Day Thirty- Seven

I make really funny facial expressions in all of these rafting pictures so just make sure you look closely at them because then you'll get a great laugh. All of these pictures are from my rafting trip. Most of these are just are the professional pictures and the pictures from the water camera we had on the raft.

I haven't done many exciting things lately hence the lack of blogging. We did do an amazing race photo scavenger hunt across Bar Harbor for an entire day, which was pretty fun. I dealt with two bloody knees and ankles and a scraped hand while hiking/ running over ten miles all across Mt. Desert Island. I also went to Pirates Cove, which is a golf course, mini golf to be more specific. I am horrible at putt putt, but I managed to get a hole in one. I also went to a Bioinformatics picnic at a PI's house, so much good food especially blueberry soda with Sprite Zero.

This weekend I get to go sea kayaking so hopefully I'll have pictures from that to share!

Our raft learning how to paddle and learning all of the commands. 

On the raft in the water.

My real great rafting boat.

Being intense.

                                       

Day Twenty- Five

I think that rather than going into great detail of what I've done in the past week, I am just going to post pictures with captions of some the various things I've done and places I've seen.

Last friday night we had a bonfire in the nearby woods behind JAX. We ate delicious smores,  especially the special recipe one of my RAs has which includes peanut butter, sang silly camp fire songs, and of course stayed warm around the fire. The funnest part was playing "Ride That Pony" which was one of the traditional brother/sister hall activities at NCSSM that I found to be quite entertaining. After we ate food and sang songs we all played with multicolored sparklers in spirit of fourth of July that following Monday.

This is not my picture, I just got it off the internet. But, I did make enough chocolate eclair cake for fifty people for Sunday nights dessert. Since I was on Kitchen Crew for the past week, we were in charge of making meals for people on the weekends including Saturday dinner, Sunday brunch, and Sunday dinner. So, for Saturday dinner we made burgers for everyone with a lot of different toppings (like avocados and grilled onions and mushrooms) and  we made veggie burgers made from scratch. We also had  sundaes for dinner. Sunday brunch we made homemade quiches, hashbrowns, and croissants. It was denoted therefore as 'Le Brunch' to go with the french theme. Sunday dinner we made a fully Italian meal: spaghetti, veggie sauce and meat sauce (made from scratch), cheese italian garlic bread (made from scratch), and caesar salad. Also, of course we had my awesome dessert, chocolate eclair cake, which I should have taken a picture of, because it later got named "geethamonster kake" in the fridge. 

Pikachu and Pichu! The JAX Summer Student Program has an annual tradition of participating in Bar Harbor's fourth of July day parade. This year the theme of our parade float was "X-Mice", because we are mutant mice. So my friend and I decided to be Pikachu and Pichu in spirit of the mutant mice.

This is what the front of our parade float looked like. Our actual float was a mouse cage.

This was us inside the parade float, the mouse cage.

This is the sand bar that connects Mt. Desert Island to Bar Island. The sandbar is usually wiped out when there is high tide, so usually people trying to get to Bar Island have to go during low tide when there's no water there. Once you get on the island and there is a short hiking trail which will take you to the top of Bar Island and there is a lookout where you can see all of Bar Harbor downtown.

Fourth of July fireworks on the Harbor! It was actually quite foggy and cold outside though, but thankfully it did not get cancelled like the fireworks back home did. 

Panoramic view of Sand Beach. Since the weather has been nice lately,  we have been taking frequent trips to the beach. However, since Sand Beach is a part of Acadia National Park it is quite crowded at times especially this past weekend because it was vacationing time for many people. However, the beach has quite clear water, so it's straight up blue and pretty but not as pretty as the water in Key West. 

