coming to institutions of higher acheivement; everybody loves and excels in their work, and it's very easy to learn a lot about fields routinely. There are talks/colloquia at Caltech/JPL alike, and they're all so awesome because of the passion in the air. Not all of them can be TED quality (though I would argue quite a few professors come close, at least in physics at Caltech), but they're all very cutting edge and novel work.

Update also on the deer: they're back, and they brought a whole family this time!!

Having company is always such a joyous thing to have, I can't help but share!

I've been falling behind a bit on my French learning; this week I'd been watching Pokemon movies/episodes in French (they're easy to understand and require little attention, so I watch while cooking) but I intend to watch a real French movie this weekend (Amelie), so hopefully that will go through! I've also been spending some amount of time just reading random things in Chinese, so that's going pretty well. I'm a bit behind schedule on GRE studying as well as self-learning physics, but I'm starting to pick that back up again.

The thing that is difficult with time management with a real job/internship (as opposed to one at Caltech where hours are on average more flexible) is that one leaves early and returns late. With my current sleep schedule (ideal sleep schedule more so, these past few days have been hard to keep up) I get 7-10 to make dinner/lunch, do whatever, shower and sleep. At the end of a long day, it's very hard to be productive already, and put that on top of an absurdly short time frame and suddenly I get next to nothing of my own done on the weekdays. I've been trying to incorporate alternative productivity into my workday at JPL, such that instead of surfing websites during my breaktimes I do other things that are more productive/justifiable, but this has yet to be come a habit.

Fugu Fish Friday

Happy Fugu Fish Friday!

 

Modified from http://www.factzoo.com/sites/all/img/fish/fugu.jpg

Quick Fugu Facts:

 

• The Fugu Genome Project was finished after the Human Genome Project, but was still only the second project to sequence a vertebrate genome and release it to the public.
• The genome of Takifugu rubripes, one species of fugu fish, is available here.
• The project was facilitated by the fact that the fugu genome is about 1/10 the size of the human genome. (Source)
• People eat fugu fish, even though the fish contain tetrodotoxin, which can cause a morbid and horrible death if the fish has not been properly prepared.
• Current research indicates the presence of tetrodotoxin in the fugu fish may be a result of biomagnification. Bacteria producing the toxin may be below fugu fish in the food chain.
• Fugu fish are, unsurprisingly, bad swimmers. They aren't exactly hydrodynamic.
• Instead of fleeing from predators, they puff up to scare them away. This behavior is why fugu fish are also called pufferfish or blowfish.

Today I practiced setting up agarose gel and running gel electrophoresis, but I promised in my last post that I would say a few words about setting up an embryo culture this time.

Why it's important:

        It's hard to study the development of sea urchin embryos without sea urchin embryos.

How you do it:

1. Get a hold of a male urchin and a female sea urchin. (Sound familiar?) This is tough for two reasons. First, sea urchins are very good at holding on to the side of an aquarium tank. Second, there is no way to tell the determine sex by looking at the animals. The only way to tell is by looking at the gametes. Sea urchin eggs are yellow and the sperm is white. How do you get the gametes?
2. Shake the sea urchin in your hand like you are trying to explode a can of soda. The stress induces the sea urchin to release the sperm or eggs. We collect the eggs in a beaker and use a pipette to collect the sperm.
3. Mix the eggs and sperm in some filtered sea water. Too much sperm can lead to polyspermy, not enough sperm leads to low fertilization rates. Too many embryos in too little sea water delays or distorts development.
4. Make the embryos happy. There's a motor-powered spinner we put in the water to simulate ocean waves.
5. Wait until the desired timepoint.

Oh, and sea urchins develop well at 15 °C, which means that rooms with animals or embryos tend to be much cooler than it is outside the lab in sunny Pasadena.

Here's one more fugu fish for luck!

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Puffer_Fish_DSC01257.JPG

I Vouch For: The Prettiest Location on Campus

Hey everyone!

Today I will briefly talk about one of the most beautiful buildings on our rather pretty campus. (Yes, it's so gorgeous and fantastic that it deserves its own blog entry, so here we go.)

One of the labs I work in is located in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) on the west side of campus. The JCAP building is this airy structure whose architects certainly knew what they were doing with glass windows... The building itself was recently renovated, and the space is extremely comfortable--not to mention classy. This is the lobby: 

 

 

 

 

 

The actual labs themselves have an open, spacious feel:

 

 

 

 

 

And all of the glassware and the countertops are so clean and shiny!

