/sci/ - Science & Math

What about Linguistics?
Am I welcome here?

Attempting to begin writing my Introduction right now.

If I can just get straight in my head what order I'm going to write this thing and what to include.

>>6503918
I suppose so, what are you working on?

>>6503907
Just about to start a PhD on diesel emissions catalysis. Get to use a souped up Titan e-TEM that is worth more than every car I have ever even been in all put together.

Pretty stoked.

>>6503992
Sounds cool, what are you trying to demonstrate with your research?

>>6504008
pushing the limits of knowledge on catalysts, their reaction processes, and atomic scale characterisation of such. end result hopefully a groundbreaking highly efficient super cheap catalytic process for emissions reduction.

>>6504041
Nice!

Undergrad researcher here, posted in one of these a few months ago. I'm on a temporary project researching accretion and the general 3 dimensional behavior of complex dust systems in an air-free microgravity environment (so we're trying to answer some questions about solar system formation and ring-moon systems). Much system design, 3D printing, and payload construction has happened since I last posted, and the experiments are set to run in the summer.

>>6503918
Definitely, I love linguistics. Tell us about what you're working on.

>>6503907

>latex instead of nitrile
>no safety glasses

>>6504098
Clearly staged photographs are always great cringe material

I'm working in the lab of a computational chemist this summer in the field of density functional theory.

I'm working on a way of constructing Kohn-Sham exchange-correlation functionals for electrides with effectively axially symmetric cavities containing free electrons.

chlorophyll based photovoltaic-cells

>>6504098
Sometimes you're working with stuff where you're only concerned about contaminating it excessively, not about it hurting you if it gets on you.

Not everything in a test tube is dimethylmercury.

>>6504174
Cool, how long until we can grow our own solar cells?

I've just finished my undergrad dissertation (psychology) about emotional convergence in people, hypothesizing that the amount of people present would increase it and a few other secondary hypotheses

>Not one p value was below .05

I probably should have put more effort into it, the method was flawed and there was more extraneous variables than I could count but overall it was a fairly weak design. Here's hoping for a 2:1 at least.

Catalytic upgrading of biomass to higher-value chemicals to support the emerging biorefining industry.

Or - using chemistry to turn plants into other stuff! Like plastics!

>>6504051

Are you using a cubesat to test this?

>>6504771
We have no idea. The problem is that the chlorophyll degrades too rapidly to be considered for any practical applications, and all attempts to make them, last longer than a day have produced no results. Like thousands of researchers are tackling the problem for years and there hasn't been any real progress, so it's basically trial and error.

>>6503907
Plasma physics. Just started a study of filamental quenching of electrostatic ion cyclotron waves in plasmas.

Applying a bias to a Langmuir probe in a plasma creates a relative drift between ions and electrons in a plasma, and a high enough bias/drift can excite acoustic waves in the plasma. When the gyroradius of the electrons approaches the order of the radius of the probe, the EIC waves damp out.

We're studying the effect in greater detail.


>>6504051
>>6504823
From the sound of it he might be working with dusty plasmas, in which case they're probably setting up a rig for parabolic flight experiments rather than a cubesat platform.

I could be wrong though. Either way it sounds cool and I'd love to hear more about it.

>>6504782
>emotional convergence
The fuck is that?

>>6504823
No, but that would be a great test platform for future experiments. Some co-workers are sending an experiment to the ISS this summer and I can't wait to see how that works out.

>>6505554 guess right, it's a parabolic flight. Rather than dusty plasmas (which sounds interesting. What are they exactly?) we're using a synthetic lunar dust analog called JSC-1. We're launching "planetesimals" through clouds of JSC-1 in vacuum tubes and measuring how their velocities relative to the clouds affect the rate of accretion.

I finally defended my thesis.

But now I feel so listless.

>>6504194

Latex gloves aren't desireable because someone in the lab might have an allergy. At least, that's why they're banned at my university.