This is the inside of the hipster theater called Reel Pizza. It is the only theater in Bar Harbor. The theater unlike usually theaters, gets most of its revenue from selling speciality pizzas. Each movie has an intermission that allows people watching the movies to go get pizza or other snack items. The theater is shaped in the way that it's more lounging. There's a large screen with couches on the first four rows, and the back rows have normal theater seats with tables placed in front of them for food. So, Saturday night my roommates and I went to watch Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon or whatever it's called. It was surprisingly a pretty good movie, and was typical to Michael Bay's usual creations because it involved the large "BOOM" noises that he has used in previous films such as Dark Knight and Inception.

Day Seventeen

It's weird to think that we've already been here for two whole weeks. This entire summer is going by so quickly. Anyways, this past weekend was an action-packed weekend with a lot to do.

Friday
Natalie, Rani, and I went into town for dinner Friday night. It's pretty hard to find places that actually have reasonably priced food that is also Vegetarian. We ended up eating at a Chinese restaurant because they had the cheapest food that was also vegetarian friendly. I got the vegetarian moo shu, it was okay, but it had nothing on Dragon Gate's. 


Saturday
Saturday, was a typical rainy lazy Saturday. I woke up in the morning to volunteer at the nearby YMCA (Mount Desert Island YMCA) which is right on the outskirts of town. We spent the entire morning washing walls, literally all of the walls at the YMCA. We also had the chance to clean the little kid nursery/ preschool/ daycare area. It was pretty cute. After that, we ran/walked in the pouring rain to go get brunch at this breakfast place called Jeannie's breakfast. They are actually quite famous for their blueberry pancakes but I decided instead to get the banana nut pancakes and the chocolate chip pancakes. They were literally the best pancakes I've ever had in my entire life. It was delicious.We then continued to walk around in town, but at this point it was only drizzling then there was a really cold downpour. So, we were basically stuck in that outside for an hour. It really sucked. We got back to the house and most of us attempted to get warm before we had dinner. Dinner was Mexican food. Literally the most yummiest thing in the world, just saying. I had to go to bed quite early that night to get ready for white water rafting the next day!

 The cute little breakfast place!

The best pancakes in the world!


Sunday
So, Sunday morning we had to wake up at 4:30 am in order to get on the bus and leave for entire. The trip was to Forks, Maine which has a year round population of 47 people, so basically it's the middle of nowhere. It took about three hours there. So, I just fell dead asleep on the bus on the way there. When we got there, they made us go ahead and put on our full body wetsuits over our bathingsuits/shorts. We also got to wear water booties. We then had to get fiited for our life vests and our helmets. We watched this safety video and got this safety speech that attempted to sike us out from actually going on the boat.

We took a long bus ride to get to the site where we would get on the river. My boat consisted of seven girls who have never been rafting and a guy tour guide. We had to lift our boat down this really long set of stairs to the water. Rani and I got the lucky position of the way front of the boat. We were in charge of starting the paddling motion to make sure everybody was synchronized. We were also the two that got hit the most with the water. It was actually a lot of fun. The entire trip was about 12 miles long, about 4 hours. We took a break near this waterfall like place to eat chewy bars because at that point we were all seriously hungry. It really sucked though because there were swarms of really large bugs that kept continuously trying to bite us every five seconds. My left eyelid was partially swollen because of a bug bite, but I couldn't really feel it. So, the rapids are classed based on their intensity, they go up to a level six, except you can't really go on a level six. We went on mostly class four and fives. It was kind of a surprise because we started the trip going into a class four rapid, which surprisingly wasn't that difficult at all.

By the time we got done through all of our rapids we went back on this like really chill 30-40 minute trip down the driver back to the Crab Apple cabin area. A lot of people went swimming and in the hot tub which was on the deck. They gave us a buffet lunch because at that point we were all really hungry. After we were all in new clothes and stuffed up with food, they showed us a video and pictures of our entire trip. It was pretty funny to watch. They also went slow motion on people that fell off the boat, and rewinded it, and went slow motion again.

