/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6809196
Started doing undergrad research for a professor over the Summer. Working on an atomic physics project involving emission spectroscopy. A lot of this stuff is still very new to me though so I don't know how much I actually get so far.

How do you do math research?

What is the point of funding math research?

>>6809257
Math research falls into two categories - applied and theoretical.

Applied is where all the money is. Usually involves coming up with clever ways to model shit or optimize existing models (ex. stock market models)

Theory is more work and doesn't pay as well, but is a good alternative if you don't want to sell your soul to Wall Street. Plus there's always the hope that you'll crack some difficult problem or come up with some new elegant theorem.

>in masters year of engineering
>have 15 page research paper due on Friday
>worth 30 % of a course
>done no original work
>not sure if they even expect original work
>can't even copy the calculations of the main paper because it's so fucking annoying trying to figure out how they did it
>current plan is to spew an overview of the topic and its concepts and hope I get 15 pages
>expecting a shit mark

I did extremely well at exams with a shit tier work ethic. Even with two other courses and this project I estimate that, including two 1 hour lectures and work for other courses, I did only 12 hours of work over the last 7 days.

But even if I fixed that, how the fuck do I come up with original ideas / insights in to research areas when it all relates to theoretical models that depend on 50 gorillion equations / algorithms? It's computational chemical kinetics modelling.

>>6809196
I'm trying to join a research project in software engineering at my uni as an electrical engineering major, but I'm not sure how to approach the professors because none of them know me. What did you guys say to join a project?

>>6809196
Spent the last two years of my undergraduate studies working on plasma physics, especially on damping mechanisms and the effects of shear on plasma waves. Did a poster and a short talk last year and we've got another poster that we're sending to the APS meeting at the end of the month (don't think I'll be able to go to the meeting myself though).

Started grad school this year, already found a professor I want to work for. They're doing some really cool research here with plasma shear and dusty plasmas so I'm really excited to get involved.

Happy to talk about this kind of stuff if anyone's interested. Hope some more of the plasma/fusionbros on /sci/ contribute to this thread, I always love hearing about what other groups are working on.


>>6809335
Honestly - I've found that the best approach is to just ask. Contact one of the professors involved in the project, ask if you could come by his office this week and talk to them (face to face meetings are always better). When you show up just explain who you are and that you're interested in getting involved with the research they're doing.

Unless a project is already oversaturated, professors rarely turn down help.

Testing psilocybin research to replace antidepressants

Within 40 years it will be more common than antidepressants

Cap it

>>6809387
How does it differ from existing antidepressants? What are the benefits?

>>6809365
I want to do some sort of research with my fusion tech professor but I have this feeling that I'd embarrass myself or don't have a strong enough background in math to do so. He's a great professor and his background is in phys, with work in fusion plasmas and propulsion systems. i'm not sure if it's not too late in the semester to ask him now or wait until next semester or what.

>>6809414
Don't worry about embarrassing yourself. Nobody goes into undergraduate research already having a thorough understanding of the material (if they did they'd probably be doing their own research instead of working under a mentor).

Doing research, especially as an undergraduate, is as much about learning new physics and new skills as it is about the actual research work.

When I started doing plasma physics as an undergrad, I was halfway through the first semester of my third year E&M course. I knew next to nothing about plasma physics except that the guy teaching our class did research with it and that he was a pretty cool guy. So I asked him about his research after class one day, the discussion kept going all the way to his office, and by the end of the talk I was his new research assistant.

Our department didn't have a proper plasma physics course, so everything I learned about plasma physics I learned as a result of working for him. He went out of his way to make sure I was learning the material as we went along, too, giving me books and papers to read, talking to me about the physics of what we were doing during our lab meetings, giving me smaller experiments to try on my own, etc.


Doing research as an undergrad is a fantastic experience and I can't possibly recommend it enough. You learn a ton of stuff you wouldn't normally learn, you learn a ton of skills that will be applicable elsewhere, and nothing says "give me this job/grad school offer" like having a couple of posters or presentations under your belt and a gleaming letter of recommendation from a mentor.

>>6809464
Thanks for the advice.

>>6809387
Is your lab looking for a grad student with strong experience in alkaloid biosynthesis and the quantum nature of consciousness? Hook a bro up.

>those undergrads worrying about not being good enough at math
kek
You should see some of the PhDs I have to work with who get confused at an integral with a Dirac symbol in it.

>>6809312
why are you even still in the class?
Cs are basically failing in grad school

>>6809196
Project 1 (for class)
Design a novel sensor using cameras or something similar for use in robotics. Our idea involves using a level we shoot with a camera to get orientation

Project 2 (for $$)
Testing high-speed, high-gain op amps.
Not much to say, there's a bunch of them and I'm just suppose to get them to work

Project 3 (for more $)
[redacted] [redacted]ing for [redacted]
I write code for [redacted] in [redacted] to [redacted] possible [redacted].
The code is awful, I don't like not being able to complain how awful it is, and it's a larger project than I've ever worked on so I can't just say "fuck it" and re-write all their shitty code in a real language.

