Day 8: Parallel Universe

Dear readers,

everybody's been feeling like we've been here for months now. It's a fresh and new Universe with so much to see. After Renan made us run around the bushes all morning, we continued chasing our very own killer centrifuge, trying to save paramecium from non-worms that look like worms to everyone except biologists, coding like there's no tomorrow and taking blood from everyone that is not a minor for the Databetes sub-project. So, we can say that at this moment we're literally bleeding for our Summer School. Stay with us!

Petra & Neva

Morning workout Renan style

DATABETES news

We started our day in very interesting way. Renan's workout was the most creative so far: running around every bush and tree into the almost infinite loop and kicking some ghosts (or we were hallucinating because we got up 5 min earlier).

As far as our project is concerned, it was the most diverse day so far. First we learned basics of probability, threw some dices, coins, and then the moment we were expecting all day came: we became VAMPIRES!

Our project leader Lucija voluntered first to suffer in the name of the science by taking a glucose level test (it's basically poking you with an needle, draining some blood and let the machine do the rest).

Among our patients there were two very interesting volunteres: Petra who sprayed a fountain of blood and Domagoj who got obsessed with poking and constantly begged for more.

The rest of the day we learned about hypothesis testing – there is a high probability we'll understand it tomorrow morning when we get some sleep.

P. S. Don't disturb us tomorrow from 3:45 to 4:15 PM it's our nap time!

The DATAbetes forcefully taking a sample of blood from a non-suspecting CTO 

DNATRiX crew advice

The day started with Renan’s workout, which was very tiring (we learned to do air kicks). A few moments later, we were in the lab, starting a pipetting + centrifugation marathon that would last the whole day (our fingers are still hurting). An advice from the DNATRiX team: being closed in a lab for too much time is dangerous for one’s mental health. We experienced it by ourselves… Until the next daily news, stay tuned!

The DNATRiX crew

We reached a breakthrough. Finally something to brag about. After an interesting morning workout-martial-art-learning, we hurried to our lab. Something was telling us that this day is going to be special. The sample finally arrived! Thank you Madds! We tested the sample with our one of a kind probe and it turned out to be exactly what we expected. It is superconductive! However, no one is perfect and neither are we (but we are close). We stumbled across some minor issues that we will for sure solve first thing in the morning. Below this text you can see graph of our first measurements. As already said, tomorrow we continue so wish us luck!

With love,

The Killers

The Killer graph

The Killer project leader

Steve the Killer

Hey everyone,

Because of the workshops we couldn't inform you about our success. Our first sample is superconductive. (The magnet levitates above our sample in liquid nitrogen.) Since we were carried out by levitation we were reminded of gravity by the falling bottles filled with liquid nitrogen.
+ MATEJA: Thank you so much for the amazing cake. It saved our lives and it was a new exotic experience for our tongues.  (I think because of the rum. J)
Today we had a lot to do (as always). We had some finished samples for the physicists and they measured the Tc. I was 120 Kelvin! What did that mean to us? We had two possibilities: we created the best sample has never seen before (with our improvised scale) and we'll get the Nobel Prize or their machine had a problem. (Unfortunately, the last one has more sense…) After the lecture we had to stay for a while to do the first steps of the sol-gel process. We were so tired that we didn’t explode anything… really…  Or not directly… Actually we crushed 5 glass tubes, 1 glass pipe, 1 funnel, 1 scalpel blade etc. (etc. = I don’t remember what else we destroyed.)

Xoxo,

The MADD

The Madd crew

It was a mini field trip in the morning! Actually, we went to the riverside to collect some fresh water as a new home for our poor little Paramecium. Also, we went to the store to get some tasty baker's yeast for them to eat and get healthier. There were also lots of promising experiments with the Arduino, while Reka succeeded with her "silver mirror" experiment! It's so shiniy, congrats! Just a little piece of advice; you can use your body heat if you don't have an incubator for growing bacteria. P.S. A huge thanks to the brave Mateja Hajdinjak for helping us prepare the E.Coli for centrifuging, it smelt horrible. (Applause!) - the NanoCollective

The NanoCollective crew

Today was the hardest day, we had to connect all of our components into CPU, and we almost succeeded.

Still we have to write some processes and instructions. Hopefully, we think that we will do that 

tomorrow morning so we can go further.

