Nutshell, Nutcase, whatever.

First of all, isn't this the effin' worst thing to see first thing in the morning?

So yeah. That's how my morning started. The next thing I did was get all of the cleaning chemicals out from under the bathroom sink and drench this mofo. Laugh all you want, but I just want to say that even elephants are scared of these suckers. And for good reason.

The past two weeks have been currrraaaazzzzyyyyy. Midterms finished, so I had a lot of time for research. My research partner and I designed and built a small chamber for holding biological solutions, which would be frozen in a controlled manner and charged with electrodes. It's a simple design, but here's what we came up with:

Here's a test where we froze the chamber with distilled water inside. You can see the solid-liquid interface in the picture. The rims on the top and bottom aluminum caps are for the electrodes to clip onto, and the cooling plate is at -20*C.

The application? Cancer research. In cryoablation, a treatment method that freezes a tumor in cycles, sometimes cancerous cells at the edge of the tumor don't freeze completely and they aren't killed. This is because the frozen mass of cells is surrounded by the patient's warm body, which tries to thaw it. My professor wants to see if applying controlled electric pulses, in addition to the freezing treatment, will completely kill the cancer.

He really liked the design and the sizes of everything, so we're gonna start working with cancer cells starting this Friday. I'm telling all my friends that I'm playing with prostate cancer and leukemia-before I kick their asses. Not my friends' asses. The cancer cells'. I reallllly hate cancer.

I could also potentially have a job with NASA this summer. Wish me luck.