Ciba: Day 5
I thought today was pretty much like the other days. In the morning, we distilled the fermented grape juice from Monday and extracted the alcohol. We tested to see if it was actually alcohol by lighting it on fire. We then went into learning about chromatography.
We had a lab looking at the color of fire change into green (copper), but my lab group really had trouble. Our fire just wasn’t big enough (we didn’t have enough gas at our station for some odd reason) and the color didn’t turn green for a certain substance. But afterwards, we played with dynamite soap. It’s basically filling soap with a certain gas (in my group, we used methane and oxygen) to create bubbles. Someone then wets his/her hand and picks up the bubbles. A teacher uses an igniter and touches the bubbles, which sets off a loud “BANG.” The hands don’t get hurt in the process though. When I went to do that, my right ear started ringing really badly for a few seconds afterwards because the noise was so loud (methane created the loudest noise).
Next week, I’m going to go live in a hotel (paid by Ciba) and during the day, I will be traveling to different areas and to Ciba to perform experiments. We are also apparently getting a project. I really don’t want to do the project…. Also, there’s going to be a lot of food; I’m going to gain so many pounds. It’s not like I haven’t already. This entire week, I binged so much on chips. I just kept eating Ruffles whenever I had the chance and I never exercised until today–I played two hours of tennis with Tina.
My swings are getting pretty good at tennis! It’s much better than a few weeks ago, when I kept on hitting everything out. Now, I can hit some with pretty good top spin and it’ll stay in the court the majority of the time.
Also, my websites will be experiencing a server move later tonight. If any of the websites are down, that is most likely the reason.
By the way, I just realized that Ciba is not entirely capitalized. I knew it was the name of the company, but I thought it stood for something.
3 Responses to “Ciba: Day 5”
July 21, 2007 at 12:23 am
It’s not exactly a chemistry class. It’s a 2-week summer chemistry program by Ciba, a world leading chemistry company (I think; I just googled it). We all had to apply and be interviewed in order to get into the program, so all the people in the program are basically good at chemistry 
Which saves me a lot of trouble when my mind starts wandering….
July 21, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Oh, awesome… I’m glad you found a way to be productive with your summer, and I hope this program is more enjoyable than an in-school chemistry class.
And yeah, neurons definitely had a survival advantage by increasing in size.. But I think that being at even just a normal cell size wouldn’t be an immediate disadvantage for them, so surely it would’ve taken a long time for the smaller ones to die out. Also, the evolution of so many dendrites on a single neuron is pretty impressive. Another thing; thinking about the growth process of a human being from a one-celled zygote to a 100-trillion celled adult and how the DNA must’ve laid out the sequence and the way in which cells were to specialize into certain organs and tissues is just amazing in comparison with the given timespan of 4 billion years.
If I go through with an article on this subject, I’ll definitely let you know and post it on my blog. It’s not intended to proove the existence of a divine or anything, but merely to indicate that the existence of one is a good possibility and to give an extra reassurance to those that already have religious beliefs. And to those that don’t believe in any sort of divine, surely they can still take pleasure in the thought that they are of a powerful species that evolved very impressively for the timespan of 4 billion years.
Thanks for all of your input on it! I’m glad to have found a good, science-brained person to blog-talk about such things with.
July 21, 2007 at 12:14 am
Hi Yingna! ^Is that a chemistry class you were doing that lab for? I just took high school chemistry… I liked the subject but absolutely hated the lab assignments, because I always got stuck working with a bunch of brainless bozos.
Also, I hope you had a great time during your long tennis session earlier. It must be very rewarding to see yourself improving.
Thank you so much for your input on my blog! That is a good point about how rapidly cells can divide, but even still, I find the amount of mutation and evolution that took place in multicellular creatures very impressive for a span of only 2 billion years. My argument does indeed need strengthening in that sense, though. If I decide to tweak around that idea into a final essay or article or something, I’ll put in some more emphasis about some of the ridiculously unlikely cell shapes that evolved. A good example is the neuron… You probably know this stuff, but the largest and most complex neurons in humans evolved to be over a meter long and to consist of over 1,000 tree-branch-shaped dendrites.
Oh, and I never knew about how it took early cells about 2 billion years to start working together. Very interesting.. thanks for the info!
(Nice new blog name, by the way!)