Here is our work on two boards, it looks pretty. ;) - the C3PU

The C3PU work

Happy project leader 101

Today we were blessed with the opportunity to enjoy our morning workout lead by our great leader Renan. Then, when we actually went to work, our day actually got much better. We got some results! Finally! Actually getting results wasn’t that easy. We had some unexpected problems, but failure leads to perfection. Soon our pendulums swung just as expected. Later we did some programming and made our first working program which still needs to be improved. Here are some cool photos made by of our lecturers Leo Sutic, so you can also enjoy them. - the Unpredictables 

The Unpredictables work

Laviru & Irena :)

Day 7: Head over feet

Dear readers,

yesterday the project leaders finally had a chance for some rest however, they decided they will surprise the participants by putting Project X to action. Mateja, Renan, Ruben, Sebastijan and Neva went to the store and bought quite worrying amounts of chocolate and other yummy stuff you need for making two delicious chocolate cakes. Matea really outdone herself and the boys helped while the logistics (Neva) struggled with writing yesterdays daily news. During all that participants were happily working in their new just-for-today workshop labs and you can read their impressions in todays news. Finally, we bring you a few thoughts about the school that our lecturer for the day, Leo Sutic, wrote about the school: "If travel is a good deal of waiting, S3 is anything but. Upon arriving I was quickly rushed to the day's briefing session. The next day was also packed: project work, workshops and lecture followed in quick succession. Anyone making it through this will make it through anything."

Love,
Petra & Neva

Today we had our workshop projects and our group took upon itself the task of measuring the universe. Our project leader, Vanja Šarković, guided us through the history of astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology from the ancient times when the geocentric model was used to the 20^th century where modern (difficult) cosmology rules the day (and night).  We took our time debating whether the models used in the past are correct or not and why. Furthermore we used our time to solve some of the problems that have been bugging astronomers for a long time – such as: retrograde motion, understanding of Hertzsprung–Russell diagram and main-sequence fitting, problem with the flatness of a galaxy’s spectra, space expansion and Hubble law. The concepts we mostly worked on (and hopefully understood) are the evolution of ideas, the nature of light, character of space and gravity ect.

 With love,

The Enteršpajz

P.S. We ran into this strange singing man just a light year away from the Gymnasium. Check it out!

Enteršpajz in action

Enteršpajz workshop leader Vanja in action 

Dear readers,

Impossibble... It is truly impossible to wake up this early - 6:45 am. Almost dead, the morning workout killed the last drop of energy in us. The  short project work began. After rapping it up, the true one started. Being like a chemist makes you feel incredible. And yes, we have a cool name - we are The Chameleons. You may ask why - but we won't answer, think about it (it has something to do with changing colour). Anyhow, prepairing the experiment was a completely new experience for some of us. Murphy's law tried to stop our adventure but we stood strong ad won just like we do every time. We synthesized a red powder - Radman's magical formula (€53/mg).

With love,

The Chameleons

The Chameleons in action

Hi guys, we are the Blast : Matea, Reka ,Domagoj with our leader Nikolina. Today we had fun learning about flu viruses and bioinformatics. We learned some theory and we used flu as a model organism in the process of learning . We discovered few pages where we could find lots of useful data about biology (for free!) and we concentrated on genetics. We observed how fast a virus change, and how successful the vaccines are. Our presentation was quite AWESOME ;) we could answer all the questions correctly. 

With love,

The Blast

The Blast in action

Today Stjepan, Michael and I (Tonko) were working on customization of our own OS. We've managed to set up Linux operating system from scratch, from handling with the 'black screen' to GUI. It was really fun to learn something more about operating systems, user interface and lots of other things. Of course, we couldn't do that without our workshop leader Jens Rauch! All in all, we were delighted that we broaden our knowledge outside of our projects.

With love,

The OS Godz

The OS Godz in action

So today was a swapshop day. The three of us, Laviru, Karla and Monika attended a swapshop by Domagoj Fijan titeled Quantum algorithms. Since quantum mechanics is very complex, we'll try to explain in short notes things we learned today:

-        first of all à quantum mechanics is AWESOME!

-        quantum mechanics is strange and abstract (e.g. When you throw a ball, it goes through the wall.)

-        Schrodinger had an imaginary cat and a box with the poison and his cat was in the same time dead and alive à that's how we came up with the name of our group: DEAD OR ALIVE

-        yesterday was Schrodinger's 126th birthday according to Google

-        we used Schrodinger's cat example to exaplain the superposition of states in quantum mechanics which enabeled us to check all the solutions of some problem at once

-        this phenomenom is what makes quantum algorithms very fast

-        and finally, we used Grover's algorithm to solve '' the boxes problem''

The end.

