One of the most exciting things that I have done since I came to college was to start working in a scientific research lab here on campus. What I didn't realize was just how difficult research can be. Aside from the huge amount of background knowledge that is required just to perform elementary lab procedures, there is the huge amount of knowledge required to be able to figure out just what the heck you're supposed to be doing. Even after you know all of that stuff, there's still a lot that can go wrong, and in most cases, it will go wrong.
I work with mouse neurons on a weekly basis, and these cells are extremely picky; they have to be at just the right temperature, pH, and nutrient levels. The most important thing, however, is that everything has to be kept sterile. I have to always be extremely careful whenever I'm working with anything that gets even close to our cultures, or everything will be lost. On several occasions, I spent about 5 hours one day preparing and culturing neurons only to look at my cultures the next day and find that all of the dishes are bright yellow (they should be red-orange, the yellow color indicates bacterial contamination), or to see huge fungal colonies in the middle of the dishes. In either case, I have to bleach my cultures, which not only makes me feel like I wasted two days of work, but I also wasted close to $100 worth of resources as well.
In spite of all this, working in this lab is something that I really like to do, and I'm not likely to give it up any time soon. Here's the link to the lab website:http://www.anatomy.wisc.edu/Dent/index.htm
It needs to be updated, and most of the videos don't work, but it still gives a good idea of what we do.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Success!
Last Wednesday was our first meeting for SPICE this semester. This was our kickoff meeting, which we had to postpone from last week due to our lovely Wisconsin weather. We had a pretty small turnout for a recruitment meeting, but we still had enough people to make it worth all the trouble.
I had gotten to the chem building a little late, and for that reason I spent the next half-hour or so running around trying to get everything together for our mini demo show. After explaining a little bit about what our group does, we wanted to show any new people some of the fun things we get to do, so we put together a short show with some of our favorite demos (most of which involved explosions). Some of my favorites were the nitrogen and ethanol cannons, metal salts in a flame, and hydrogen/helium balloons. Everything went quite well, and no one lit their hands on fire, as was the case during our last training session, where we teach our members how to do our demo shows. I did almost hit someone in the head with a cork when I set off one of the liquid nitrogen cannons (we cork a flask with liquid N2 until the pressure builds up and the cork shoots off), but luckily I didn't wound anyone.
This was also the grand debut of our brand new microwave demos, all of which worked on the first try, which is a rather novel experience for us. These especially gave us a really good response from the prospective new members. I think what makes these demos especially interesting is the fact that this is a normal microwave that everyone has at home, and if you put a toothpick inside, you can create a mini plasma storm (by the way, from what I understand, no one actually knows how or why this works).
After the show, we gave everyone a quick tour of our very messy demo lab (a different part of Jim the demo guy's lab, for anyone who's ever taken a chemistry class), and then fed everybody some freshly made liquid nitrogen ice cream, which is just cream, sugar, and vanilla mixed for a few seconds with liquid N2, and then all the toppings you could ever want. Overall, the few people that came seemed really interested in what our organization does, and with how well things are going, I think this is going to be a really good semester for SPICE.
I had gotten to the chem building a little late, and for that reason I spent the next half-hour or so running around trying to get everything together for our mini demo show. After explaining a little bit about what our group does, we wanted to show any new people some of the fun things we get to do, so we put together a short show with some of our favorite demos (most of which involved explosions). Some of my favorites were the nitrogen and ethanol cannons, metal salts in a flame, and hydrogen/helium balloons. Everything went quite well, and no one lit their hands on fire, as was the case during our last training session, where we teach our members how to do our demo shows. I did almost hit someone in the head with a cork when I set off one of the liquid nitrogen cannons (we cork a flask with liquid N2 until the pressure builds up and the cork shoots off), but luckily I didn't wound anyone.
This was also the grand debut of our brand new microwave demos, all of which worked on the first try, which is a rather novel experience for us. These especially gave us a really good response from the prospective new members. I think what makes these demos especially interesting is the fact that this is a normal microwave that everyone has at home, and if you put a toothpick inside, you can create a mini plasma storm (by the way, from what I understand, no one actually knows how or why this works).
After the show, we gave everyone a quick tour of our very messy demo lab (a different part of Jim the demo guy's lab, for anyone who's ever taken a chemistry class), and then fed everybody some freshly made liquid nitrogen ice cream, which is just cream, sugar, and vanilla mixed for a few seconds with liquid N2, and then all the toppings you could ever want. Overall, the few people that came seemed really interested in what our organization does, and with how well things are going, I think this is going to be a really good semester for SPICE.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Microwave + Toothpicks = Fun
Have you ever been bored sitting at home, saw your microwave sitting all by itself, and decided "Hey, I'm gonna put a light bulb in there and see what happens...?" This is essentially the kind of thing that I did this saturday afternoon. I'm in an organization on campus called SPICE (Students Participating in Chemical Education). In this organization, we perform chemical demonstrations for elementary and middle school aged kids at various schools and locations around Madison. The idea is to get those kids interested in learning and science, but for those of us in the organization, its just plain fun.
We're always looking for new demos to show kids, and recently, one of our members heard about lots of things that we can do with your everyday microwave and other various household items. All saturday, we tried out lots of different experiments to see how well they would fit in with our other demo shows (we always try to have scientific themes: solid/liquid/gas phases, polymers, gas expansion, etc.). I was really surprised at just how many sites there are on the internet that are dedicated to this specific topic (here is just one example: http://www.everist.org/special/mw_oven/). The only problem is, most of the sites just tell you how to do them, and don't give any explanation of why the experiment works, and now I'm going to be spending a good amount of time doing research on how these things work.
