PJAS Preparation

It's the middle of the average school year and most researchers have spent their time well, having spaced out their work in ways sufficient to have produced results. I am not one of those researchers. To prepare for the PJAS science fair, I have made a presentation that is being revised at the moment. There is but one problem: data. I have not reached the end of my experiment as of yet, with days of work left to be done before I will be, but I am running out of time. The deadline for me to turn in my presentation to PJAS is in about 10 days. That is more or less a frightening prospect for me, but I am going to be trying my best to get some results before then. That means I must work everyday, not to mention cutting corners. It won't be pretty or remotely ideal, but it will get the job done. It only makes me wish that I knew what I was getting myself into before I decided that this was not priority one. Maybe then I would have more time to work on this experiment. Sorry for this blog post being a little sloppy, but I am trying to prevent any of my classes from falling behind because I'm only focusing on one subject. Wish me luck, and I'll update when I can.

Status: Ecstatic but Enervated

Batch 2 undergoing pretreatment.
The Phragmites has a darker color than the
Bamboo, both in liquid and solid content.

My research could be going worse. I have very little to show as of yet for my first batch, but I have started a second batch for more data.

The second batch consists of six falconer tubes: 3 for Phragmites and 3 for Bamboo. Each sample consists of ground up stem/shoot material from either plant in a quantity of 1 gram with 25 mL of water.

I started the pretreatment phase last week and decided to take my time in it. This turned out to be a good idea, as I'm already getting promising data. My biggest success was finding information that points towards my present hypothesis to be correct. The hypothesis is that the structural strength of a plant will be affected by cellulose proportionally. I will try to prove this by showing that Bamboo should be better than Phragmites because it is a stronger plant, so it should have more structural fibers that can be enzymatically hydrolyzed.

In contrast to the initial success of promising results, I am getting close to my first science fair, not to mention my midterms, and I have little in quantity that can be presented. I hoped to have been able to set up my first batch to distill, but that hasn't worked out thus far. I'm being pressed for time by the science fair and feel the pressure already. I hope that I can get enough information to be able to present this Friday for my peers.

The big question at this point is whether or not I will be able to make ends meet and have a full presentation ready by the end of this week. I think I will be able to make it work with glucose measurements, but I'm not sure. Either way, big things are coming this way, so I need to be prepared.