>>6809856
This

Despite what you might have heard the majority of physicists suck at math. The only physicists who care enough about math to actually get it are the theorists... everybody else basically learns enough to get by and then uses math tables/matlab/wolfram for anything more difficult.

Most of the professor's I've TA'd for have to rehearse derivations the day before lecture to make sure they remember all the steps of the derivation because working it out off the cuff is too difficult

>>6809414
There is no such thing as embarrassing yourself when doing undergraduate research; the only embarrassing thing you could do is refuse. Research is a graduate's game; as an undergraduate taking part in it you have basically no expectations levied on you. If it's paid, you'll have expectations proportional to how well you're being paid, but if it's volunteer then nothing is expected and everything is appreciated.

Once you graduate, there is no such thing as bad undergraduate research experience. If you do well that's better, obviously, but short of shitting in the samples and wiping with the test results there is nothing you can do that will act as a negative.

Enjoy the experience. If you love it, pursue a Ph.D and make research your life. If not, you tried it, and you're a better person for having done so.

>>6809896
>everybody else basically learns enough to get by and then uses math tables/matlab/wolfram for anything more difficult.
This is true for absolutely everything, everywhere, not just physics. The only people who truly enjoy doing math go into CS/Physics/Pure Maths theory. Everyone else in STEM sees math as a tool and realizes that wolfram et al does it much faster than you.

>>6809918
>short of shitting in the samples and wiping with the test results there is nothing you can do that will act as a negative.
Oh fuck, that explains a lot

>>6809924
>Everyone else in STEM sees math as a tool and realizes that wolfram et al does it much faster than you.
Wolfram is good for dumb little experimentalists who cant into math.

Wolfram won't figure out a theoretical model for you or make an intuitive leap.

>>6810160
Project 1
>Whole genome sequencing of my plant
Project 2
>Find sex determining region, develop primers
Project 3
>Finger printing of crop plants

I really do hate troubleshooting pcrs

Mechanistic biochemistry and structural biology, working on protein folding pathways.

Background in biochemistry/biophysics, worked in labs that study lipid metabolism, cytoskeleton, viruses/infectious diseases.

>>6810211
You sound pretty cool

>>6809196

Meh, I decided to part ways with research after my PhD.

I would only have continued in academia if I got a director's fellowship or similar at one of the National Labs, or some other prestigious postdoc fellowship; needless to say, I applied, but didn't get any. I think a large part of it was my advisor, he wasn't particularly well connected (which is a necessity for these things, unfortunately), despite being at a top school, and my research wasn't anything exciting.

Applied to a lot of industry jobs, but didn't take them.

Instead, I got a boring desk job. Only 70k starting, but 40 hours a week max, and they're pretty strict about that. Per hour, it pays a lot better than the other job offers I got. Plus I value my free time a lot more after having less of it during graduate school.

did a 4th year thesis on binding domains of cell cycle proteins. half bioinformatics (fun), other half lab work with yeast (not fun).
that feeling when you approach the 30degrees incubator after the weekend and pray to see at least one blob on the culture plate (of course see none lol)

Working on enzymes to assist in total synthesis of antibiotics. I'm a second year undergrad writing my first paper now.

>>6810211
Expand on your work a bit. Which proteins and what techniques used?

>>6810290
I find successful platings are done with over-sterilized glass pipettes (ethanol + bunsen burner treatment).

Pic and link related: https://cheapassscience.wordpress.com/tag/pasteur-pipette/

>>6810266
Understandable, research as a career isn't for everyone. I'm curious what you did for your PhD, though.

>>6810290
>tfw some shitty fucking high schooler on a field trip fucked with the dials on an incubator and your cultures all got fried over the weekend

>>6810734
No way.

Way.I had visiting rug rats take turns sneezing into my cultures.

>>6810743
Yep, one of those stupid visiting student tours or something came through our department Friday and I guess one of the little fucks messed with the incubator.

Nobody noticed it before we quit for the day but when I came in this morning the incubator was running at nearly 70 C.

The bright side, if any can be found, is that I was the only one who had anything in it over the weekend. I've got to set everything up again but at least it's not like we had somebody's thesis project in their or something.

>>6809365
>>6809414
What kind of research is there to do in plasma and fusion?

It looks very cool but I know almost nothing about what kind of work is actually being done.

>>6809196

Right now I'm not doing shit because I just started medical school, but for the last year and a half of undergrad I worked on a fantastic project with one other person that we're about to get published for.

