Orbitals & Artichokes

Sciencing!

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:10:12 -0500

It is official, our new lab is up and running. It is so exciting. Granted, we have been in the space for over a month now, but recently we got our freezer and refrigerator. This may seem minor to any ordinary individual, but for a lab, it’s a REAL BIG DEAL! Go ahead and make fun of me for being so nerdy but it feels so good to finally be back in action instead of sitting at my computer all day dealing with administrative stuff.

One of the best things about starting our very own new lab is that I get to organize everything from the beginning. If you know me at all then you know that sometimes I have a little bit of OCD when it comes to cleanliness and organization (thanks mom!). Even though outsiders may find this annoying it does make things in the long run a lot easier. For example, when I set up my reactions:

This is a 384 well PCR plate. Trust me, you get dizzy quickly when loading these guys, but I have to admire the efficiency of it all. So naturally I color code it so that I can set up my reaction seamlessly. Beautiful right?!?!

Well thats all for today, just wanted to share my excitement. Cross your fingers that all of these reactions worked!

It's Been a While

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:17:06 -0500

It has been over a year and so much has changed. First off, I moved to San Francisco! This was quite a leap for me. It represented my first solo adventure where I had no idea what I was going to do once I arrived. A very exciting time until I entered the job search race. I would say this was a TERRIBLE time of my life. This may sound dramatic, but for someone who takes every rejection personally, saying this was a tough time is an understatement. Luckily I had some wonderful people in my life who carried me through.

Then the most amazing thing happened, I got a job. Yes, thats right, a real person’s employment opportunity! My life was complete, for the moment. It has been a year since I started and it has been an incredible experience thus far. I am doing something that is influencing people’s lives while enriching my knowledge set and pushing me to new boundries. The details of this will be soon to come, but I want to leave you all with a little suspense…

Anyway, now that my self esteem is back in full force and my excitement about science (and don’t worry, food too) has been renewed I am ready to get back into the blogging world. Now I will leave you all with a little something to make you jealous. I am entitling it, “I live in California.”

Everything Must Come from Something

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:29:12 -0400

My brother is in 10th grade chemistry and hates it, naturally, and since I am the resident chemist of the household I have the responsibility of helping him with his homework! Usually I am not a fan of high school chemistry because it deals with moles, soon you will find out why I am so anti-mole, and basic plug and chug. But today I found myself very enthusiastically answering the question “Why does the law of conservation of mass drive chemistry research?”

For those of you who don’t remember high school chemistry-I am very disappointed in you! But for your benefit I will refresh your memory: conservation of mass is the fundamental idea that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. For example, when water boils it looks like the water level is going down, but the water is not disappearing, it is turning into steam, another form of the same molecule.

This idea is so fundamental because chemists strive to find out what’s going on “behind the scenes”, especially in cases where we cannot observe a change. This whole concept is what started chemistry and what allows us to start thinking about the unknown of daily happenings. If matter cannot be created nor destroyed, then what happens to it that the human eye cannot see, and the idea that something has to happen to these constantly changing everyday events is what chemists are trying to find out. Everything relates to this law and chemistry. For example; eating food and it turning into energy, clouds that lead to rainy weather, burning a fire, and many many more. It’s unthinkable how much we know and don’t know about chemical processes that happen all the time. I feel as though I am not doing the importance of this idea justice, but if it gets you to think a little bit about it, then my job was successful.

Birthdays

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 16:08:54 -0400

Its been a while! Since my last post many life changing events have occurred. One of which is I am now officially 22 years old. I took advantage of this momentous occasion by trying my hand at layered cakes. As my sister said, “You would be the only person who would want to make your own birthday cake!” Indeed this is true, but I have to say, I gave myself a delicious present. It was a little hectic because I get so anxious and excited that I am terrible at waiting to make something, so naturally I started 3 days before my birthday. I first made a lemon cake using Martha Stewart’s Tender Lemon Cake recipe. I am not a big fan of Martha, but when it comes to cakes, she is very reliable. I then cut it in half horizontally and froze it. I decided to make a cream cheese frosting, because its my favorite, and in the middle layer on top of the frosting I added a blueberry and raspberry reduction that I made up.

This is my final product! Originally I was going to try and pipe the whole outside with little flowers, but I decided to save that for a later endeavor.

Many people shy away from baking because they think its too difficult, when really its almost easier than cooking. You don’t need to be very creative, know how to mix flavors, or anything special. Really you just need to follow directions and anything sweet is always delicious. But, NEVER FORGET THE SALT!

