Yosemite (1)

During Thanksgiving the International Students' Association organized a four-day-trip to the Yosmite National Park. And it was amazing! But also super snowy and the hiking path consisted sometimes of more ice than rock. I'll post more photos and infos soon, but here's a start:

My network

Two days ago I made my own network! (Non-social, sorry ;)) It's been a "small" microtubuli network or probably rather a bunch of microtubuli clustered together without adding any crosslinker. It took about 2.5 hours and it was mostly pipetting and waiting for the incubation time to pass.

 

Green: Microtubuli, red: actin, blue: nucleus (wikipedia).

Microtubuli are long, stable polymers (... "long" on a cell scale...) which make up a large part of the cytoskeleton and are vital for the cell shape and in general the cell's well-being. There's a common cancer medication, taxol, which stabilizes microtubuli in the cancer cells, so that they can't divide and the cells die.

Actually, we used taxol as well, to stabilize our microtubuli: We began with tubulin which is the protein microtubuli are made of and started adding taxol in small steps to the buffer-tubulin solution. After adding taxol you have to wait for some time so that the taxol can spread out. Tubulin polymerizes to microtubuli (i.e. connecting in a non-trivial way to form long, stiff rods). Some of the tubulin proteins were labeled with a fluorescent dye so we could see them under our TIRF microscope! :)

Asking for homework

Today I witnessed how a group of students (to be honest - somehow including myself) asked for homework - yes, indeed, to get another homework sheet for class. I said several times I would favor some voluntary problems just to get a better understanding of the topics we're talking about, so nobody would be stressed out because it's the ending of the quarter and some lectures require final exams, so you could do the homework any time you want (or not at all if you're not interested).
It's actually really helpful to have some problems to solve for yourself about the topics discussed in class, because otherwise everything seems "so clear" if somebody explains it, but it's a different cup of tea if you have to do it on your own.

However, we ended up with another (unplanned) homework set which is due in ten days - and even our professor didn't really want to give us one! In the class I'm talking about we don't have a grader, so our professor has to do all the grading and correcting of the homework...

Fortunately, the homework isn't too difficult! And now it's Thanksgiving and hopefully nobody is going to do anything. I'm going to the Yosemite National Park, so maybe there won't be too many entries for the next few days, but prospect-like photos afterwards.

Morning run

It's 6:30 am and I thought I should start enjoying November by a run on the beach. And it's beautiful! I wish I could do that every morning:

Turkey Trot

In order to get rid of additional pounds you might gain during Thanksgiving there's a short run (5 or 10 km) at the weekend before Thanksgiving at the lagoon of the UCSB. Of course, the original intention is not that directly connected to weight loss, but to support students to go to conferences associated with sports and leadership development.

Or, as the Daily Nexus describes it:
“The fund basically sends students to conferences and different activities that would promote Recreation Sports leadership,” Clarke said.
Chad Briner Student Staff Development Fund also helps expand leadership roles in the Rec Sports office through workshops aimed at strengthening the recreation sports programs and helping staff members continue to put on various activities, such as the Turkey Trot." (link)
http://www.gauchosplay.com/student-events/item/1128-turkey-trot

So, we had a great morning of fun and so many different people were running, that was fantastic! For example, I met one of my professors and his son; then there was a group of "old guys" as they called themselves who were running the 10 km under 50 min.! I felt old ;) The track was beautiful as we had a nice ocean view... but I could have stopped after 3.5 km - 5 km can become very long if you run under time pressure.

The two-body-problem

There's a very nice "publication" online dealing with some really special problem in physics, the "two-body-problem" - it's actually a proposal. For original size, here's the link: http://imgur.com/SKNl3VR .

Faraday - we made it!

A: "Why don't we kill all the IgE in a cancer patient? I mean, then there's no mediator for the allergic reaction and the patient will be fine, right?!"

B: "Mh, I think there's some function to IgE despite just reacting in a harming, allergic way..."

A: "Oh, wait, ... I just looked it up, IgE is super important, never mind, guys..."

That's a brief abstract of our Faraday discussion on Monday and Tuesday night and it was super fun! For the Faraday discussion some people prepared a presentation (5 min.) and others read all the papers which were going to be outlined. The readers have to come up with questions, so that you have an actual question / discussion session (20 min.).

And it's not an answer-response game! There've been many different ideas to questions and cross-links between the papers, so you could compare the research results and find even contradictory outcomes!

Our discussion was about lipids and their function as drug carriers (often used for cancer medication). But after about ten papers we were really glad to have a slightly different topic ;) I learned a lot about the different antibodies our immunsystem has (e.g. IgE, IgG, ...) and additionally, I did not read my paper to present it, but to answer questions, so I had to find the "difficult" points in it. That's a lot more interesting! I can only recommend this style of paper discussion!