TRAIN Scholar Evelyn Rivera Elias' Blog

  On Monday, Cassandra and I took a bit of the sample from Dr. Cotter's microbiology class TSA plates of the wastewater treatment samples. Then, we mixed the sample into TSA B broth tubes to see if there was bacterial growth.  On Tuesday and Wednesday, I did counts of the microplastics for stages 5 and 6. My counts were lower than others, so I counted twice to get a more accurate count. The counts may be compromised because each time the filters are exposed to light, the less plastics are visible. We will be redoing the filters, so hopefully, we will yield better results.

  I think I had the best Spring break this year. Maya and I went to a food festival called "Foodieland", and they had a variety of food from different cultures. In the images above, there is takoyaki with a spicy curry (probably my favorite) and hawaiian honey comb, which was good but I was expecting it to taste like a beehive. We also ate oysters, bone marrow and had sugar cane juice. Overall a great experience that I hope to do again next year.  I was able to get a lot of sleep and took care of things I had neglected. It was very much needed and I am glad to be back now.

  Today Cassandra showed me how microplastics look under the microscope and ultraviolet light. Dr. Cotter wants me to see what the current methods are for counting the microplastics before creating the AI-based program. While I knew it was manual counting, I thought they kept track of the number by making paper tallies. Apparently, they use a clicker to keep track of how many microplastics, it goes up to 10K. It was time-consuming just looking at them and I noticed there were microplastics all over the FTIR Machine.  In the picture above are the swabs of the wastewater sample I made last week