Chapter Ten: I'm Known For My Strength, Right? (feat. Melanie, Jeff, Jamie, Bryden, Sabrina, Corey Hartman, Alicia Vaughan)

Note: This post combines Weeks 11 and 12. I felt this was appropriate because the work done in the lab over the course of the two weeks can be combined under a similar theme, as illustrated below.

Alright, the title of this post is a lie: I'm not known for being strong; I'm actually known for being incredibly weak. I'm a six-foot dude with a 130-pound body (that corresponds to about a 60% difference in height-percentile and weight-percentile), I definitely don't go to the gym, and in AP English Language class last year, I lost every single arm wrestle during the end-of-the-year party. But these past two weeks made me look like The Rock with how strong my will (and my muscles - sort of) were.

In the last post, I told you all that a disgusting endeavor was in the process - and it was disgusting, indeed. Remember those P. auriofaciens? Those bacteria that convert nitrate into nitrous oxide? Well, we finished all of the denitrification runs that we had planned for the samples that we currently had, and the jars that bacteria were in needed to be cleaned up! Of course, these are a bunch of dead bacteria, so they smell awful.

To clean the jars, we add bleach to the dead bacteria to ensure that all of the bacteria are actually dead, which, to my surprise, actually makes the smell much worse. Having the ability to stay alive while cleaning the jars was an accomplishment, even if half of the cleaning was done under a fume hood.

All of the bacteria-filled liquid gets put into these containers, where we add bleach and dump it into the sink (which is unfortunately not under the fume hood).

And if you know me, you know that I tend to get nauseous often - in early elementary school, I would vomit most days, and since then, I've ruined many a car, including but not limited to my parents' cars and Mr. Lamb's car (which is a story for another day).

After the jars go into the bleach, we rinse them off and stick them into a hydrochloric acid mix, where they sit for a day.

You're gonna need thick gloves before you stick your hands in this stuff, because 0.5M HCl is pretty strong.

After that, we rinse them off again and let 'em dry.

Quite the balancing act.

Besides this example of my incredible strength (of will), another endeavor in the lab over these past two weeks made me feel incredibly strong - getting nutrients out of soil by running wet soil through a paper filter! Okay, but why would that even make you feel strong? Good question! A client sent in sand and soil samples for analysis, but, as you probably know very well by now, the analysis needs a standardized material for comparison. So, with the sand and soil samples came a whole coconut husk! We needed to make sure that this husk had the same consistency as soil, so I got to channel my inner savage and rip apart this husk with my bare (well, glove-covered) hands.

It used to be a husk-shaped husk, until I absolutely beasted and feasted on it.

We then added different liquids (acids for nitrogen and phosphorus analysis, water for pH analysis)
 to the different sediment samples so that they would be completely submerged.

Five of the fifteen mixtures created - pretty murky, if you ask me.

We put the mixtures for nitrogen and phosphorus analysis on a shaker to allow for the nutrients to be distributed into the water, and filter out the water from the samples.

The mixes getting filtered so that all that's left is the water and the sample's nutrients - definitely one of the coolest things I've done in the lab.

For pH analysis, we just took the raw mixtures of the sample and water, put it on the shaker, and then used this cool machine here, which has a convenient little pH sensor.

It took quite a while for the pH reading to even out.

Besides these, I did a few more NAS trays and cleaned some other dishes! Outside of the lab, I did my practice presentation, which went 15 minutes over the limit, so I have some editing to do before my final presentation.

Speaking of my final presentation (that transition though), remember that the SRP final presentation day is Saturday, May 6th, starting at 9 am, at BASIS Flagstaff! My presentation is at 4 pm.

However, just because my final presentation is this coming Saturday, I'll continue to post on this blog (hopefully biweekly, if not weekly) because the awesome staff at the lab is allowing me to continue interning over the entire summer!

Looking forward to seeing you this Saturday at BASIS, and if not, to seeing you on the next post!

End of Chapter Ten.