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Showing posts from March, 2017

3/27/2017: Week 7 – Long Nights/Thorns/Columns

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Seventh week already, wow! This was a very busy week, filled with long hours and interesting tasks, so prepare for a lengthy post! DOUBLE BARNWATCH Sometime last Sunday, Lansdowne went into red alert, meaning the interns were on night duty! I was very excited, as I thought this could finally be my chance to witness the birth, and took the later shift (1 A.M. to 4 A.M.) that day. Unfortunately, Lansdowne didn't give birth that night, and because we were all so tired from staying up late, lab duty on Monday was canceled. Lansdowne didn't give birth the rest of Monday either, so we had to go back for another night watch shift. This time, I took the earlier shift (9 A.M. to 1 A.M.) because I was quite tired from the previous night. I ended up staying the whole night at the ranch, but thanks to my horrible luck, Lansdowne still didn't give birth.  Because of all the late shifts the interns had, Tuesday's lab duty was also canceled. At this point, we thought we would

3/20/2017: Week 6 – Building and Crushing

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Hey everyone, time for some Week 6 talk! LIFE ON THE RANCH Remember that project we were working on last week? After hours of grueling work this past Saturday, we finally finished. We now officially have one mini horse proof stable!  Beautiful As you can see in the picture, the final product looks quite different from the early stage picture I included last time. One important step we took was to cut the boards we'd painted in half using a table saw. Sawwwww This method let us conserve enough wood to eventually make another stable mini horse proof. This will be necessary since we're getting two mini horses and the one that gives birth first will start getting possessive very quickly. But anyway, pretty much all our time on the ranch this week was spent finishing this up, so that sums up the ranch portion of this post. BACK TO THE LAB AGAIN Working in the lab this week came with a good deal of new and exciting experiences. But before I get to those

3/16/2017: Week 5 – Painting Madness

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Hello again, everyone!  As promised, here is my Week 5 post. I'll be talking a lot about what I did on the ranch and in the lab, but for Week 5, there's something special I have to address first. VENTURE MADNESS Invest Southwest's Venture Madness is an event in which startups across Arizona compete for money based on their innovativeness and potential impact. It started with 64 companies, and after two rounds of online voting, this number was narrowed down to 16, of which AniCell was one. These 16 companies were then invited to the Venture Madness event to compete for the top prizes through live presentations.  Low-Quality Brackets Picture The whole top 16 event was actually three days long, and I wasn't there for all of it, but I was able to attend the final day, when I found out AniCell had made it into the top four! Going to the event was very exciting, as I've never been to formal business events like this, and I even got to hear the CEO of Red

3/14/2017: Week 4 – Amnion, Amnion, Amnion

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Hey, everyone! I've got a few different things to talk about for my Week 4 post, and I'll get right into it. BARNWATCH AND CHEYENNE As I said in my last post, I had to spend the night at the ranch two Fridays ago watching Cheyenne and Lansdowne (mainly Cheyenne). Staying up late into the night was quite an interesting experience. Although my shift was only until 2 A.M., I ended up watching the horses until 4 A.M. with Nikash, whose shift was from 1 A.M. to 4 A.M. We had a pretty nice setup, with my laptop playing YouTube videos sitting right next to the laptop with live camera footage of the horses, and didn't observe anything unusual. But that was only until 3 A.M., when Cheyenne suddenly got down on the ground and started shaking and rolling quite violently. Because the two signs that horses are about to go into labor are either their water breaking or them lying down, we thought it was about to happen and ran to wake our mentor up. However, it ended up being noth

3/3/2017: Complicated Papers x 2

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Hey, everyone! I've finished thoroughly reading the papers (on cancer and stem cells) that I mentioned and will be talking about what I've learned in this post. I'll also discuss the SOP's I talked about in previous posts. But, before I start, important updates on the horses! Cheyenne has been raised to orange alert and Lansdowne is on yellow alert. Because horses typically give birth during the night time, I will be going to the ranch later tonight (from 11 P.M. to 2 A.M.) on "barn-watch" duty, monitoring the two horses and being prepared to alert the team if either goes into labor. In my Week 4 post, I'll make sure to talk about this experience, as well as everything else I've done during my fourth week with AniCell.  This post, as the title states, will be about two different types of complicated papers. SCHOLARLY ARTICLES GALORE The first type of complicated paper I'll be discussing is, you guessed it, scholarly articles. As of now, I