The Dead or Alive

(at least in this parallel universe)

 The Dead or Alive in action

After physics and computer science we discovered magical chemistry. 
There was some rough hairy guy, and we actually did't know what we was talking about.
But, he showed us some really good video about ferrofluids.
Our workshop leader wanted to poison us with some chemicals (NH3, HCl...), but we found masks around and we succesfully
survived. :D
After all, we made our awesome ferrofluids, so here take a look. ;)

With love,

The Crazy

The ferrofluid made by the Crazy

The Crazy crew

Finally we bring you some photos of the organizers struggling with daily news and other organizational bussiness and everyone eating the magnificent cake that Mateja made. 

Petra in action

Neva in action

Day 6: Fear of the briefing

Dear readers,

the dreadful briefing day passed in the best possible way. The organizers and the project leaders are very proud of their groups. Everyone did well and there is still time for practice and learning until the final presentations. We bring you the groups impressions with the briefing in their own words.

Petra & Neva

Briefing day

Yesterday we had a lot to do because of the two girl members of our team who overslept for one hour. We made the first step of preparing sol-gel and oxygenized successfully the material without breaking anything. Then we had to revise everything what we have done so far for the briefing. We were a little bit nervous about the presentation in which we had to explain what we have done. But the main problem was the questions we got by the audience because they knew everything about our projects and they have asked us difficult questions. After surviving all this we made firework! - The Madd 

 

The Madd during the briefing

Yesterday wasn't just an ordinary day. Yesterday was our one and only briefing day. Waking up, we immediately felt the enthusiasm. We knew it was time to take our project to the next level and, at the same time, to make a presentation. After all that drilling, cutting, gluing, soldering  and winding the probe was almost done. We took a few photos which we, after thorough editing, put in our presentation that KILLED the crowd ('cause we are the KILLERS).

 The Killers crew during the briefing

Daily News

DATAbetes

Today was a great day with a lot of work, so this is the reason why we are “very creative” with daily news…

We were really productive and we started to work with our diabetes data frame as well! *.*At the end of the afternoon we finally managed to finish our briefing presentation but it was very tense. And although we didn’t have time to practice, everything went well (but we will do better for the finals)!

 

 

The Databetes crew during the briefing 

Daily news, /The NanoCollective/

We spent our morning trying to mix 'n' shuffle citric acid with the nanoparticles, playing with the Paramecium, experimenting with the Arduino and planning to get bacteria for our experiments. The afternoon was a wee bit hectic because we were making preparations for our presentation about what we've been doing so far. And so we had our big show and we did pretty well. So did the other presentations. What do you think?

 

 



The NanoCollective crew on the briefing 

 

Yesterday was a really difficult day. We were learning programing in Python and we like it. We have fun typing different codes. After that we needed to do our presentation about what were we done in the last few days. We tried to find the best way how to explain to others our work in group in 10 min. Maybe it was difficult but we also have some fun. - The Unpredictables

Today, after implementing the simple parts of the CPU, we had to learn something about finite state machines in order to make a central unit of our CPU. We programmed our first finite state machine, the traffic light, and we hope that tomorrow we can start doing some hard work on the central unit. - The C3PU



 

The C3PU crew during the briefing

 

Today was really exciting day. Besides working in the lab where we decalcified and incubated our samples, we were preparing for the first briefing. The presentation was quite interesting and we hope everyone of you liked it. There was a lot of questions which we answered successfully, at least we hope so :) Tomorrow is a workshop day so we won't be in the lab 'cooking' ourselves at 40+ degrees.

Only one thing more: "Narwhals, narwhals swimming in the ocean!" 

DNATRiX

 

 

 

 

The DNATRiX crew on the briefing



Day 5: Nature! It's all over me! Get. It. Off. :)

Dear readers,

yesterday was our leisure day. We went to beautiful nature park Papuk where we were met by park ranger Miro Mesic who gave us a beautiful tour of count Jankovic grave, glass makers graves, Jankovac waterfall and other beautiful nature around us. He also told us all the stories regarding the nature park and its profound geological and political history. We had barbecue for lunch and after lunch we climbed a peak called Ivačka glava where we took our group photo and learnt all about geocache. Since a picture is worth a thousand words we won't say anything more.

Enjoy your day,

Petra & Neva