Friday, July 8, 2016

Day 3 (maybe I should come up with more interesting titles)

Today was really fun and interesting! So far, we have done a different thing every day. I have really enjoyed that because I have learned a very wide range of things within a few days. This morning, after the staff meeting, Zihao and I had another lecture by Prof. Hornak. The lecture was mainly focused on the difference between low frequency EPR (what we are using) and standard (high frequency) EPR. This will be important to our research project this summer.
After that, we went into the chemistry lab in the basement. There, we started to organize pigments that we will later examine with the spectrometer. We put each of them into separate test tubes, which took some careful handling because the powders tend to go everywhere. We labeled the tubes with the type of pigment, and then recorded our total collection. One really fun thing we got to do was make our own pigments. We made three: coal, charcoal, and hematite. We put them in plastic bags and smashed them to make a powder. Then we packaged and labeled them.

Lunch was a picnic, and I got the chance to talk with the other interns more. I really enjoyed playing volleyball with them after lunch, even though none of us were very good. I'm pretty sure we will be pros at the end of the summer though.
After lunch, we finished making pigments and creating our list. Then I put the list into a spreadsheet and Zihao and I researched information on each of them for our database. This took most of the afternoon.

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