For one of my classes, I was assigned to head out in the morning before dawn and document how something gets set up. That was why, two Fridays ago, I pulled myself out of bed at 5 am to get to Haymarket at about 6.30am. Sadly, I was only there for ten minutes before someone… Continue reading Rise and Shine at Haymarket
Author: xiaozhi
Highlights from AAAS conference 2013 – Family Science Day
Sunday, Feb 17, was a Family Science Day at the AAAS conference. It was also a day that I had planned to be at talk after talk after talk, so I didn’t expect to get twenty minutes free after lunch to go walk around the Family Science Day exhibitions. Here’s what I saw in twenty… Continue reading Highlights from AAAS conference 2013 – Family Science Day
Highlights from 2013 AAAS conference – Part 1
It is the end of day three at the American Association Advancement of Science conference 2013 and I am exhausted. There are two more days to go, so here’s a very brief summary of some of the event highlights for me.
Chinese New Year, and reflections on combustion
Late Saturday morning, I watched children go down the snow-covered streets with sleds as text messages started to stream in from my family. It was approaching midnight of Chinese New Year in Malaysia, where my family returned every year to reunite with my father’s siblings and their families. It occurred to me that there are a lot of Chinese practices that involve burning stuff. If climate change went up against these deep-rooted traditions, who knows what sort of debate we’ll get into?
Pineapple adventures: Part 1
This is a very special year, because it marks the first (and possibly last, I’m still thinking about it) year that I make my own pineapple tarts. Yes, the pineapple tarts that are an essential item in every Chinese Singaporean’s house during Chinese New Year.
What I did not expect, was that the five pineapples I cut up and cooked into jam would eat all my fingerprints.
An open letter to the EPA
Dear EPA officials,
I was quite excited by several headlines this weekend saying that a federal court decision had gone against the ethanol mandate. Considering the devastated corn crop from last summer’s drought, the rule forcing gasoline producers to maintain ethanol levels at ten to fifteen percent is expected to result in almost half of the corn crop ending up as ethanol. It would make a lot of sense for the rule to be relaxed this year, if not forever.
Tiny ‘wires’ and a big step forward for solar cells
This is a pretty exciting piece of news for the solar cells of the future. Although I must admit, I don’t quite agree with the use of the word ‘breakthrough’ in the title of the press release that came out last week – ‘Breakthrough in Solar Cell Research.’
Engineering cyanobacteria
I like to think of myself as an environmentally-conscious person who tries to save energy and reduce my carbon footprint. But there are times, like now, when I just want to keep my apartment warm enough to wear shorts and not feel guilty for contributing to carbon dioxide emissions. What if we could recover the carbon dioxide molecules that’s produced from burning fuels and quickly convert those molecules back into energy-rich fuel molecules? It’d be a different story.
Killing stories
This past week, I had two blog entry ideas that were supposed to become two blog entries. But somehow, I convinced myself that they were dumb ideas and I shouldn’t write them. And now I’m writing an even dumber entry about this story-killing process. So I guess, even though it’s the middle of January, this year, I would like to be brave enough not to let the fear of failure stop me from trying. I would like to learn to be OK with imperfect blog entries. I would like to be brave enough to fight the good fight.
An old news story – Kopitiam in Boston
Yes, it really is an old news story – so old that I got a little embarrassed to send my professor another reminder that it’s still not on the BU News Service website. But still, I think it deserves to be out there, and so, even though this is supposed to be a science blog, I’m going to very shamelessly self-publish my story here: Kopitiam in Boston.