 

 

 

 

 

 Essentially, artificial photosynthesis takes power from the sun and uses it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen can be used as an energy-dense form of fuel, and oxygen is vital to life.

As you can probably tell from the name, JCAP is a hub for solar energy.The labs inside study all different aspects of artificial photosynthesis. These include:

• Light Reactions (we are talking about the sun after all)
• Heterogeneous Catalysis and Molecular Catalysis (because catalysts make the hydrogen evolution reaction go at a pace that is industrially viable)
• Surface Chemistry
• Substrate and Catalyst Interactions

With the impending expenditure of fossil fuels, scientists all over the world are busy trying to find new sources of energy, and solar is getting hotter and hotter as a field. When I was younger, I wanted to study environmental science until I realized that if I did that, I could only find problems, and if I became an engineer instead, I could actually solve problems. But of course, what did I really know until I started researching in a lab? Then I realized that 1) science is ridiculously expensive. (Never thought of how much it costs to run an electrochemical reaction; you have to buy the glass containers, the electrodes and wiring, the solution in which you run the reaction, the gas you bubble through it, the reagents you use to make whatever you're testing; and you have to pay for the current you send through the electrodes and the instruments you use to measure your data like voltmeters and ammeters!)

And 2) it's so cool to be practicing actual science and making reactions go and being surrounded by super smart and friendly people who know so much about the same subject I care about but can tell me about different aspects of it that I'm not as familiar with!

Working on solar energy in JCAP this summer feels like my reward for studying diligently for 13 years of my life. During the school year at Caltech, the sets are hard and life is tough. But I think this summer is a little taste of why it will all be worth it!

Till next time,

Anita

First Day of SURF!

SURF’s started!

My first thought is that Caltech is a really nice place once the work and stress are removed. What work, you might say? I mean the problem sets.

We’re playing the hosts at this game for once. Ever since we were prefrosh, even after we were rotated and became frosh, the class of 2017 was the youngest and therefore the newest at Caltech. Now, finally, we are the ones showing others around. In just one day I’ve met Harvey Mudd students and students from Iceland and Estonia, as well as improved my acquaintance with some other Techers. I’m estimating the number of guest summer students in Ruddock house to be somewhere in the teens… Even though many Techers have gone home or to other places for the summer, it’s so great to see all the new faces and hear all of the stories.

I’m working in the lab of Professor Nate Lewis in artificial photosynthesis this summer. Today, since it was the first official day, we went through a lot of safety training--first through the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division at Caltech, and then another for the Lewis group. During lunch, I attended a CNS (computational and neural systems) seminar on the functions of certain neurons in the retina. The speaker, Professor Meister, is experimenting with how neurons in a mouse brain work for subconscious visual signals, and answering questions such as What causes mice to run away from a black spot in the periphery of their vision? Did the neuron that gives the escape signal to the mice evolve for protection against birds of prey flying 14 feet above the animal?

For the rest of the day, my mentor gave his other summer student Ryan and me tours throughout the labs we’ll be working in and safety-trained us in glasswork. We learned how to cut glass tubes and how to heat them in an oxygen flame in order to round out the broken edges or seal the tube closed. It will be a useful skill for electrode-making in our projects later this summer.

I returned home around 5 pm. After cooking a good dinner and relaxing a little, it’s time for bed. During the summer, we have a lot more time on our hands, but going to work or the lab is more exhausting than sitting in class, so it’s not actually too much extra time. Still, I can see that it’ll be a great 10 weeks!

Till next time,

Anita

The Reason the Anime Content is Rising by 150%

If you recognized photo number 5 from the previous post, you've probably figured it out already. If you haven't -- I'm cosplaying for Anime Expo again! And I've actually remembered to take photos of the progress this time! Also, the cosplay group has expanded to an impressive 8ish people. I hope everyone finishes their costumes on time, haha...

 

We will be cosplaying characters from Kill la Kill. If you've been following this blog for a while, you might've remembered me rambling about this show about a year ago, before it aired. Random thoughts on Kill la Kill:

- Kill la Kill is... kind of a controversial anime. I'm sure you're all here to read about Caltech life, not some CS major's attempted literary analysis of Japanese cartoons in the context of Western feminism, so I'll spare you the walls of text for now. (tl;dr: because this show is so crass and outrageous, you'll interpret this anime to be either really offensive or really progressive, with basically no room for middle ground.)

- In terms of writing, Kill la Kill is pretty weak, with pacing being its most glaring problem (too many ideas, not enough time). On the upside, this show has massive amounts of charm and personality, possibly the most I've seen in any anime I've watched.

