Anvita Goenka



hi everyone! let me share a few things about myself. so i am basically a second year student from srishti school of arts design and technology,bangalore-India.apart from designing i love to travel,i love wildlife and mythology.

May 24-Day 1

Science was one of the subjects in school that used to scare me the most and most of the times what i did in class was either pretentious learning or sleeping. i used to hate it as i did not understand anything. n here i am today a part of i-gem dealing with synthetic biology. at first i was like this is not my cup of tea but how about giving it a try and removing that fear from your system that you cannot study science. The first was full of silences and blankness as what all we learnt in class 10 was coming up and i felt just like we were back in school trying to understand those complicated terms. There was like a chemical concoction going on in my head onto what was happening and what are we supposed to do.i was eagerly waiting for the class to end because again biology and me were poles apart. at night i just began to study all of a sudden about all the basics and give everything one reading at-least and thats when everything made sense and i went like o.O this is actually so cool and i was happy about the fact that i choose to do this and as a team we will produce great work.

May 25-Day 2

SO day two was a little less scandalizing as i felt things for me falling into place and all the DNA and RNA and genes began to make sense. todays most exciting part was extracting our own DNA and burring it in whichever way we wanted to. for the extraction you need salt water,prill,alcohol and a test tube and there you can see you DNA after performing the experiment floating on the top. It was an amazing feeling to see that thing as it was nothing else but just white chunks of you.

STEPS

1..Take some salt water in your mouth and gargle for 2 minutes.

2..spit it out in a test tube.

3..Add detergent to it for example-Prill.

4..Add alcohol.

5..There you go you see the strands of your DNA coming up in the form of white chunks.



For the Burial

i decided to drain out DNA with water because it is said right? "What goes around comes around?" so you never know in some way or the other it will come back to me.



May 26-Day 3

Another new day yashas was not going to be there so i thought aahhh ill just sleep it off but iw oke up thinking that we are going to learn new things each day and i have to overcome the fear of "icannot study science" so i went to college. It was a very research oriented day and we planned on how we were going to build our "jugaad lab". Starting with we divided ourselves into various groups and who was going to make which lab equipment. So me sohil and achala decided to build the centrifuge. After brainstorming on what material we could use we decided to make two centrifuges one which would be eco friendly and the other which would run on electricity, this was just about it we still have no idea how are going to exactly make it and will it work or not. After we broke for lunch we saw how to make a microscope which as pretty cool. Thats how yet another day ended which left me thinking and wondering how amazing it is that we can actually mix design with science and make a whole new world out of it and bring about a change.

May 27-Day 4

Today i arrived early in class and it was nice to wait for the rest of the people to come. After every one was here we were asked to answer a few questions-

1.What is life according to me?

Anything that is natures creation is Life to me

2.Do you think you have the rights to modify a living thing?

All living or dead organisms are interdependent on each other and need each other for their survival. If you see we don't have any rights to modify a living thing because it was designed by nature in a certain way to function and hampering with that will make our life easier but will pull us closer to our ultimate doom as well.!

3.What is design according to you?

Anything that is functional something as simple as a safety pin to something as complex as cell phone is a design.

May 28

Weekend was finally here i was pretty exited about it as i did not have to wake up early in the morning for college but i woke up before time at 8 o clock i and damyanti had to go to sohail's place to collect the ingrediants to grow bacteria without using any lab equipments or chemicals. so this is how you do it. Agar is an important substance as it is the solidifier so an alternative for agar is gelatine and for anything to grow you need to provide it with the nutrients and food so chicken broth was the food here

STEPS

1.Collect some puddle or pond water.

2. Make chicken broth or you get them in small readymade bricks in the market so mix them with water or any liquid.

3.Make liquid gelatine.

4.Be careful that all the above are at room temperature.

5.Mix the chicken broth and gelatine in pond water and leave it for the bacteria to grow.