To make this post more on-topic, my research most recently involved me accidentally inhaling some dust of lithium aluminium hydride and now everything smells like swimming pool chlorine, I'm sure it'll be temporary, right, right?

>>6503918
Not if you're going to be a timid faggot.

>>6505753
>We're launching "planetesimals" through clouds of JSC-1 in vacuum tubes and measuring how their velocities relative to the clouds affect the rate of accretion.
Oh wow! Very cool! Are your 'planetesimals' made of a similar compound? What are the scales you're working with for your chamber and your accretion cloud?

Be careful to properly pad and secure your rig, I know quite a few faculty and students with scars from colliding with experiments or bumping into sharp corners during parabolic flights. Have fun though!


In answer to your question, dusty plasmas are basically what they sound like - a plasma is generated and a cloud of extremely fine particulates are introduced into the plasma. The particulates become charged and (when the gravitational effects are negligible or the electromagnetic forces are sufficient to overwhelm gravitation) behave like charged particles in the plasma.

But because the particles are many orders of magnitude greater in scale than the particles of the plasma, and because they are capable of building up significant charges, their introduction to the plasma causes a lot of completely different phenomena to emerge.

>>6505753
Bring a 20 gallon can of confetti to celebrate with after you finish taking your data.

>>6505811
>Are your 'planetesimals' made of a similar compound?
This is the major parameter other than velocity we're varying. They're quartz spheres, some of which we coat in JSC-1 and others which we leave bare.

>What are the scales you're working with for your chamber and your accretion cloud?
The test chambers are 3" diameter cylinders, 12" long at the most. 12" was preferred for all of them, but such a length wouldn't allow us to capture the slower-moving planetesimals before full gravity was re-introduced.

>Be careful to properly pad and secure your rig
NASA representatives have been checking in with us about safety and progress, but I don't think this has been done yet! I'll make sure to bring it up at the next meeting. To be honest, I'm more concerned with dodging flying vomit chunks than the experiment platform. My co-workers aren't exactly known for having strong stomachs.

I'm surprised introducing dust to a plasma can make for such interesting science! JSC-1 would probably make for a cool dusty plasma experiment; It reacts quite noticeably to electrostatic forces (hell, some of it even tends to follow my latex gloves around when working under the fume hood).

Since you seem to know a lot about plasma, what do you know about laser-induced plasma channels? I'm looking apply for research at my uni in a lab on the cutting edge of high-powered laser plasmas, and while I'm familiar with the science behind lasers (I'm a photonic engineering student), the plasmas not so much.

I'm fucking with nonabelian cryptography. Too bad research of people much smarter than me started to show that it's a dead end.

I did my dissertation on the growth of thin films of metal oxides. TFTs, diodes.

Got a few publications, not really high impact, though, due to lack of pretty pictures/wasn't state-of-the-art and didn't really compare to IGZO. Collaborations were nice.

Most of what I did was more yield/reproducibility since it was the beginning of the project, others have carried on project and are doing more with it.

Now I'm doing industrial research and I hate my life. Sometimes I just want to do something useful, even if it doesn't require any brainpower.

>>6505914

Also, I hate organic electronics with a passion. Most fucking overhyped piece of shit technology. I spent a lot of time working on that stupid shit.

>>6505893
lel, why the hell not

Seriously, it's tempting to want to fuck around up there once we're done. We will, but not to the extent I wanted. Among the things I wanted to do:
>glue chess pieces down to a chess board, get pic of me and m8 playing upside down chess
>bring pipette filled with water, charge up a pencil and let some water droplets orbit it

>>6505913
That's unfortunate mang. Have you started thinking of any backup plans?

that feel when chemistry major
that feel when literally one third of my classmates are in some sort of research group

>>6505916
Hey, I did my dissertation on growth of thin films of small molecule organic semiconductors.

My work is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. I'm trying to get into industry because I've really started to hate my experience of academia.

