Paint With All the Colors of the Rainbow

Joyeux quatorze juillet to anyone in France or who loves French culture (like me)! I'm not going to post Nematodes (Part II) quite yet.

So, I just started reading a book called Schrödinger's Cat by Adam Hart-Davis. It goes through different eras of scientific thought, listing out important scientific discoveries of each time period. I finished reading the very fast chapter, focusing on the ancient thinkers (before the Enlightenment, that is) yesterday, and I found one of the sections to be especially intriguing.

This section talked about Theodoric of Freiberg, a Middle Ages German clergyman turned scientist who attempted to explain why the rainbow was colored the way it was. His explanation was original and verified by experiment. The one big thing is that it was entirely wrong.

Theodoric believed the rainbow was not made of a continuous spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple). Rather, he believed there were four dominant colors: red, yellow, green, and blue. Red and yellow were "clear" or translucent colors; blue and green were "obscure" or opaque. 

He performed several experiments to verify his thoughts, such as passing sunlight through a glass prism and looking at the sun through a flask full of water so as to model a raindrop.

Somehow, Theodoric's conclusions turned out to be correct though his explanations had been all wrong. Still, he can be commended for using the scientific theory - proposing a hypothesis and then testing it.

Nematodes! (Part I)

So I am finally done with my internship and free to write! And since I spent a whole month at Caltech studying nematodes, I thought I'd give you guys a little introduction into what they are and what I did there.

Here we go: a nematode is a roundworm. Some are free-living (usually in soil) while others are parasitic. The species of nematode that is studied most often is C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans), which is also considered a model organism, meaning that it is easy to maintain and easy to work with. It is a free-living variety and has essentially been domesticated for the lab.

I, too, worked with C. elegans for the majority of my lab work. My project involved the ecology of C. elegans, particularly what food it prefers. In the wild, C. elegans dines on soil bacteria. In the lab, it usually eats a strain of E. coli called op50. The point of the project I worked on was to determine which bacteria the worms preferred, other than op50.

To be continued in Part II...