Here's a list of a few things that we put in the microwave:
I know it's kind of cliche, but I feel obligated to say that you probably shouldn't do this at home, kids. Knowing that you probably will, please be careful, and I am not responsible for any fires, explosions, power surges, injuries (mental or physical), or anything else related to anyone doing these experiments at home.
With that said: have fun!
We're always looking for new demos to show kids, and recently, one of our members heard about lots of things that we can do with your everyday microwave and other various household items. All saturday, we tried out lots of different experiments to see how well they would fit in with our other demo shows (we always try to have scientific themes: solid/liquid/gas phases, polymers, gas expansion, etc.). I was really surprised at just how many sites there are on the internet that are dedicated to this specific topic (here is just one example: http://www.everist.org/special/mw_oven/). The only problem is, most of the sites just tell you how to do them, and don't give any explanation of why the experiment works, and now I'm going to be spending a good amount of time doing research on how these things work.
Here's a list of a few things that we put in the microwave:
- Lightbulb - Apparently, if you put an average incandesent lightbulb (we used a 75 W bulb) in the microwave, it will light up. It uses the microwaves as energy in a similar fashion to when you screw it into a socket. What's even cooler is when you put it at the edge of the turntable, the bulb will flash in different colors and brightnesses due to the power variations of various regions in the microwave. However, you do need to put the bulb in water because it gets very hot.
- CD - A CD is composed of several layers of material which contain metals, and when its exposed to microwaves, the different layers cause energy to arc across in a patterned fashion, which makes it look like lightning. The big problem with this is that it gives off quite a strong odor, which I'm told is vaporized metal and possibly arsenic. This is one of the things we need to work on a bit before we put it in a show.
- Soap - If you take your typical bar of soap and put it in the microwave for about 3 minutes, it will grow and expand to about 4x its normal size. We figure this one is just based on gas expansion: the microwave causes any water in the soap to boil, create water vapor, and the soap traps the vapor in bubbles. All science aside, this one is just kinda cool to watch.
- Toothpicks - This is by far my favorite. We took a toothpick and stood it upright in a cork in the microwave. When we lit the tip of the toothpick and started the microwave, it started shooting out fireballs. It was a little scary too, because when it shoots out the fireballs, there is a strange electrical noise that sounds like it might be power fluctuations. We don't quite know how this one works yet, but its still the coolest one I've seen.
I know it's kind of cliche, but I feel obligated to say that you probably shouldn't do this at home, kids. Knowing that you probably will, please be careful, and I am not responsible for any fires, explosions, power surges, injuries (mental or physical), or anything else related to anyone doing these experiments at home.
With that said: have fun!
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Yay Brains!
Hello and welcome to the inside of Boltzmann's Brain! My name is Chris and I am a student at UW-Madison studying Biochemistry. I am heavily involved in neuro-anatomy research in a lab on campus and science education through demonstrations, and I really enjoy sharing my experiences in these areas. After all, who doesn't like hearing about brains and flashy explosions?
First, a little explanation of my blog's title:
The Boltzmann Brain Paradox refers to the second law of thermodynamics: that entropy (disorder) in the universe will always increase. Ludwig Boltzmann noticed that in our universe, there is an unexpectedly high level of organization for this law to be true. Similarly, if our level of organization in the universe, which contains many self-aware entities, is the result of random chance and fluctuation in entropy, then it would be much more likely that the universe would be able to create single self-aware entities, since this would require much less organization. Based on this reasoning, for every organized universe we see, there should be numerous self-aware brains floating around in unorganized environments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann%27s_brain).
This was something that a friend of mine told me about recently and I found it really interesting. The concept is something that I enjoy pondering about, but it really has nothing to do with what I'm going to be writing about in this blog - other that the fact that I work in a neuro-anatomy lab where I dissect brains. (In fact, I spent 2 or 3 hours out of my Sunday afternoon dissecting around 15 brains or so... my eyes hurt.)
In the future, I will write all about the fun things that I'm doing in the lab that I work in, as well as the cool chemistry demonstrations that I help perform for elementary and middle school students around Madison to get them excited about science education. Until then, I'm going to go rest my brain for a while, and maybe feed my stomach too.
First, a little explanation of my blog's title:
The Boltzmann Brain Paradox refers to the second law of thermodynamics: that entropy (disorder) in the universe will always increase. Ludwig Boltzmann noticed that in our universe, there is an unexpectedly high level of organization for this law to be true. Similarly, if our level of organization in the universe, which contains many self-aware entities, is the result of random chance and fluctuation in entropy, then it would be much more likely that the universe would be able to create single self-aware entities, since this would require much less organization. Based on this reasoning, for every organized universe we see, there should be numerous self-aware brains floating around in unorganized environments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann%27s_brain).
This was something that a friend of mine told me about recently and I found it really interesting. The concept is something that I enjoy pondering about, but it really has nothing to do with what I'm going to be writing about in this blog - other that the fact that I work in a neuro-anatomy lab where I dissect brains. (In fact, I spent 2 or 3 hours out of my Sunday afternoon dissecting around 15 brains or so... my eyes hurt.)
In the future, I will write all about the fun things that I'm doing in the lab that I work in, as well as the cool chemistry demonstrations that I help perform for elementary and middle school students around Madison to get them excited about science education. Until then, I'm going to go rest my brain for a while, and maybe feed my stomach too.
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