Day 20

Today wasn’t quite as productive as yesterday. I took my laptop to the lab with me today, so that I could graph my Elisa results in English. I graph the values of my known concentrations, but I couldn’t figure out how to find the concentration values for my samples because Excel doesn’t have a function for it. The one it has was backward from what I needed. At about ten, Alex asked me to go to a lecture with him and a few others upstairs. It was a Life Science teacher at Texas Tech University talking about stress tolerance in certain genes. Alex said it would be in English, so I would learn a lot. The professor was Chinese, so he ended up speaking Chinese with a few English words thrown in every once and awhile. His powerpoint was in English, but it didn’t really help much because it was supplemental to what he was talking about. I lost interest in about twenty minutes and had difficulty staying awake. It got very hot in the room because it was quite small and completely packed with students. I was just pouring sweat. It got over at about noon, so we went to lunch.
I went to the old lab after the break so I could ask Cici for help on my graphing. She was busy with an experiment so Zhen offered to help me. He didn’t understand it either though. He ended up enlisting the help of a teacher’s aid. He helped us but couldn’t remember the formula for changing the results to a linear equation, so we could determine my unknown concentrations. I actually ended up figuring it out because I had done it in Calculus and Statistics. I have to wait until tomorrow to finish it though because I left my laptop in my room after lunch. It turns out that my results for my high concentrations of known protein were too high. I took to long during the last step so the higher concentrations reacted too long with the last chemical. I was lucky though because it is the low concentration knowns that are the most important. I just have to throw out my three highest numbers and everything else will be fine. I guess the protein levels I found of my unknown samples were better than some of the graduate students have ever gotten. That made me really happy because I was sure that I completely messed it up.
Then, I went back to the new lab and talked with Tina a bit. We decided that my hypothesis would test whether or not Bt cotton is still effective to use in China. I will be testing it in many ways and learning a lot of new things, including checking cotton bollworms for signs of resistance to Bt cotton. I am pretty excited about it. On the side, I will also be helping Ibraham with his herbicide resistant weeds. Then, we went to supper and to the supermarket for more water. I also picked up a new webcam since mine won’t work. It was very cheap; just under $7 actually. We even checked to make sure it would work. I also figured out that my cost to eat everyday is under $2. You can’t buy anything in the US for $2 let alone an entire day’s worth of food!