Whats on pictures: (left to right)
Our team - me and a human model - our first 3D printed shark comb given to a girl
Entertainment for children - crystals containing lysozyme (activity) - find 10 differences (activity)
Find the difference between two humans (activity) - build a DNA (activity) - explaining inheritance through tortoiseshell cat (activity)
Guess which animal it is (activity) - protocol to extract DNA - extracted DNA from strawberry (activity)
Last week was quite busy, I had to meet the head of our faculty to discuss the data from the beamtime that I had created a while ago. I was quite anxious about this meeting as the beamtime was in April, but I still haven't analysed the data properly. I just analysed one sample and even it is not perfect, as I couldn’t separate the fibres. Anyway, he was really nice, I made my presentation and he gave a ton of advances in terms of how to go around the problem with fibre separation. On the following day I had a meeting with my main supervisors. I don’t get those meeting that often so I had to be prepared. He gave me some advise about my literature review and more importantly he contacted people in Henry Mosley and they actually added me to the emailing list and even invited for a seminar. Until now, I was struggling a bit as I felt like they were trying to avoid me. Thus when I was analysing the data and was getting stuck, they could not be bothered to help. However, I don’t think they understood who was my supervisor. I hope now they will treat me more like a group member.
The lab life was quite boring. I just keep cells alive :D I hope I will do something more interesting in the upcoming week.
As I am writing this, I am going home from Harwell. I have volunteered to do public engagement at a science up close festival. When I brought it up to the director of the research complex he suggested that my supervisor should also participate in it. And he in turn has required another CDT student whom he is also supervising. So we were allocated to introduce the public to bioprinting. So we came a day in advance and we thought we will move the printer and will test it out, so that we are ready. Apparently the printer had a mind of its own. It was constantly turning off the heater, thus the polymer wouldn’t melt and the button to turn on the heat would just disappear and reappear after a while. We spend a whole day trying to get it to work and were quite discouraged at the end of a day, as we saw some amazing things other people came up with, and we couldn’t make our printer work. So today, luckily we managed to print! First we started with simple scaffold structures then letters and in about an hour we were able to print a shark hair comb. I will include its picture. We managed to give quite a few of them out, so people can enjoy playing with them. The majority of attendants were scientists with their children, so it was quite nice as you could talk to the adults, while kids were preoccupied by clay or the printer. I also managed to sneak out with my supervisor, so we could set up electrospinning. I brought some sol-gel and I need new fibres for my project. In addition, my supervisor asked me to write a small article about this project engagement. (As if I don’t have enough with my literature review) So I had to go around all of the tables and talk with people and kinda interview them. Well, it turned out to be amazing, I played different games, learned lots of information, got laser etched and cut coasters, extracted DNA, created crystals, tested my hearing, grip strength and the most excitingly I have played with the microscope. So it's similar microscopes which are used for in vitro fertilisation. You have a screen, a suction needle on one end and a needle for injection on another. You get your embryo – it was a mouse's – zygote would be more accurate) and you suck it with one needle and inject it with something, we actually didn’t inject anything, but you could just puncture it. I will try to include as many images as I can, so it can hopefully inspire someone if you will have to do public engagement and will get stuck with the ideas for activities. Honestly some of them were just amazing.