- It's interesting that the vast majority of the humor in this show that us foreigners categorizes as "lol so random" actually have really heavy bases on Japanese culture -- this show is literally conceived on a bunch of puns, there's at least one entire episode dedicated to making fun of the stereotypes of various Japanese provinces, and the whole show is filled to the brim with references to old anime and Japanese TV shows... It's anime like this that really makes me wish that I know more about Japanese culture (good thing Caltech offers Japanese language classes!)

-The reason I'm so attached to Kill la Kill is less about the actual show itself, but the effects this show had on my life. A lot of us in the cosplay group wouldn't have been friends if not for this anime. We'd just lived out our separate lives, only vaguely aware of each other's existence... This whole thing started out with me watching Kill la Kill alone in the ASCIT Screening Room*. And somehow, by the end of the show, the screening room was packed with 15+ people from all classes, all waiting eagerly for the finale. It's kind of fitting, really, because the relationships between people is one of the main themes of this show.

 

... I was hoping to talk about cosplay making in this post, but it's already gotten too long. Darn. Next time, more photos, fewer words!

 

*The ASCIT Screening Room is a room fitted for movie-watching that's freely available for student use. It has a projector, screen, a nice sound system, and some soft comfy couches. It also holds a buch of good memories left from the weekly showings of the newest Kill la Kill episode I ended up hosting.

(50) It's been how long? Part 1

Hello, readers! I’m back! My name is Lekha, a rising senior here at Caltech. I blogged in my freshman year for Undergraduate Admissions, and I decided to come back for one last round of blogging. Some general facts about me: I am an Applied and Computational Mathematics (ACM) major and live in Avery House, a (very) fine house. In my spare time I enjoy reading, listening to music, playing the violin, learning something new like viola and French, going to the gym, making bad jokes and puns, and following sports (American football, tennis, and, more recently, fútbol).

The first two blog posts are to recap the rest of the world on my life since the end of my freshman year. So, first, sophomore year.

Sophomore year:

Academics: Like my peers, I started on option-related classes (ACM95 and ACM11) and finished Caltech’s core program! As part of the Class of 2015, I took 5 terms of mathematics and physics, each, so I had my first (and, sadly, last) foray into quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. I never thought I would have enjoyed physics, considering my little exposure to the subject in high school. I especially enjoyed the mathematics behind the physics because of the use of pretty abstract ideas in mathematics in a physical realm. My hardest class was Introduction to Number Theory (Ma7/107) because, out of a class of ten, I was the only student who attended class. I seriously enjoyed the class because it taught me not only about number theory, of which I had no prior knowledge, but also, as much as I love the collaboration possible at Caltech, how to work hard by myself. I worked closely with the TA to understand concepts because I had control of the classroom, which is difficult when you feel outnumbered. I finally took my menu class, a requirement unique to Caltech’s core program where students take a class in a field outside their options. My menu class (geology) was one of the most fun classes I had at Caltech because I had the chance to explore the geographic wonders of California through an intellectually refreshing class (with a fun field trip...my first since junior year of high school) and look at my home state in a completely different way after learning about different rocks, tectonic plates, and more.

Research: Having no idea what to do for summer research in ACM, I went back to the Announcements of Opportunity page of the Student-Faculty Programs website and surfed (pun intended) for a new research opportunity. I picked research in economics/neuroscience (called neuroeconomics) with Professor Antonio Rangel. I started working for Professor Rangel in spring term, and I am affiliated with the lab ever since.  Neuroeconomics is an extremely fascinating field, where, by combining concepts of the social sciences (economics, psychology) with those of the “natural” sciences (biology and physics) and the computational sciences (computer science techniques and statistics), we can make so many conclusions about human behavior, from how our genetics could influence our betting behaviors to what habits and behaviors develop from learning or are innate. I never thought that, as a Caltech student, I would find myself in something so interdisciplinary, but I find that very aspect of my research the reason I stay drawn to it. I loved the research so much that I want to pursue it (or a variant of it) in graduate school. My research was a statistics project on combining results of various fMRI studies to understand the common regions of the brain involved in decision-making. I had my frustrations with the research, from reading so many papers to seemingly endless Google Scholar searches for data and definitions, but I found purpose in my research. The applications of my research are vast, from understanding the neurobiology of addiction to solving the nationwide “battle of the bulge” (obesity, but there actually was one).

