The long days have begun

These past couple of days I have arrived at school at 7am and well it's a bit exhausting especially since I end up leaving like around 5 pm. From 7am-10am or 11am I'm in the lab after that I have classes until 1pm and after that I was in the lab 'till 5pm which is a pretty vast amount of time but it has its up sides. I have a somewhat good amount of my poster finished which is a good thing because those are a pain in the butt to do, not because they're hard but extremely time consuming. Since I was the first one to start my poster and had it saved on dropbox Matt and Josh told all the interns to use mine as the template which is totally find but now everyone's poster looks somewhat to mine, since they're all related :). Tomorrow I will be searching for a new template so that there won't be a resemblance with everyone else's, lets just hope I find one otherwise it would just look funny with everyone having the same poster.

On Wednesday I spent working in robotics, fixing some of the errors that the robot had encountered, since many of people there find themselves disagreeing with one another which is fine because that is process, the only problem was that things weren't getting done. I basically took the whole top part of the robot apart and build a newer version of it which I tried to make as symmetrical as possible, while also trying not to cut any pieces so it could be easily repaired or adjusted. Today since the robotics people were meeting up I showed them what I had done, at first they seemed a bit upset that I took it a part, but they soon came to realize that it was needed, since I wasn't there today to help them they worked on it themselves and I must admit they're off on a good path. Now that we had some ideas exchanged I now know what they want to do with the robot, before everything was done in a manner were only certain people knew what to do so it was hard for others to work on the robot without someone being there.

Anyways it's interesting to see how people interact with each other. I can always help as well if they need me :)

Weird week

   This week has been pretty weird for me because of everything I have going on like my project and school work. Today I worked on the bacterial cultures I have incubated a while back and it held good results except for some unfortunate few that were contaminated but I was still able to get data from the remaining ones. Basically what I did was count every single CFU's (Colony Forming Units) present on each individual dish meaning every dot on the dish was counted. The control plates that I had were the most contaminated of all the majority of them were contaminated but for the ones that were not contaminated I counted the CFU's and took the average of all the controls which theoretically should all have the same samples.

 




I also tested out this experiment for a lab that was meant to test out the levels of oxygen ppm, Nitrogen, and phosphate. At first the experiment seemed somewhat difficult but after I got started it was fairly easy. I was also timing myself to see how long it should take for someone to do it and it took me roughly 55 minutes but I also had multiple water sources to test out: tap water, DI water, and Papago water. It held some interesting results, At first I thought I had messed up somewhere but then I realized that everything was done properly so the results of oxygen was 0 ppm for all water sources, nitrogen was also at zero, the only one that gave me results was phosphate which Papago water was rated at 2 and both DI water and tap water were rated at 1.   

The Difficult Part

So now comes the hard part after 2 weeks it's time to get samples from my test tubes and try to identify the different species of algae. Based on observation alone it seems that the treatments with Sodium Phosphate added to it has the most growth and the weird thing is that tube #1 has the most growth which is expected but tube #2,3 had growth around the same as the control and tube #4 has the second highest amount of growth. Tube #1 had 1ml of a certain nutrient + 100μl of Sodium Phosphate and tube #4 had 25μl + 100μl of sodium phosphate. The nutrient Sodium Phosphate was added to the second set 100μl in each of the test tubes except for the control which is just plain Papago water which should have some nutrients in it. below are the tubes numbered 1-6 left to right.

When taking samples and putting it under the microscope I found that it was extremely difficult to identify all of the species so what I did was take picture with one of the microscope cameras which is somewhat better because I'm able to come back to the picture and see if my observations are the same as Matts. I did however see a pattern within the different sets mainly the one where tubes #1 and 4 had the most growth even though I expected #1 to have the most growth. Below are some of the many picture I took.