We developed a microfluidic microchip digital PCR device for high throughput individual mutational analysis that is hundreds of times cheaper and simpler than any commercially available device, as well as being environmentally friendly, which almost no other microfluidic chips are. I had so much fun with that project.

Before that I worked on a different microfluidic chip used for biomolecular mass analysis with electrochemistry using a carbon nanoparticle sieve. Works similar to electrophoresis, but occurs on a tiny microchip and is read by fluorescence with a computer.

>>6810887
> it's not like we had somebody's thesis project in their or something
Oof, that was my worst experience as a TA. We borrowed the adjacent lab's water baths for one of our experiments. I never found out exactly what happened, but I suspect that one group of my students decided that having the bath at 29.6 C wasn't close enough to 30.0 C (instead of just using 29.6 in their calculations), and fucked with the settings on it. Then the next group came in, saw two baths at 40 C (because the first had come way up), and moved the other one down. Something like that.

In the end, six baths got changed, completely fucking over a bunch of grad students. I'm talking a year's worth of research, gone.

The worst part is that I even checked at the end of the lab to see that the baths were, indeed, still at the correct temperatures. And all temperatures were accounted for... just in completely the wrong order. I'm just glad the senior lab instructor was in there while I was giving the pre-lab talk and heard me stress a dozen times about how important it was not to fuck with those things. But fuck did I feel bad.

>>6809196
Molecular biology grunt here. Working on a family of proteins related to cell death/survival/proliferation/autoimmunity/neurodegeneration. Currently looking into PTM:s, basic shit I know but you gotta start somewhere, but I'm getting quite fed up and would rather go somewhere else. Gerontology maybe.

Does anyone know of a way to induce site directed point mutation of endogenous DNA in eukaryotes besides synthesizing part of the genome from scratch?

>>6810909
I don't understand, was there something in the water bath? Heating water by itself changes nothing

>>6810943

Do you mean that you're looking to induce a specific point mutation at one specific position in the genome, rather than recreate a small portion of the gene, knock out the original, and insert your copy? I haven't heard of such a thing and I'm not sure how it'd work, but I'm not a biologist.

>>6810950

Many chemical reactions are extremely sensitive to temperature. By changing the temperature, you could change the entire reaction that occurs.

>>6810973
Oh really. I mean, is this it - Lab A gave Lab B their water bath. Lab B used water bath but heated it. Lab B gave water bath back to A, and A resumed experiment in heated bath.
If so, it's idiocy on the grad part. Why wouldn't you check the temperature of a water bath you just let someone else use before continuing reactions in it

>>6810981

I'm not the person who was telling the story, but yeah I assume that's what happened. The grad students probably didn't expect anybody else to be using their equipment, even though somebody should have told them if undergrads were using it.

>>6810972
There's a system cal Red-ET or something that can do it in prokaryotes. Modifies 1-250 bp, but it doesn't really work for eukaryotes.

Is what you described actually possible, putting in an altered copy at the exact same position? Would there be extensive modifications to surrounding DNA, extra sequences left behind?

I thought the most common way is to do a knockdown and then introduce a plasmid with the altered gene. This, for many reasons, is not ideal for my system.

>>6810943
obvious site-directed mutagenesis is obvious
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site-directed_mutagenesis

>>6809196
I'm an undergrad assisting with research on amoebae. I started pretty recently so I haven't done a lot but I've done a little PCR and gel electrophoresis, which is cool. We're pretty close to sequencing the DNA of one of the species of amoebae I work with so hopefully I can get in on a paper soon.

>>6810231

Not sure if srs. If it's any consolation, my background is in chemistry and physics, so /sci/entists haven't been too hard on me.

>>6810303

I've been in a few different labs, worked on a number of different proteins. My first few positions were spent learning the basics of technical work (protein purification, cloning, cell culture, etc.), but I've spent the last year or two on protein-nucleotide complex formation in viruses. Techniques have been a mix of in vitro biochemistry, and structural/biophysical studies.

>>6810943

Many companies sell kits for site-directed mutagenesis. I like Agilent's QuikChange:

http://www.genomics.agilent.com/en/Site-Directed-Mutagenesis/QuikChange-II/?cid=AG-PT-175&tabId=AG-PR-1161

>>6810996

Oh, I see, I'm not familiar with that. I'm in medicine so I don't know much about prokaryotes.

It is possible, but it's difficult and I don't think it is 100% reliable. It is similar to putting in a plasmid with a few key differences.

You would have to make your inducible gene with your specific mutation yourself. In addition to making the new gene, you'd have to flank it with a series of nucleotides completely homologous to those flanking the wild type gene in the cells.
After that, you have to excise the gene from the cell using sequence-specific RNA guided endonucleases like zinc-finger nucleases or CRISPR-Cas9 or something like that. You have to make sure to cut out the gene you want to replace, but do not cut out the homologous regions that you replicated on your new gene.

