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

Scorched corn fields in Texas, 2011. Image obtained from Wikimedia.org

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.

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.

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An old news story – Kopitiam in Boston

The Kopitiam Poster

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.

Kopitiam in Boston

As noon approached on a recent Sunday, a line of people began to form outside the multi-purpose room in the M.I.T. Sidney Pacific Graduate Residence. These people were mostly from Singapore, queuing patiently, as Singaporeans are known to do, for good food. The rich aromas of cooking curry mixed with various aromatic spices began to waft from the doors. The chatter grew louder, more animated, until it abruptly fell to an absolute silence as a student came out of the multi-purpose room and calmly began to instruct people what to do once they went in. Then, the line started moving. The kopitiam was open for business.

Welcome to Do The Molecule Dance, and 2013.

New Year's Eve at Faneuil Hall, Boston. Picture taken by Cassie Martin on my phone.

This is not the first entry here, but it is the first entry in 2013, and since this blog just sorta got a new look, Welcome to Do The Molecule Dance! Also, I guess it is kind of an afterthought, because I didn’t write a ‘First Entry’ when this blog started in October 2012.

So here goes.

First real publication!

My first published article on BU News Service!

I am required to file a new 500-word story every Wednesday at 2 pm for one of my classes. Which means that usually, that new story gets written between noon and 2 pm, during my two-hour break which is also supposed to be my lunch break. So I was really, really pleasantly surprised when my professor liked the mushroom story enough to have me do some edits and get it up on the Boston University News Service website!