By the time we came home, most of us were really exhausted and really hungry. So they made us grilled cheese and tomato soup, literally the best combination of food in the world. I also started Kitchen Crew that night for a week. Which is basically like PFM work serivce, but we are also in charge of cooking food for everybody on the weekends. So, if anybody has any ideas for food that is easily for 45 people, then let me know!

That's the website if you're interested in looking at it: http://www.crabapplewhitewater.com/maine/kennebec_raft.shtml

Day Twelve

I finally finished my proposal! I sent in my draft to my professor, and the feedback he sent back, and I quote" Sangeetha, I think it looks great, especially considering how briefly we have discussed the project" So, hopefully this entire project will actually work out so I can get some good data. Basically this is a really rough overview of what it does.

A computational biology analysis of the genetic linkage between adrenal gland weight and anxiety behavioral assays by methods of singular value decomposition

Specific Objectives

Aim One: To find a correlation between a non-behavioral trait and a set of behavioral traits to investigate if indirectly related behaviors may be influenced by the same genetic factors.  Specifically, the non-behavioral trait of interest in this study is the adrenal gland weight and the behavioral traits are anxiety test assays. The study will attempt to show that the adrenal gland weight has an effect on anxiety in general. This analysis will be completed using singular value decomposition (SVD) as well as running quantitative trait loci (QTL) scans using the statistical open source software R. A set of overlapping QTLs and genes will be formed to compare with the gene expression analysis.

Aim Two:  To conduct a gene expression data analysis on all of the genes mapped thus far in the BXD inbred mouse cross in order to find similar expression patterns among genes. This analysis alike the phenotype trait analysis is done using singular value decomposition and QTL scans. In the end, a set of genes with its corresponding gene ontology annotations will be formed that represent the greater proportion of genes whose gene expression are explained by the patterns found by SVD. QTL scans will be performed on the SVD gene expression patterns to identify genetic loci that influence these patterns.   

Aim Three: To compare the gene lists between the gene expression analysis as well as the phenotype trait analysis for overlap. After completing the singular value decomposition on both the gene expression data for the BXD inbred mice cross and the phenotypic trait data, overlapping QTL scans can be found.

 If you want my actual proposal to read if you're interested. I can probably send it to you. 

Day Eleven

So, I really like to sporadically blog if you haven't guessed already, so don't expect a post a day. I try to put a bunch of days into one whole post. It makes it more interesting to read I suppose. So this past weekend was a really long weekend that involved a lot of workshops. The one on Saturday was from 9-5 and the one on Sunday was from about 9-12. They were supposed to teach us how to present and give professional scientific talks. So basically the guy who is in charge of the entire program Dr. Randy Smith invited this guy named Tobias from California to teach us how to present.

Pretty much Tobias is kind of a failed actor who attempted to teach us how to present, it ended up being like an acting lesson. We had to learn how to sing, whisper, yell, and normally say the introduction to our scientific talks. This guy is also trying to write a book on how to be a wizard, and I don't think it's going very well. It was a very interesting weekend to say the most. He also was obssessed with showing us various tidbits of like TedTalks and magic shows. My favorite TedTalk was this one: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html. Which was really interesting because it was one how you have to present for musical performances. It's pretty funny that I can also play all of the pieces in this video as well.

Another thing we learnt how to do was to create a memory palace. To create a memory palace you first are giving a set of things to remember. In our case we were given a set of random words to memorize. Then we associate this order of the set of words with a story. This story could possibly be about anything. Then we associate the words to numbers to further help us to remember the order. By the end, you have a story and a number to associate each noun with and you can say it in order. This method of learning, according to Randy allows us to even remember and memorize things we have to learn for classes.

Also interesting things that I took notes on throughout these various lectures...

• Albert Einstein once said, "Information is knowledge. The only source of knowledge in experience". 
• There was mention of an author or somebody famous, the name escapes me currently who once said "to stay alive is to do something that scares you everyday". I guess a challenge for all people would be to take that advice. I for one, am trying to do that.
• Tobias also mentioned his definition of what a wizard was. He said by his definition of wizard, Harry Potter was the only actual real wizard in the entire book series. Anyways, by his definition of wizard, a wizard is someone who goes out and find experiences to obtain wisdom. He or she uses leverage to find such wisdom. 

