Edwin at the AU Student Research Conference

Today was the annual Student Research Conference at American University.  I was there all day, but in the afternoon was a science poster session.  Donna and the kids arrived then to look at the posters. 

I took Edwin around to some of the posters... at first he was a little unsure of what was going on, but he quickly realized that he was able to talk to "real" scientists talking about their experiments.  He got very excited and had lots of fun engaging them in discussion about what they did, possible failure mechanisms, and even proposed some ideas for future work!  After about the third poster, he was quite happy to go up to the presenter on his own and ask them to explain the poster to him.  He totally enjoyed stopping them to ask questions, provide suggestions or comments, and just generally participate like one ought to at a scientific conference!

Highlights:

• Edwin was very interested in a poster about controlling rats enjoyment of varying concentrations of sugar water by nerve stimulation -- electrically and optogenetically.  He suggested trying different intensities, wavelengths, and patterns of the light stimulation to see if the response could be modulated.  I heard the presenter tell someone else later that Edwin had asked the most challenging questions that anyone had asked her!
• Edwin liked two posters about the fact that different portions of the brain brain control different aspects of language (Broca's region for words and Werneke's region for grammar) and that the cerebellum (associated to reflexes) was also connected to these regions.  He asked if this meant that your brain responds to certain language tasks much faster than others because of this -- unfortunately FMRI doesn't have the time resolution to test this!
• He thought the poster describing building a synthetic genome for E coli was really cool, because it was kind of similar to programming.   
• Zebrafish!  Edwin liked the fact that by exposing them to alcohol, they could be convinced to swim around differently
• He was interested in a poster about a possible treatment for skin cancer in rats, and got the meaning of three different plots about the performance of their treatment..  (The treatment dramatically reduced the severity and number, but not the presence, of tumors in succeptible mice.  I have to admit it took me a while to actually read the labels on the plots to figure it out.)