Well, it's Friday again! They seem to take forever getting here and yet they fly right by into the weekend. I posted some interesting links below with some comments per the usual. But before we dive into the world wide web let me give you a quick glance at how my summer is going.
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Did you know...
most standard glass is an amorphous solid.
I'll explain next week! |
A month into the summer and I am beginning to progress into to the grad research life. I just finished a two week course on Pharmaceutical Solids. The course, however long and monotonous it could have been at times, is quite motivational towards jump starting your own research projects. Basically, the course consists one hour lectures taught back to back (sometimes up to 7 in a day) by a professor or scientist who is an expert in that particular field. It is inspiring because all of the lecturers speak of when they were grad students and how they have progressed in their respective careers. It is a privilege to have been taught by these people and I only hope I can do them justice with my own work.
Speaking of my own work, slow and steady seems to be the way to go. I have just begun taking small amounts of data for my first study and I am slowly learning the ropes of working in the lab. Some days it feels like being thrown to wolves because I am told what to do, not always how to do it (such as ordering new Nitrogen tanks). But, I push aside my pride, ask someone who knows, and I get the job done. Eventually, I won't feel like the new guy but for now I continue relating this time to that of freshman year of marching band or my first week of RA training.
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| The Pharmacy Building at Purdue (RHPH) |
All in all, life in RHPH is going well. Next week expect a piece on amorphous solids as that is what the majority of my research will entail to some degree. Ok, now for the reason you clicked on the link....here are your time-wasting fragments for today!
-A man from Berlin has been
functionally cured of HIV. It is quite remarkable and undoubtedly will lead to great advances in HIV research but the technique used to cure him was a bone marrow transplant (which can be fatal) and was intended to cure his leukemia, which it did. The cool thing is that they discovered that the donor is one of the 1% of people in the world who is inherently immune to HIV. I'll let that sink in for a moment.
-Dinosaurs, Dragons, and Chickens? A paleontologist wants to create a
dinosaur from a chicken by turning on old genes within the chicken DNA. Thus, he wants to create the chickenosaurus! And in Malaysia, the
skeleton of a rare lizard has been unveiled, which resembles the modern day dragon. And it is rightfully named the Malaysian Dragon. Unfortunately, it is just a sculpture made from chicken bones.
-Yes this is a
real sign in Indianapolis, Indiana. It's a sad day to be Hoosier.
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| One of Intel's Atom Processors and a penny. |
-And finally, in computer science news,
Intel released news about it's upcoming line of processors. It plans to defy
Moore's law with it's line of Atom processors. Moore's law basically state's that computing functions improve at an exponential rate over time (i.e. processing speed, memory capacity, chip size, etc). Intel plans to make the new Atom chips which will improve faster than the predictions of Moore's law. I don't know whether to be excited, scared, or both.
TGIF!
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