You add the gene to the nucleus and the cell should repair the cut DNA with the homologous repair mechanism using your new DNA as a template, guiding it with the homologous flanks.

I'm not sure about all the consequences. This is an active area of research and I'm not sure how common it is to be used in a lab.

>>6810892
Fusion research is all about engineering - making tweaks and optimizations to existing fusion configurations to try and come up with a system that works.

Lots of work in plasma is in space or laboratory plasmas I think. I keep hearing about "dusty plasmas" but I don't know much about them.

>>6811097
fusion research also works on fusion plasma propulsion systems, advanced fuel systems, correcting mhd instabilities in fusion systems, etc.

>>6811118
MHD instabilities are the big one. Waves and turbulence IIRC are the first or second biggest loss mechanism for fusion plasmas.

>>6811097
>I keep hearing about "dusty plasmas" but I don't know much about them.
It's *exactly* what it sounds like.

>>6810892
>>6811097
Most of the research being done in plasma physics these days is researching space plasmas (mostly in planetary or stellar atmospheres but some research is done on large scale plasmas as well like SNRs), or laboratory plasma physics studying instabilities/waves, damping mechanisms, behavior of multi-species plasmas, effects of shear on plasmas, etc etc.

There's also a whole subfield of dusty plasma research that's sprung up over the last 20 years. When you introduce small dust particulates into a plasma they become charged/magnetized and this dramatically alters the plasma behavior (one of the most notable effects being that the timescale of plasma dynamics and instabilities drops by a couple orders of magnitude)


And then there's fusion which is a whole separate beast.

Have spent the last 12 years as a research scientist in drug discovery with a focus on cancer and a bit on infectious disease. Our lab has chemists, who make the molecules, biochemists/molecular biologists, who assess activity and mechanism of action in vitro, and in vivo biologists/pharmacologists, who assess efficacy and validate mechanisms in animal models.

>>6812315
Awesome... so where's my cure for cancer?

>>6812361
Tough one. >>6812361
Cancer cures may come at the level of the individual..when we get to the point where we can personalize a treatment to your specific disease and then eradicate it (i.e. cure you of it)...or manage it (i.e. control your disease so that you die WITH your cancer, not OF your cancer). In any case, I think that as long as people live longer lives, people will continue to get cancer.

watch what you buy in Texas, permit required on certain items.

>>6812315
Neat - private or public sector?

Do you enjoy the work?

>>6812748
Public. Yes I do enjoy it. Our program/group is well respected/valued in the institution and there are opportunities to interact/collaborate with clinicians and clinician-scientists, which has been important for the translational aspects of our work.

>>6809196
Astronomy undergrad, helping work on an x-ray spectroscopy project. Pretty neat but I'm not sure if it's what interests me. I'd rather be looking at planetary science stuff but our school doesn't do much with it.

My current research is cosmology, specifically observational tests of the accelerating universe. Including the integrated Sachs Wolfe effect which is when relativity local clusters and voids change the observed temperature of the CMB. Other things involve testing the idea that the CMB cold spot is in fact the effect of low redshift void. I also do IGM stuff and feedback in absorption line systems.

Hopefully going observing early next year.

My current research consists of how to fix homosexuality.

>>6813552
>testing the idea that the CMB cold spot is in fact the effect of low redshift void
Could you elaborate?

>>6809196
Applying parallel processing to solve partial differentials of the angular momentum of objects, say a hurricane, across a surface (say a landmass)

Oh Cuda Fortran, how I love you

>>6813641
>Fortran

>>6813668
Yeah I know.

But when the choice is fast code or easy code fast code wins.

>>6813552
What kind of observation? I was under the impression that apart from stuff like the Planck mission, most cosmology was theoretical work

Looking for Supersymetric dark matter candidates at cern.

>>6813609
The cold spot is a region of the CMB which is colder than average. This is not special but it's size and amplitude make it significant as if it was a real CMB effect it would represent a perturbation of extreme unlikelyhood in standard cosmology. Some suggest it is in fact a local void which, in an accelerating universe, would cause the photons passing though to loose energy more than photons going round. It could create a cold spot or make one more significant. The aim is to detect this local void with surveys.

>>6815255
Observational cosmology is big business.
I use data from Planck combined with optical surveys for the ISW effect. Clustering is a big topic in cosmology which comes from imaging and redshift surveys.
There are countless examples of observational cosmology, BOSS-SDSS, Euclid, WFIRST, BICEP2, ACT and SPT... The supernova cosmology project, high Z and COBE which won all the Nobel prizes in cosmology were observational. There are more observers than theorists but many do both. The vast majority of the money goes to observational, the theorists get more headlines with mad ideas.

>>6815504
I should say detect or rule out. If there is no void hen there may be a problem for standard cosmology.