Welcome back to week 4 everybody! "What do you want to hear first the bad or the good news?" Everyone has received and used this question at least once, and here I am essentially asking you which order you prefer. For those of you who would like the good news first skip to the third paragraph, for the rest of you who want the "bad" news first continue reading in the normal order. Here they come! As I previously mentioned we are working on a multitude of organisms with the same question in mind. This week, my mentor took off our training wheels so to speak. We repeated the experiment from last week. Here is a little overview of what we did, we took sand dollar gametes and induced fertilization. After a couple of other steps, we dissociated the embryos into half-sized, or quarter-sized cells to see how their development will progress. Unfortunately, we ran out of our beginner's luck and forgot some steps which affected our results negatively and prompted us to replicate this experiment a total of 4 times. We are hoping that this fourth time, we did things right. I will have to let you know next week about our results. Those were the "bad" news. They weren't so bad, right? Well now that you've read them go ahead and let me know in the comments your opinion and whether your choice in selecting reading them first or last was a good one. The good news! I suppose I can consider myself an honorary camper now. A couple of us REU interns decided to go camp and visit the Redwoods for 4th of July weekend. We were well on our way to California and were just entering the state park when all of a sudden Wyatt's car starts to sputter and kick. I know what you're thinking, now what? We pulled to the side; then Wyatt and Chris got out to check on the car. They determined that the issue was probably the transmission fluid, so then we turned around and went to the nearest gas station to buy transmission fluid. As we are driving there we are all hoping and praying that the car doesn't break down otherwise how could we return to OIMB? We reach the station and attempt to fix the problem. Under the notion that we had fixed it we drove back to the redwoods but to a nearer campsite. Halfway to our destination, we feel the kicking again. Uh oh, we all thought. Just as we thought we made; it's déjà vu. We drive to the nearest mechanic and an older gentleman named Jake takes the car for a spin around the block to hear the engine and feel out the issues the car may have. We all start to have a discussion about the myriad of ways we could spend our afternoon and night. As we are wrapping up that conversation, Jake comes back and pull into the back calling Wyatt over. After about 15 minutes, Wyatt comes back and states that it was the transmission fluid and that it would only cost 10 dollars. In my book, this was a miracle. How many times does something go wrong with a car and it ends up not being expensive or seemingly take forever? In my experience, that has never happened. After this string of events, we finally go and reach our campsite. We decide to eat, set up half of our camp and go for a 6-mile hike. We did the mill creek trail and the stout trail. It was so beautiful, the trees were… you guessed it! Red. Their height was unimaginable and truly a magnificent view. We reached the stream and played around in it and headed back from there. We then reached our campsite ate dinner, talked, laughed and bonded over making smores over our campfire. At 10 pm we headed for bed and we were off the next morning to OIMB. I guess you could say we were out of the woods!
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AuthorHi! My name is Kostantina Orselli and I am transferring to California State University of Northridge. My interests include hiking, kayaking, playing with my dog, hanging out with friends, watching movies and more. I am ecstatic to be experiencing this opportunity at OIMB! Archives
August 2018
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