Summer 2024
Summer 2020 Colabroy Lab – What happened?
In Summer 2020, I worked with five students remotely. It’s hard to do chemistry remotely. But we did our best. Here are their presentations from the Celebration of Student Research and Scholarship in October 2020. I’m so proud of what we managed to accomplish. Alex and Miranda’s work spanned more than just the summer, since they are seniors now. But David’s work really contributed to the publication I’m writing, and Paige and Snow’s work became part of BCM 341: Experimental Biochemistry in Fall 2020.
Miranda Robinson (’21)
Alex Goldberg (’21)
Snow Du (’21)
Paige Jones (’22)
David Strzeminski (’22)
BCM 441 is on Sabbatical
Dr. C will not teach BCM 441: Advanced Biochemistry in Sp 2021 due to sabbatical. Look for a fresh new update to the course in Spring 2022.
Mozzarella Madness: Raw Milk vs. Pasteurized Milk
Raw milk mozzarella (Flint Hill Farms, Coopersburg, PA)
This raw milk mozzarella was made using 1 gallon of raw, whole cow’s milk, 1/4 of a vegetable rennet tablet, and 1.5 tsp of citric acid. I used bottled water to dissolve the rennet and citric acid.
Something that I did (without realizing it) was crush the rennet tablet between wax paper with the flat side of my knife. Then I slid the powdered tablet off the wax paper and into the water. This made the rennet easy to disperse in the solution, and it was clearly working. The curds obviously formed between 20-30 seconds and were thick enough to resist the spoon.
Pasteurized “Whole” Milk Mozzarella
I used the same technique in which I crushed the rennet tablet with the flat side of my knife between a folded piece of wax paper. The rennet and citric acid were the same as above. I had only 1/2 gallon of pasteurized whole milk, so I used another 1/2 gallon of 2% pasteurized milk for 1 gallon total.
Okay…just one more!
Who remembers?
Who doesn’t love a good mechanism?
This is a test…
Black, white and brown
In both pieces, “War” and Coffee Poems the color of the coffee is significant. The Coffee Poems talk about coffee’s blackness, with the color of ink. It is contrasted with milk by color, but not in meaning – the authors imply that milk and coffee share the same “purity” – in fact, the color is the seal of its purity. In War, there is an extensive discussion about the use of milk to turn coffee brown – the exact color of a monk’s robe. The exact color is known only to a select few who must know in their mind the brownness of the robe, and match the color by balancing the amount of milk against the strength of the brew. We might expect the authors of coffee poems to find the kapuziner impure. In War, Allen tells the reader that Turks believed milk added to coffee caused leprosy.
What is interesting here is not the presence of milk, but rather the appeal to coffee’s color. The coffee poems appeal to the blackness of the coffee as evidence of its purity – and by implication, its holiness. The writers of coffee poems imply the purity of the coffee imparts God’s favor or blessing – the drinker also experiences enlightment, by the pursuit of wisdom. The addition of the milk to make the coffee brown in the kapuziner would therefore be an adulteration of the beverage. And yet, being able to make the kapuziner is evidence of one’s depth of knowledge of Vienna’s coffee culture – you have to know the exact color of the monk’s robe. So in the case of the kapuziner, the knowledge was required to change the coffee’s color. The enlightenment (or state of enlightment) of the coffee drinker/brewer is significant.
Balzac and “Eight Cups a Day”
Certainly Balzac (The Pleasure and Pains of Coffee) would have been delighted to read “Eight Cups a Day” (Johnson, NYTimes, 2008). Balzac was a writer made legendary for the sheer quantity of writing he produced in his lifetime; productivity fueled perhaps by his obsession with coffee.
In reading the two pieces, written over 100 years apart, I was first intrigued by the number of references to human anatomy. For example, in “Eight cups a day” we read of cardiovascular difficulties, lowering of the risk for atherosclerosis and the cerebral infarction – all medical terms associated with the heart and the brain. Balzac too mentions the diaphragm, and the plexus of the stomach, and also the brain(x2)/cerebral. He addresses the stomach (x2) filled with suckers and papillae and its digestive juices. Between all these anatomical references, the brain/cerebral is repeated most often.
Interestingly, the physical and anatomical would seem opposed to the spiritual. Something spiritual is intangible, while a brain or a stomach is certainly not. In “Eight Cups a Day”, we find a reference to my demon and Satanic worship – both written in reference to coffee’s effect on the author and other drinkers. In Balzac, “few writers are actually becoming more spiritual” (P1), while coffee effects on the stomach are as a “pythoness appeals to her god”. A pythoness is a female priestess or practioner of divination. Finally, at the end – the coffee drinker is referred to as a “man of spirit” – implying that the presence of spirit is evidence of coffee drinking. In these reference, it would seem that the evidence of the spirit/spiritual/possession is a result of the coffee drinking – something so physical, the act of drinking, producing measurable biological effects that are simultaneously spiritual/non-physical.
Perhaps the reference to the spiritual or the intangible is implying the intangibility of the ideas themselves. The ideas are a product of the coffee drinking, after the pythoness appeals to her god Balzac does find sparks shooting up to his brain. But this is not consistent with “Eight Cups a Day” where the author abstains from coffee and is able to function “just about normally again” – apparently recovering from his “sluggish brain.” Was the author able to generate ideas without the coffee? It would seem so…
And yet the author of “Eight Cups a Day” refers to the coffee as “my demon”, while Balzac’s pythoness appeals to her god. Who is her god? If the pythoness is conjuring spirits from her god, then “she” is conjuring spirit from Balzac himself. Balzac and Johnson (“Eight Cups a Day”) are both the gods and coffee is doing their bidding. And perhaps in the mystery inherently associated with these kinds of intangible words – demon, spirit, god – these authors are pointing to the invisible science that turns stomach acid, blood, nerves and brain matter into words, sentences and ideas.
But first…Coffee.
This Fall 2017 semester will be the first time that Coffee class goes online. FYS 282 has been around for a while, and it’s always been about writing. Writing all the time about what you are thinking or studying is critical for learning.
So why blog?
We spend more and more of our lives online these days…and in many ways, online communication is terse, cryptic even vapid. But does it have to be? Can we write for the web as our thinking selves? Not just our social selves? I think so.
Let’s think in the open
Is it summer yet?
It’s 65 degrees and raining here in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It doesn’t feel much like summer…yet. But my research students get here next week, and then it won’t matter what the weather is like. It will be SUMMERTIME in the lab.
Why is summer so awesome?
No grading.
No faculty meetings.
No 8am organic chemistry labs.
Just plenty of time to think about our research and actually DO the experiments we want to do. My NSF-RUI proposal was just (finally) funded. I’m ecstatic. I’m thrilled that we will finally have the instrumentation we need to move our work forward, and that someone thought it was worthwhile to fund us. Nailing the undergraduate research niche is hard…harder than I thought. Doing high impact work that is accessible to undergrads and that you can publish at a rate that won’t get you scooped…well, I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Part of the NSF funding allows me to refresh my teaching lab, BCM 341 to bring in new original projects – so, this summer I’ll be working on rebooting that course.
TTFN
