Thursday, 24 July 2014

All good things come to an end... and are repeated in 2015! Can't wait for S3++ 2015! :)

Dear all,

S3++2014 has come to an end! While the participants/project leaders and organisers are catching up on their sleep (YES!) :), here’s a little reminder on how great these last 10 days were!  :)

Time flies by when we’re having fun! :)




NanoDocs 

In the last few days, we learned about probabilities, and to which extent can we use them in our advantage. We theoretically and experimentally proved that the probability that something is going to happen is in fact directly proportional to the number of ways it can happen. Furthermore, we calculated the nuber Pi in an outdoor experiment (in the picture). Learning about Monte Carlo simulations and the application of probabilities in everyday life was a lot of fun for all of us because it really clarified the concept of measuring probability. Every day we get to know each other a bit more and as a result function much better as a team, and even though we've slept for maybe 15 hours in all of these few days we are still very motivated to work on our projects and form new experiences, and, of course for the final party ;)

 Stinkers 48

20th July: Yesterday was a complete DI-SAS-TER! Truly everything went wrong. We were supposed to create super-duper, glowing green in UV light bacteria, buuuuut.... We were all sleepy, the lab was hot and humid, our special LB plates for that experiment had frozen, we lost tubes with bacteria (they were hiding deep in the ice), the plasmids with genes for the green-in-UV protein did not want to come off the paper and the most important - we forgot to put the plasmids in the tubes with bacteria. What’s the conclusion? Sleep more, kids. It really helps.

PS. Patricia was not sleeping under the table - she took the picture.


Laser Benders

Hello everybody,
It's been a while since you've heard from us, but for everybody here, it all happened so quickly! It seems like yesterday

when we first arrived to the school, and now we're finishing up our projects and will all be leaving in less then 2 days!
A lot of exciting things have happened to team Laser-Benders; one of them being the experiment setup that's finally ready after maaaany hours of work. We've spent a couple of days  programming in Python, wohoo! We learned how to program a simulation of a random walk of particles and after that, a simulation of diffusion limited agregation which explains how fractals actually form in nature. We learned all that in 2 days of programming, and 50% of the team never had any prior coding experience!
Next step is to repeat the experiment with silver colloid particles that are, in fact, fractals so we can apply everything we've learned so far. Saturday was a swapshop day and a great opportunity to learn about something new, so half of the team had fun with robots and the other half with chemistry.
Monday  is an important day, or so they tell us. That's the day when we'll be presenting all our work to everybody else including mentors and participants and it's bittersweet, because everybody is eager to hear how everything turned out for other teames, but also sad, because it marks the end of the school.

Good luck to other teames and have fun,
Xoxo
Team LB! J


The SEQuers

Day 5:
Tin: We are still programming…and programming. But it is OK when you have excelent leadership!
Day 6:
Tin: Finally some lab working. We got some intro for the PCR and we prepared samples and then performed PCR. This was special day for me because I finally got the opportunity to see this thing in person.
Day 7
Tin: Another day in the lab, but this time with some different purpose. After performing the PCR we continued with gel electrophoresis. I must say this is really interesting.
Jovan: Finally some lab work. Btw II have also found code for facebook color  which you can see here. During the course of the last few days we have really developed as team, so my friends were kind enogh to let me preform part of their experiment because there was not enough time for mine. My mentors are the best :D!

And some final remarks:

Sara- We had the coolest project, the best mentors, and the best team and it was a really, really nice experience. Working on the project as a whole was really fun (yes, even the programming part :) ), and we got to meet a lot of interesting people, who come from very different backgrounds and cultures. So , all in all, it was so great, and a lot of it was thanks to Jelena and Matilda :) (who did a reeeally good job as project leaders).


Martina- S3 was great experience for me. I enjoyed  working on my project. I learned so many things in 10 days, something that is not taught in regular school, but can be used in further scientific career.  Our project leaders were incredible; they had so much patience with us in computing and lab work. Young scientists, our mentors and organizers, taught us how beautiful and interesting science can be. I am really grateful for being a part of this amazing project and I hope that I will come back as swapshop or project leader.


See you next year!