>>6505979
>I'm trying to get into industry because I've really started to hate my experience of academia
I switched to a major with potential for industry (rather than astrophysics, as great a science as it is) because I just got a bad vibe from academia. What in particular is driving you away?

>>6505983
The fact that no one, not even my advisor, cares at all about my work.

>>6505994
that's probably because you didn't do one of the "cool" majors.

>>6505999
I think it's more because he's reached a point in his career where he doesn't have to care anymore.

bump for research

More of a general question. I was in psych club in undergraduate so I volunteered to help with some experiments that psych majors were running. A few of the ones were self-evaluation or questionnaires.

Given that I was aware of redundant questions to filter inconsistencies and the actual objective of a few of the studies... what do the researchers do to compensate for this?

How do self-reports account for people saying what the researchers want to hear? Whether this be what looks good in a moral sense or just catering to or against the hypotheses of the researchers?


Could have gone on about my genetics research, but it was pretty mundune

I'm conducting experiments on various organic and inorganic materials to see how they react to various types of conscious energy directed towards them. It's basically a continuance of the work done by Masaru Emoto but with stricter controls and larger sample sizes.

>>6503907
Considering doing a project involving the spectral analysis of a variety of species; my friend is currently doing similar phd research using one of the largest databases in the world to study speech patterns in the hopes of creating more realistic A.I., which I find pretty inspiring.

CS undergrad researcher reporting in. We are creating a compiler that would switch marked pieces of code with neural network instructions doing an equivalent thing. The point - less power consumption, way faster performance. Cons - margin of error, which can be controlled if you need more accurate results.

>>6503907
About to start a summer research project on stability transitions of nano-mechanical structures. Basically going to use bifurcation theory to investigate structural changes in things like nanowires and graphene sheets

>>6505554
So are these sound waves or EM waves? Why do the waves damp out? What are you actually trying to show?

We haven't really talked at all about plasma physics in any of my courses yet, so I'd really like to know more.

>>6506902
>>>/out/

>>6507214
They're acoustic-like waves in that there's a physical oscillation of particles not like you see in a sound wave. But because you're dealing with charged particles instead of neutral gasses, there's electromagnetic interaction which has an effect on the wave behavior.

When you apply a bias to a Langmuir probe, it drives a current through a small channel in the plasma. The EIC waves depend heavily on gyromotion of ions in the plasma and they damp out if the gyroradius of the ions becomes as large or larger than the size of the current channel.

We're hoping to determine the precise relationship between different sized current channels and critical gyroradii and which specific geometric properties determine the cutoff for different kinds of probes.

Undergrad aerospace engineer here, this summer I will be researching telemetry systems and how to make it so ground stations automatically interpret data from spacecraft.

>>6508784
That's cool. Speaking of, what do you know about autonomous rendezvous and docking? I hear there's a lot of engineers in different aerospace groups working on that concept

Currently working in computational astrophysics.

We're attempting to simulate the thermodynamic and relativistic behavior of a collision between a spherical, stellar mass distribution of molten metal and silicates and another, comparable object composed of solid water.

The results should be quite interesting.

>>6504098
glasses are for weenies

I bet you wear a helmet in lab too kek

>>6508925
Hahahahah holy shit you fucking got me.

>>6508925
Oh fuck you

Currently testing 2 novel organic compounds that could at some point potentially be used to treat brain cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Right now testing them on human immune cells, but it's a battle because the protein kinase c (PKC, the enzyme we're trying to activate) acts differently in different cells and to different activators and the results are not easy to interpret.
It's fascinating as fuck, though

>>6508925
I first read this my instinct was to alter it for fresh new copypasta.. then I realized.

Just got into doing research for one of my astronomy profs. Nothing too interesting yet, mostly just running analysis on radio telescope data.

Working on characterization of thin film pnictide superconductors.I designed a photolithography mask to make Josephson Junctions to take measurements of multilayered films.

>>6509172
>It's fascinating as fuck, though
Indeed! Sounds like you're doing really important work anon!

Keep up the good work!