Difference between revisions of "Akshitta kohli"

Revision as of 21:09, 8 June 2010

Daily log

The first few days there was a lot of confusion about what exactly had to be done. The only knowledge I had was that it was something to do with synthetic biology. Now what exactly synthetic biology was...I had no idea. I was just familiar with the term biology. We started by seeing videos on cells and talked about various scientists, some of which I already knew about from my past knowledge about biology. In a week things had become clearer and now we were familiar with almost all the terms and terminologies related to biology.

17th may

Does lying about things do us any good? What if there was something which could immediately detect our lie?? What if our body could change colour depending on our moods?? These were the questions that came to me while I was thinking about my bacteria. So I came up with these bacteria which could detect a person’s lie and his state of nervousness by changing the person’s skin colour. I named it coloreria. While doing this I learnt a lot about the functioning of bacteria. Other things that interested me were the various mechanisms involved in the melanin formation and I was also fascinated by the fact that these bacteria can make people dark and light skinned based on their moods.To know more about the functioning of coloreria visit the link: coloreria

18th may

The day was spent in modifying our ideas on our hypothetical bacteria. The most interesting part of creating the bacteria was thinking about a mechanism for it to work. It was more like making it work on my own terms. It was interesting to add more features to the bacteria and decide their usability! While thinking about this there were other things that conquered my mind as well. It was the way society accepts colour. Every society has tended to assign some valuation to skin colour differences, especially when these have corresponded with existing economic and political differentiations.

19th may

Thinking of a machine....that could perform any abstract function was one of the tasks of the day. What will the machine do? How will it function? Why not make a machine that keeps eve teasers away? So we thought of a machine which could push back the eve teasers. We thought of a machine which can be attached to the intestine. So it absorbs a part of the waste while it passes through the intestine. Whenever any human with the machine in its intestine feels insecure the machine starts decaying the waste and it comes out of the body in the form of bad stink which pushes the eve teasers away.

21st may

Things are still not clear and we are thinking on making another hypothetical machine. Thought process was still going on...we were brainstorming on creating another machine and modifying our previous ideas. So why not make something that can act as a life saver. So I got stuck with the idea of an oxygen recycler. This is basically a machine which will extract oxygen from the plants during the day and store it so that it can be used later for a lot of other life saving purposes.

24th may

I started thinking about my sculpture in which we are asked to grow something that lives for a period of 2-3 months.So i thought of growing fungi. Now the next step was to think about how to grow it.I thought of growing them on fruits.Now the ideation is done...only implementation is left!

25th may

Today we went to the national centre for biological sciences. I had always dreamt of working in a place like ncbs. The place fascinated me a lot. It is quite a fancy place. We then had a huge discussion on whether government should spend that much of money on places like these or not. During lunch we met a very interesting person who is an educator and discussed with him the positives and negatives of the present system of education. He was quite curious to know that why we all being design students are taking part in a competition like igem. So there was one discussion after the other and it went on for quite a long time. So the day was given to discussions. Then we were introduced to the labs and the different microscopes in ncbs. We met a few people who quite willingly talked about their research work in ncbs.We saw a fly brain under a specialized microscope and saw the way all this information is read digitally.

26th may

Now that we had our basic knowledge about biology, it was time to know about some artists. We read about Stelarc and Orlan. I quite liked Orlan’s work. Her idea of Carnal Art is quite fascinating. It is a very unique way to put things across as it uses her body as a language. I think that she tried to change ideas of feminism by doing such experiments on herself. Her digital hybrids try to break the barriers of gender, caste, colour and creed.She treated her skin as the most treasured organ and experimented with it.By experimenting with her skin she tried to change the concept of beauty.

27th may

I started working on my sculpture today.I got fruits like papaya and sapota and left them to decay.I have cut papaya into pieces and then left it for decaying whereas sapota has been kept as it is.

