Time for summer research

A whole weekend of summer vacation? Sweet!…. Seriously though, I already start work tomorrow? I feel like I just got out of my last final.

My summer research project is in a chemistry lab at Caltech. The project is to build a novel chemical reactor that can take samples of a solution in real-time to study time-dependent species of a reaction. To do this, we have constructed an acoustic levitation chamber to float micro-droplets of our sample. The floating drops are subjected to a pulsed electric field which ionizes them, creating tiny charged progeny droplets that a mass spectrometer can detect. Imagine the most futuristic piece of equipment for the kind of chemistry done in sci-fi movies and that’s what we are building.

Its gonna be a good summer.

Was it worth it?

Doing research can be insanely frustrating and undergraduate research is no exception.  Our lack of a complete formal education and hefty course load makes undertaking a research project that much harder. I know I have struggled with dedicating 10 or more hours a week to a project  only to come to the realization that the amount of labor necessary to truly get something significant done in the lab is nothing short of a 60 hour work week riddled with all nighters.

So, was it worth it? Did I make the right choice in starting my research career early? I think so.

Because of my undergraduate research experience, I am leagues ahead of my peers and well on my way to having a successful career in research. I know how to take a critical look at the problem at hand, devise my strategy of attack, and use all the resources at my disposal to tackle that problem head on. I may not always be successful, but at least I went for the ride and learned a ton along the way. Failure is not a lack of success, it is a lack of effort.

Epic Fail

Since last summer I have been obsessed with building my own parametric array speaker: a highly directional loudspeaker in which sound can only be heard in the path of the acoustic beam (see holosonics.com for an example of this).

After months of circuit designing, hunting down the right parts, assembling and testing my prototype I had finally accomplished my goal: a somewhat functional parametric array speaker. I have never been more proud of anything I’ve built.

I decided to enter my prototype in the New Venture Competition expecting the blow away the judges with this new and very marketable technology… This is where everything went wrong. 15 minutes before the competition began one of my function generators decided to completely stop working. I bolted across campus to Broida Hall desperately asking around for another. Apparently people aren’t very willing to part with $5000 plus equipment. By the time I finally got a function generator  the competition was already starting and it was too late to install it. Needless to say, our team looked foolish telling people that my prototype (aka the pile of wires, IC’s, and other hardware) actually does work and it just won’t work right now.

We did not make it to the next round… Epic Fail

Mole-pocalypse

Don’t ask me how I came across this paper…

Apparently blind mole rats can use the  geomagnetic  forces from the earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves in their completely dark underground environment. The study involved taking 30 or so mole rats and putting them in  a giant man-made maze with an even bigger magnet surrounding them to simulate a shifted magnetic field. The scientists were successful in thoroughly confusing the moles rats when they shifted the magnetic field (1).

The real question is what are all the blind mole rats in the world going to do when the earth’s north and south poles flip as they are predicted to do every 300,000 years (2). What will happen to  all the earth’s blind mole rats when they think south is north and lose their bearings on which direction their house is and their blind mole rat wives get pissed off that they haven’t come home? What will happen to our fragile eco-system when this inevitable mole-pocalypse occurs? Move over global warming, we’ve got bigger things to worry about.

 

1.  Kimchi, T; Etienne, A; Terkel, J; A subterranean mammal uses the magnetic compass for path integration. PNAS 2003

2. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/29dec_magneticfield/

Lab Gremlin

There is a gremlin in our lab. Every time I start a process that takes more than one day to complete, something goes horribly wrong over night.

The most recent disaster happened when I put some samples in the water bath to incubate at a 55 degrees for 5 days. When I came back, somebody, or some thing, had placed a piece of Styrofoam underneath my samples, successfully lifting them out of the water they were supposed to be in. This ruined the entire experiment because instead of sitting at 55 degrees, the samples were at room temperature the whole time. There goes 5 days of progress.

The only logical explanation for such debauchery is a lab gremlin. Probably looks something like this:

http://www.janbrett.com/mobile_troll.htm