Fun activities so far this week!

We had a bonfire in these woods that were in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't really bonfire, but there were smores which are really yummy!

We also had a chance to go to Downtown Bar Harbor, which is literally the cutest place ever because it's write next to the actual harbor to see this steel drum band play. There were about twenty old people in total in the band and they did a really good job with what they did! 

While we were at the downtown Bar Harbor we had a chance to see the sunset on the water. It was literally the prettiest thing ever. It's probably just "normal" looking through photos, but in real life it was amazing. 

I'll post all about my experiences in the lab tomorrow and give a tidbit on the research I'm doing if you guys are interested in knowing :) 

Day Seven

Considering I've been really lazy about posting in this blog during the week, I guess I have to update a lot of what's been going on lately. I need to get on terms with updating this more regularly, but I will start doing that tomorrow definitely. I'm actually hoping people are reading this.

Tuesday and Wednesday of this week have practically been the same thing. I work in a computer lab area with seven other people in our program who are doing bioinformatics/ computational biology research. Seven of the people were in my independent studies in computational biology program during this past year of senior year. I only met my mentor on Wednesday but then he decided to leave for Duke, how ironic. I wish I got to go back with him only for it a little bit. Tuesday was also a Professional Development talk where we go into presentation skills and ethics behind science.

Wednesday night we went on a night walk. I have felt the need to "grasp every opportunity" that I've had lately. Even though I'm kind of really scared of climbing things that could potentially make me fall. So, we all wore our light gear, flashlights and headlamps. It was an enjoyable experience, and I'm glad that I definitely took the opportunity do it. The hike went one was called Mt. Champlain. I only fell once which I was very surprised about due to my klutzy tendencies. I like skinned parts of my right leg, but it'll be fine soon. It took about an hour and a little bit more to get to the top of the mountain. When we were going back down I was really scared I was going to fall off, but it was easier to climb down in the dark with my flashlight then it was to climb up with natural light. Pretty ironic. Here are some pictures from the hike.

The sun has finally decided to come out Thursday and Friday, so instead of raining constantly we get really pretty normal summer weather. I like it a lot. I decided to take a video of the view from my balcony because it was that pretty. Thursday we had SNIPP night where people give presentations of what they have accomplished so far in their research. Mine is the dead last presentation in the summer program on July 28th.

I'll update on my research things tomorrow or next week once I have a good idea of what I want to do for my project.

Day Three

So today was the first day of lab. Lately I still haven't be able to fall asleep, but hopefully I'll get used to this sooner or later. I woke up around six thirty to get showered and dressed, also to have enough time to eat breakfast by 7:30. The whole group of late start students decided to walk together to the lab, which is about a 20-30 minute walk on the trail. When we arrived at the lab, it was actually pretty cool. We went through various orientation sessions throughout the day such as procedures for labs and mice procedures. I got to hold a mouse today! Although it decided to go to the bathroom on my hand, thankfully I was wearing gloves. It was a really cute mouse though! It was pretty cool because it was one of the mice strains that we used for our Atherosclerosis research this passed year (B6xC3H). We had to do a lot of exercises with the mice to prep for lab work, but since I'm in a computational biology lab I don't want to deal with them which is pretty nice.

 I sadly unlike everybody else didn't get to meet my mentor. He's supposed to be coming to meet me on Wednesday which should be pretty exciting. He did give me a really nice computer with like 25" inch screen. So excited for that. Yay for programming this entire summer! He did give me a lot of articles to read before our meeting on Wednesday, so I should probably do that. We left around 5 to come back to the house. At this point I was really exhausted and hungry. So the first thing I went to the snack room and I got a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. It was heavenly.