28th may

Today we read about Adam Zeretsky , Petricia Piccinni and Eduardo Kac. Out of these artists Petricia Piccinni’s work fascinated me the most. I think she has tried to challenge the stereotypical mindsets with her work like by using an ugly looking old mermaid, rat like creatures coming out of the bum, breasts at the back and a lot more things like these. I really like the way she has created a beautiful relation between the ugly and the beautiful. Like in one of her works she displays a very beautiful relation between a small boy and an old ugly fish like creature.

31st may

It has been four days since i have started working on my sculpture. The papaya that i had kept has ripened fully and now it has started decaying. I can see some black fungi growing on the outer body of the papaya. The sapota has decayed and has become black and loose to touch. The fruits have started stinking. In a few days the fruits will start stinking even more and even the sight of it will disgust me. I hope it turns out the way I want it to.

1st June

Today we started with our first experiment. We tried to grow yeast in the lab. We used different techniques to grow yeast. In one of them we used dry yeast pallets in agar water and left the yeast to grow in the lab for 2 days. The process of growing yeast was quite interesting. Since I have worked in a lab earlier, I was familiar with all the lab equipments and the precautions that had to be taken care of while working. It was fun to work in the lab after a long time.

2nd June

We started our day by attending a talk in the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) on the theory of evolution given by Charles Darwin. It was quite an interesting talk. It basically presented the views of different theologians and scientists on the theory of evolution. A lot of people questioned the theory and believed that there exists a creator (God) who creates the living species. They tried to explain their point with interesting examples like that of an eye. According to some of them, the eye being a very complicated sense organ can only be the role of a creator. While there were others who did not believe in the concept of a creator at all. According to them even a complicated organ like the eye has been evolved through the process of evolution. They believed that eye initially had a very simple structure but due to the requirement of the successive generations , different features have been added to the eye by the process of evolution which has made it a complex organ. It was quite interesting to see how different people approach the idea of the creator(designer). Even after the talk ended there were a lot of questions in my mind that were unexplained. Though Darwin’s theory was a great success but the questions that it created about the role of a designer are still unexplained. Later in the day we went to ncbs and saw the place where we were supposed to work. Our most important task was to build our own lab.

3rd june

We started our day by thinking on the materials that we will require to build our own lab. So after listing everything down , we thought of making an incubator and wrote down all the stuff we would require to make one. I searched for different methods of making an incubator and found out quite interesting ways. Then we went to the lab to see the growth of our yeast. We saw all the three petridishes in which we had grown yeast but only one of them showed yeast growth...the other two were unaffected. So were happy that one third of our experiment was successful, which was a good start. We decided to work on the proportions and then tried to grow the yeast by the other two methods which were initially not successful. This time we first waited for the agar mixture to settle. We left it for an hour. After an hour the agar had completely settled and had formed a thick jelly. We put yeast in it and left it to grow for another two days.

7th June

The first thing was to see how our second attempt of growing yeast had turned out. It was interesting to see that apart from the yeast colonies there were colonies of some other fungi growing as well. So now we get back to making our incubator and centrifuge. We started with the incubator first. The most difficult part was to keep the temperature inside the incubator constant, so for that we thought of using a 75 watt bulb with an exhaust fan. Then we thought of different ways of fixing the fan inside the ice box. Then we left the incubator for a little while and started thinking about the centrifuge. We used a mixer for it. We started by using plastic tubes and made slits in the tube so as to fix it in the mixer blades. We tried and tried but didn’t work. Every time put the mixer on the tube used to fly off. So the thought process was still going on....

8th June

Still thinking .....how will the centrifuge work? Finally karthik managed to extract the base out of the jar of the mixer. So now we thought of putting a plate on top of the base which rotates with the base. Then attach the plastic tubes to which will act as test tube holders. So this is what we have planned. Now the incubator. Finally it was made..yay! but again the temperature inside the incubator was not constant and was high. So we thought of putting two more fans inside the incubator.Lets see how it works.