Brains, Babies, and.....Lasers

Hello friends! I am currently working in the Child Study Center, specifically, in the Child Neuroscience Lab under Dr. Kevin Pelphrey. What my lab does is use fMRI, eye-tracking, and fNIRS (Near-InfraRed Spectroscopy) to monitor the comparative brain states of children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders. There are a few areas we're particularly interested in: the Superior Temporal Sulcus, the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, the Fusiform Face Area, and the Amygdala stand out particularly well. I'm also experimenting with the NIRS device, which fires lasers into the brain and then delivers a cortical image with the temporal resolution of an EEG, and a spatial resolution that's significantly higher than said device. I'm also helping out with some experiments and coding eye-tracking for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I'll never be able to watch that movie the same way again.

Displayed here are some photos of what I do...generally speaking. And the brain is mine; no HIPAA violations for me!

Sad Science

Sometimes you have lots of protein, and then it degrades over the course of your purification, and then you have no protein. And then you are sad because you don't have anything to present on lab meeting on Monday other than complete and utter failure. and dispair. and sadness. and tears. maybe I will take pictures of my tears instead of my failed gels.
Also, I would like to point out that biology is epically winning the poll right now. However, if you combine biology and chemistry and physics into 'biophysics and biochemistry' it would TOTALLY dominate over say, geoscience. Just sayin.
Well, I'm taking the weekend off from my scientific failures and I'm going to Vienna. I will eat cake and be happy.
-Julia

Turtles! Ducks! Stability of Ice/Rock Mixtures with Application to Titan!

Hello Adoring Fans! Let me tell you a story. About 4.55 billion years ago, in a spinning disk/cloud of dust, gas, and other stuff, our solar system began to form. The sun turned on. C1 chondrites (awesome meteorites) condensed, preserving a key to the bulk elemental composition of the solar system. About 30-50 million years later, something about the size of Mars slammed into the proto-Earth, fucking melting the shit out of everything and flinging a cloud of debris into space that eventually condensed into our Moon. But before that, in the vicinity of Saturn, something very special was happening. Titan, the second largest satellite in the Solar System and currently the only celestial body in the Solar System besides Earth to have large, stable bodies of liquid on its surface, began to form out of various bodies with inhomogeneous density. Various processes occurred, driven by the relative densities of ice/rock mixtures within the planet and by the ability of convection to remove radiogenic heat. Recent measurements of Titan's gravitational field (gathered by Doppler Tracking the Cassini spacecraft during a few flybys) allowed the determination of it's moment of inertia coefficient. Like Callisto (but unlike Ganymede!), Titan is incompletely differentiated. That is, unlike Earth, its deep interior does not feature defined layers with distinct composition (iron-rich core and silicate mantle in the Earth, in contrast). So, there's probably a layer of intermixed ice and rock.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? IS THIS CONFIGURATION STABLE?!?!?!?!? WHAT CONSTRAINTS DOES THIS PLACE ON THE CONDITIONS OF ITS ACCRETION?!?!?!?!!?

I DON'T KNOW I DON'T KNOW I'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR TWO DAYS STOP YELLING PLEAZE.

But before classes start, I will have something coherent to say.

And possibly pictures of a gathering of infinite turtles.

Yes.

Oh PS - I'm working at CalTech now. It's very pretty here. Lots of sunshine and palm trees and turtles. Have I mentioned the turtles? I saw two ducks today too. They appeared to be friends with the turtles. Turtles! It's turtles all the way down!