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

This week we presented our final projects. My group joined two other groups to present to Professor Vesna's fiat lux class as they were learning about food studies.

This week we began planning our final projects. My group consists of me, Aileen, and Stella. A topic that we have talked about at lengths throughout the preceding weeks is fermentation. Through these conversations my group members and I were reminded of kimchi, a popular fermented Korean side dish. As we are all Korean, we are interested to learn more about the history and scientific process of kimchi and its fermentation. We aim to present these things in an artistic manner by producing posters. We plan to split roles by variations of kimchi.

Tuesday 

Tuesday 

Week 8: Meteor Gallery & Magnets

I wasn’t able to attend class on Tuesday because I was ill, but I heard that the class visited the UCLA planetarium which has telescopes and a large star projector. I did not know that a planetarium existed on campus, so I was disappointed that I had to miss it. However, I made more progress on my kombucha fermentation. I wrapped up the second fermentation of my batch from last week, a strawberry black tea kombucha.

During week 8, I got an infection from virus so I could not go to class whole week. But i heard from my friend that they visited CNSI and saw the Scanning Electron Microscope. Since I could not see the and know about the microscope in person, I will post my research contents about it.  As I researched, A scanning electron microscope (SEM) is a type of electron microscope that produces images of a sample by scanning the surface with a focused beam of electrons.

On Tuesday, week 8, we visited the UCLA Planetarium (completed in 1957) and got to see and learn about their telescopes and star projector. The UCLA Planetarium offers an intimate seating experience for visitors to learn about the universe. The facility hosts free shows, intro astronomy classes, and presentations by astronomy grad students. The star projector is the main star of the planetarium because it’s used to create the night sky inside the dome. The current projector, a Viewlex Mark IIA (also known as the Goto GX–10), cost about $35,000 and was installed in 1973.

WEEK8 BLOG

Meteorites, Star gazing, Dust

I’m not going to lie, I’ve had a very strange week 8. On Tuesday, our class met with Santiago again and visited the Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences Geology building. We stopped by a classroom that had a responsive, projection-mapped sandbox to denote different contour lines and elevations. We then continued down the hall and entered the exhibit portion of the building, where the department had many different kinds of rocks and meteorites.

TUESDAY 2/28: 

Tuesday 

This week was overall pretty fun and insightful! For our first class on Tuesday, our class went to the UCLA Meteorite Gallery in the Geology Building on the UCLA campus. Before going into the gallery, we stopped by a classroom where a Ph.D Geology student, Valeria, was preparing for a class about topography.

On Tuesday, we headed to South Campus to visit the meteorite gallery and planetarium. On the way to the meteorite gallery, we ran into a fourth year PhD at the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences. She had been setting up an augmented reality sandbox that uses depth-sensing technology to label the topography of a landscape as the sand is pushed around the surface.

On Tuesday of this week we got to go to south campus and see the meteorite gallery and planetariums. We started out by going to the meteorite gallery where there were some amazing pieces in the collection. I really enjoyed looking at the shapes and textures of the rocks, they felt like they were smoothed and stretched by the speed at which they hurtled towards earth. One particular meteorite caught my eye which had gemstone-like inclusions within it.