Space-The Final Frontier

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:28:55 -0400

Entropy: a macroscopic property of a system that is a measure of the microscopic disorder within the system (thanks Wikipedia)

Entropy, one of the many factors a chemist must always consider during a reaction, is fundamentally a foundation of the universe. It is commonly thought of as the amount of disorder in a system. What is a system? It’s a scientist’s way of breaking down everything that happens in the universe and separating them into individual circumstances so that it is easier to measure obscure quantities such as entropy. When a system is at maximum entropy, or disorder, it is known to be most stable. This can also be thought of as saying “everything in moderation” meaning there should not be an excess of any one thing in one area, but it should be evenly dispersed. A basic example would be ice melting in water-where the coldness of the ice disperses through the water while the water warms up the ice. On a molecular level it can be thought of as the rigidness of the solid ice structure needs to become more chaotic by turning into a more entropically favorable liquid structure.

Now on a more grand scale of things; the big bang. This is the first notion of entropy in this universe. This event in time was a basic energetic process that needed to increase its entropy, therefore an explosion occurred that spread mass throughout the universe that we know today. To me, it is very cool to think about how processes on a molecular level, such as ice to water, mimics the same fundamental idea on a more grand scale, like the big bang. Our whole existence is based on this strive for chaos that everyone of our cells works so hard for.

Some of you may have heard of a new concept called “dark matter.” I know it sounds like something out of Star Trek, but it is an idea that there are molecules that are expanding the universe. This theory comes out of entropy. The expansion of the universe is a way to increase the chaos by inserting this dark matter into “empty” space. Now, none of this is known to be a fact, but what I want to let you know is that even the smartest of the smart are using basic ideas that we learn about in high school and expand them into unfathomable concepts that eventually win them a nobel prize. So I leave you today with the idea that we all start in the same place and maybe one day you will think of the next great theory that stems from a very basic concept :)

Keep on causing chaos!

Green

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:40:00 -0400

Fun Fact: No matter how much science has advanced, nothing synthetic has been able to replicate the efficiency of a biological process.

The new fad nowadays is being “green,” and I am all for that notion and its my favorite color! But this most current hot topic stems from chemistry, of course. Being all “crunchy” means that we produce less CO2 (carbon dioxide from this point onwards) which in turns leads to more oxygen (O2). The ideal process that this term comes from is photosynthesis. This process only happens in plants where an organelle (a small but essential part to a plant cell that is most likely a chloroplast) takes in CO2 and creates O2 as a byproduct. This is where we get our oxygen. Up to this point this has been basic biology, but remember we are talking about chemistry! Do you know why plants are the color green? Because of chloroplasts.

Light is one of the most complex concepts that the only logical reasoning for its characteristics came from the combination of two competing theories, which ended up being that it is a mixture of waves and particles. This implies that it can “flow” through a room, but can also bounce off a solid object and the color we see is the frequency or wavelength of light that is not absorbed by the environment. Therefore white is when none of the wavelengths are absorbed and black is when they are all taken in, for example the background on this page. With this logic we can see that chloroplasts are green because they reflect back the green color. So a little recap-being green refers to being efficient for the environment, which comes from the most efficient process known, photosynthesis, which happens in green plants because the tool used for this event happens to absorb all colors except green.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could all produce our own oxygen simply by having an extra part of our cell that happens to create it for us? It would mean we would all have to literally be green, but hey I think it’s worth it!

On a separate note: I forgot to mention that I am always up for suggestions on topics to write about, or clarifications for that matter :)

First Blog Post

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:19:14 -0400

As of today, I am an official blogger! I have recently moved home from Pittsburgh to Providence with my cat, Catman. As a recent unemployed college graduate, I now spend my time running errands for my mom, mediating the dog and cat situation, and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life…

The title “Orbitals & Artichokes” comes from two of my strongest and most interesting talents, chemistry and cooking, plus I liked the way the words sound together ;) Most people know what an artichoke is, but may not exactly know what an orbital is. Maybe you have heard of it in a high school chemistry class as the “path” an electron (negetively charged particle) takes when circling around the nucleus. In fact, there are people in the world who spend lifetimes trying to figure out exactly where one particular electron may be because in reality no one actually knows, they can only guess using this extremely long and complicated mathematical equation that I will spare telling you about. Orbitals are the shapes that the electrons travel that mathematically make sense. Some electrons travel in a circle, some in a figure eight, and it only gets more complicated from there.

So at this point you may be wondering, what on earth is she talking about. This concept of orbitals is one of my favorite things because its something you can’t see but somehow some very intelligent people have convinced us that this is the way an atom works. In a way this is what all of chemistry is, and I have taken it upon myself to share what came out of my years of painful studying and hours of getting to know the TA’s with the general public. Maybe, as more concepts are explained and ideas are understood, you can look back to this first posting and say, “hey, this kind of makes sense now!”

Until next time!