Tonko&Tonka - S3++2014 organising team :) 

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

What a start! - Summer School of Science 2014



Hi everyone!

It's been a hectic first 4 days at our little scientific bubble! Take a look at what we have been up to! ;)

NanoDocs

During the last few days we learned about the minor differences between cancer cells and healthy cells and how we can use those differences to target only cancer cells. In short cancer cells tend to overexpress CD47 ("don't kill me") receptors which tell the white blood cells that they are healthy. The problem here is that unlike with bacteria whose receptors are fundamentally different from ours the ones on the membranes of cancerous cells exist in healthy ones as well, which is why chemotherapy destroys a lot of healthy cells as well. This problem can be alleviated with the use of multivalent nanoparticles. Using a program (in Python) which we made we are trying to design nanoparticles that can enable us to target much more cancer cells than healthy cells. We are having a lot of fun getting to know each other in the team and learning new things and new approaches in cancer treatment.


Stinkers 48
 
Hello! This is (from the left) Dora, Patricia, Pawel and Tesa. Together we create the Stinkers 48 and we fight against stereotypes and discrimination of bacteria living in and on our body.  So far we have grown bacteria from our armpits, befriended a dead insect Fluffy (our mascot) and started an experiment that filled the whole room and also the hallway with a wonderful smell of fresh garlic and onion. This is the origin of the first part of our name. The second one you can see on the picture in our hands: all mighty and antibacterial gel named ‘48’. Hope to smell you soon!

Laser Benders

Hello everybody!

Team Laser-Benders has been enjoying our time in Požega in the past 2 days.
After we got to know each other better on Saturday, our leaders started to introduce what would our workshops look like. It turns out, we were about to go on an exciting journey learning about how awesome fractals are!
 We started off learning about the idea of fractals and where we can find them in nature. After going over the math between them, we calculated the dimension of the Norwegian and South African coastline and learn how to use the computer to figure it out. After spending some time learning some theory and how fractals are applied to optics, we needed some practical work. We spend the afternoon playing with lasers in the dark, and look what we got!
 After dinner, we joined the other teams in the library and listened to a lecture by Ivan Đikić, famous scientist of Croatian desecnt, from Goethe University in Frankfurt. We learned about ubiquitin and how to make a difference in science.
Tuesday is an important game for the team, since we’re about to learn more about waves so we could do even cooler things playing with lasers later! Everybody’s tired because of the game that nobody actually watched all that much because nothing was happening for the most of the time. But, we learned you gotta make sacrifices for fractals, so we are ready to keep on working!
Bye for now, from the coolest team that’s having a lot of fun here,
Pozdrav and a warm talk to you later,
Team LB!


The SEQuers

Jelena & Matilda: Awesome starting days here at S3! So far a  lot of hard work, but a lot of fun as well! We dived into depths of genomics, sequencing and programming, but hopefully, we’ll have some nice results already before our first briefing :)
Jovan: Great day today, lot of useful but also challenging stuff learned. I am sure that knowledge I gained in last two days will help me in my future career. Looking forward to
Tin: It was a completely new experience to get a brief introduction into the bioinformatics through Linux.I am sure this will help me in my future career. Also, looking forward to learn some other programs than Linux. :)
Martina: I had a great time today. I like biology more than computing, so I liked theoretical part more.  I was so afraid of Linux, but it turned out well.
Ana: It was really interesting to learn how to use Linux and how to use some of the commands as I have never done anything like this before. Looking forward to learning more in the following days :)
Sara: - It‘s really cool to hear about what it’s like to work as a bioinformatician, and about new ideas such as storing regular data with DNA etc, but we survived the programming part as well :D


Antonija
   Out of all my organisational efforts Cokolino with haselnut and keksolino have proven to be the biggest hits – you can conquer the world with chocolate ;)
   Teaching is the best possible thing on the planet! Seeing people getting enthusiastic about the science that they're doing is priceless, amazing and so beautiful – feels like being wrapped in a scientific bubble where even the sky is not your limit – but it's an interesting topic to study, as we will see in one of our following lectures.
    Home is where the heart is – Summer School of Science, it feels incredible to be back home.

Thursday, 15 August 2013

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 :)


Wednesday, 14 August 2013

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 20th 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