Clubs and miscellanea: From my first summer job as a teaching assistant in a summer school a few summers ago, I realized that I love teaching, so I joined the Caltech Y’s RISE program to tutor middle- and high-school students in mathematics. Tutoring allowed me to direct my abilities towards others for a couple of hours each week and focus on helping a student reach a solid understanding of concepts in mathematics, or the same satisfaction which motivates me in my study of ACM. Outside of tutoring my music days continued through the Caltech-Occidental Symphony Orchestra and Caltech’s chamber groups as a violinist and violist, respectively. I worked with admissions throughout the year by helping coordinate Prefrosh Weekend and Caltech In A Day for admitted students, earning a few extra dollars to pay for books and having the chance to meet amazing people along the way. In Avery I lived in a single room, having a quiet and clean space to read, do yoga, and practice the violin and viola.

Stay tuned for what happened during junior year!

In which I pretend to be interesting (Introduction)

Hi!

This is introductions, when I pretend to be interesting despite being actually a boring person. 

My name is Nikita; I'm a freshman (rising sophomore) physics major in Ruddock house (that sentence bascially sums up my identity as far as anyone at Caltech is concerned. :-D)

What that means--there must always be seniors and frosh. Seniors become ghosts after ditch day so then the rising seniors become risen seniors. After commencement, rising juniors become juniors. So over the summer there are seniors, juniors, frosh, and prefrosh. Once the prefrosh rotate into a house, they become frosh, and the old frosh (rising sophomores) become sophomores. So I'm a freshman right now. 

Physics major is pretty self-explanatory. There was a form we had to fill out. I really really like physics. There was this box next to physics that I bubbled in, with a bunch of other anxious freshman convinced we were all about to fail out of Caltech soon. This is my first week doing research here (SURF)...but more on that later.

I am a member of Ruddock house, one of the 8 undergraduate houses here at Caltech. We are a very fine house; that's all I can say for now.

I decided to write admissions blogs this summer because I'm somewhat workaholic-y, I enjoy writing but don't get to do as much of it here as I used to, and admissions blogs were one of the things that got me interested in Caltech. Keeping this first post short and simple (hopefully???) since it's an introduction...but next time probably longer and pictures, depending on how lazy I am (I'm supposed to be workaholic-y, so maybe this whole blog is just a lie and I just keep making stuff up??? Maybe I'm secretly an MIT student). 

Sorry if I'm kind of a wierdo.

Nikita

Nice to meet you!

My name is Ariel. My favorite color is glow-in-the-dark (don't tell me it's not a color). I like zombie apocalypse fiction and postmodern poetry. I like my water cold from a Brita filter in the fridge and I take my tea-drinking seriously.

I'm also a sophomore biology major at Caltech.

I am a week into the ten-week SURF program, which allows me to research in Professor Davidson's sea urchin laboratory, which uses purple sea urchins as a model organism to study developmental biology. So far, doing a SURF is almost as exhausting as a term at Caltech, except when I leave lab in the evening, I don't have any homework. I also have weekends free. Oh, and there aren't any early morning classes.

There'll be plenty of time to talk about my adventures and misadventures in lab, but I'll start with some of the nonacademic parts of my summer first.

Over the weekend, I finally had time to start watching Breaking Bad. Between problem sets and classes, I'm too focused on getting enough sleep to watch any TV during the school year. (I'm much more likely to be found with a book.)

Speaking of books, I'm also reading Digger, which is a fantastic graphic novel about a wombat. It was written originally as a webcomic, and is luckily available legally, free, and in full on the author's website. I have a lot of friend at Caltech who follow webcomics with an impressive regularity. XKCD, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and Questionable Content are popular choices. I read Cyanide and Happiness regularly myself, but that's only because the latest comics pop up in my newsfeed whenever I check my Facebook.

The webcomic Digger is available here: http://diggercomic.com/

Digger isn't the last graphic novel I'll be reading this summer, but most of my reading consists of papers on gene regulatory networks (GRNs) for my research. Sea urchins all the way!

Now, we can end with some eye candy.

This is a purple sea urchin alongside a glamorous close-up.

From http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/files/2012/12/Sea_urchin.jpg

 

This is a sea urchin being eaten by a snapper.

From http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/179/cache/sea-urchins03-sea-urchin-snapper_17930_600x450.jpg

I do not eat sea urchins, but some people do.

From http://www.belly.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/dave03.jpg

 It was nice meeting you! If you want to hear about starting a culture of sea urchin embryos, you should check out my next blog post later this week!