Day 20

December 6, 2011

It was a very interesting day! We started with cell culture. I've been this before also in my Wednesday lab. It was interesting that they use similar techniques for completely different purposes. It was fun because Kellin let me do the entire procedure while he just told me what to do. We put 2mL of media (a mixture of chemicals and cells) into a tube and then placed it in an incubator for 10 minutes. Then we placed the tube in a centrifuge. The centrifuge rapidly spins the tube around which somehow makes all the cells settle to the bottom of the tube. We brought the tube back into the hood and removed the remaining solution but left the cells in the bottom. We placed 4ml of new media into the tube with cells and pipetted through several times to chop the cells and mix them with the media. Then we moved the solution into a different container that we could place under the microscope. Once we finished that, we made another gel gradient. While we were waiting for the gel to harden, he and the rest of the lab were just playing around with dry ice. He showed me what would happen if he put a frozen cube of CO2 in room temperature water. It boiled and looked like fog. It was really cool. Then he explained that if you place a small amount of water in a syringe and reduce the pressure enoughm the water will boil at room temperature! He attempted trying this but ultimately failed. He told me that boiling points differ depending on the altitude. In Denver which is high in the mountains, water has a lower boiling point and it takes a longer amount of time to boil something there. Then, Ms. Rein came to visit my lab for a few minutes. But it was ashame because we had already finished everything we wanted to do that day, so Ms. Rein didn't get to see me do anything.