S P E C I A L  T O P I C S : B I O T E C H + D E S I G N

The lectures this week covered a wide variety of interesting subjects like microcopies, the power of 10, hexagons, carbon, flour, and wheat to name a few. However, while all very intriguing, what captured my interest the most was Alvaro Azcarraga’s presentation on maize. Thanks to all his fascinating research, I was hungry to know more. My interest in the presentation and this topic of maize was first cultivated by Michael Pollan.

Bees

(Above is an image of a honey bee)

                I was so excited to hear that we will be studying the work of Buckminster Fuller, he has been my hero! I mention him in all my application essays. I'm currently participating in the Design Science Studio in affiliation with the Buckminster Fuller Institute. I believe that art and design is important for the future because if we can't see it, we can't create it. Our assignments in this class require us to  

This week we baked bread, which I was really excited about because I'm really into baking cakes. I've only made bread once before and it was Hokkaido Milk Bread, so the process was very different from the no-knead method. I mixed flour, salt, yeast, and water together and left it out overnight to rise.

In Velarde New Mexico, on the Rio Grande river between Taos and Sante Fe, my Uncles Andre and Pierre and my Grandmother Tutu spent many years on a farm. There, my Uncle Andre grew apples. He was also a beekeeper, tending to a colony of bees and selling honey at the Santa Fe farmers market each week in little jars with the yellow label, “Eves farm.” Cultivating the Bee population on his farm helped him with the pollination and care of his crops. 

My bread

Joseph Hernandez Torrejon

DESMA 160 - Special Topics

01/14/22

    After last week’s lecture on genetically modified technologies, GMO and its relation with rice caught my interest the most. GMO stands for genetically modified organisms and have been long attempted in order to alter and adapt living things’ genes with selective breeding.

As I mentioned in class, Mark Bittman's bread recipe was a staple in the immunology lab I worked for. I remember by boss would pick me up in the morning, we were neighbors, and we would drive into the city together. Every Wednesday, her husband Karl would wake up early and make two loaves. One for his family, and one for our lab family. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of her car, the warm bread nestled in a woven basket under a gingham kitchen towel keeping my lap warm. 

Part I

Two subjects during this Thursday’s lecture intrigued me— salt and bees— so I took a shot in the dark and searched to see if they happen to be interconnected with each other.  To my surprise, they did!

Part 1:

agriculture

AI

air

Since our last class, I’ve been traveling. I’m on a road trip; constantly shifting locations and seeing new groups of people. Along the human highway I’ve begun to notice the similarities and differences between the groups of people I interact with. Although I haven’t been on the road too long and our lecture was just two days ago, I’ve seen how universally we connect.

Part 1: After this week’s exciting class on bread, the topic that I wanted to explore further was GM technology and GMO crops, specifically in relation to corn. I’ll  talk about GMO and its background information first, and then move on to its relationship to corn.

   This week's lectures were very interesting, they drove us to pay really close attention to small things like the Molecular structure of salt, carbon molecules, bees...... and we watched some videos of how to make bread, GMO, which the way to make processed food. In this case, we can really see the shape of the structure very detailly and closely like hexagons. What impresses me most is that many of the structures are made up of regular patterns, like the honeybees' honey wall, which is made up of regular hexagons.