Im Back

Just so people know, I have been away for a while on break. I didn't actually go anywhere, just took a break. I did a lot of work in the lab, but it was just another Kinetics Assay, seeing if we could get all the fibrin out of the gels in under 6, 3, 2, 1 hours. That Mon, Tues, Wed, and some of Thursday last week, and since then I have just been hanging out reading and playing WOW a little. BTW Warriors get the shaft in WOW, in case you didn't know. So I hope to update with something substantial after Tuesday, probably next weekend actually, so don't get too anxious.

Andy

New Developments

So I had an idea last Tuesday night, and it had to do with Splinters disappointment in our preliminary analysis of the Kinetic Assay. I don't want to sound like a dissenter, but I have a hard time believing that what we are doing doesn't work, it just doesn't make sense to me that it wouldn't work. And believe me, I started off not believing this whole heartedly, but I have thought about it a lot and have come to the conclusion that it is RIGHT. So Splinter says, all disappointed like, "Well, we still have fibrin in the gels, so our experiment is a failure." Or something to that effect.

So I says to her today I says, "I was thinking to myself the other day, I thinks, 'Andy you are damned cool.'"

And then I says to her, "You know I was thinking about what you said Monday, about our gels not being porous because of the fibrin still being present. I don't buy it. Why does having some fibrin in the gel mean that it isn't porous? It doesn't, it just means that there is still fibrin there. I think what we should do is prove that the pores are bigger than they were before by putting the gels into a media that has a concentration of some molecule of a size bigger than what the normal PEG pore is and see if it diffuses into the gel. That would prove to ME that we had larger pores or not."

And Splinter being the master of knowledge that she is considered this idea and gave it a thumbs up, and she started considering just how we were going to set up this new experiment! It hadn't occurred to me at that point that the pores had to be large enough to let the fibrin out of the gel, because that was what our experiment we just did WAS, so we know our pores are at least that large! So I suppose we need to step it up by a few microns above fibrin.

This idea and our miraculous data from the Kinetic Assay, which did end up showing us what we wanted to know, verifying the Boss Lady's (Dr. Mahoney) idea that the majority of the fibrin that leaves the gel leaves within the first twenty-four hours. And furthermore it is, like most things that are of any interest to anyone, an exponential decay. Another thing it kinda shows is that the concentration is dependent on there being fibrin in the media, because before the 24hr time point we didn't change media, and after that point we did and looky there it went down again after it appeared to have leveled off. So with this knowledge I bet we will change the media a couple of times before the 24hr point from now on.

Why is Thanksgiving Break Always a Week Away???

Well, some good news and some bad news. One piece of good news is that I just got done talking to a very pretty young lady from my O-chem class last semester, I really like her hair, so every time I see her I have to ask her about it. I think it appeals to the OCD part of me because usually when people put multiple colors in their hair it is very disorganized and chaotic, but not hers, her hair is very orderly.

So talking to pretty women aside, there have been plenty of other developments. Firstly, we had thought, and I reported hear that we thought all our polymer is screwed, that was a false alarm, only a lot of our polymer was screwed. So since we had some polymer left we carried forth our Kinetic Assay of our hydrogels to see how much fibrin left our porous polymers at specific time points. We were initially planning to do 4 hour intervals over the period of 24 hours, but then Splinter wussed out on that and moved it to 6 hour intervals. Splinter wussed out again when she was comfortable in bed at 4:00am and decided that we didn't Really need the 4am data point. So, we got to mash everything up with the vibrators on monday and today we will start doing the data analysis, Rachael is not overly optimistic about the results, but I think it worked spectacularly, AND I got an idea of how to make it even better! And I had another idea of how to make it better last night right before I went to be, and now I cant remember what it was, but I bet I'll remember it soon and it will be earth shattering.

In other news, School sucks! While I was waiting for someone to show up at the lab at 4am on friday, I finally made sense of Topology, but unfortunately I haven't had time to actually get to doing anything about that, its pretty disappointing. And tomorrow I'll have a Midterm in Electronics Lab, over how LITTLE we fricking know about circuits.

And I'll probably update this more as the week progresses.

Andy