S2:9 Just a Girl Living in a Plastic World

Just a Girl Living in a Plastic World
Going into this research project, I knew that people, including myself, use plastic in their daily lives. However, it wasn't until I started my experiment that I realized just how dependent we are on plastic. Think about it and ask yourself, "How many times today did you use plastic or plastic-related materials?" As for me, when I reflected on this, I realized I come into contact with plastic several times a day. Almost everyday, including today, my microwavable lunch comes in a plastic container. The fork I use to eat lunch is plastic. My water bottle is plastic. That's a lot of plastic!
Aside from pondering about how much plastic society depends on, I also began to start my project poster while I waited for the small glass petri dishes to get delivered by Amazon. Once they arrived, I washed them in distilled water and placed them into the laminar air flow hood to dry. It was a long process but pretty to look at.

S2:8 It's All About Control

It's All About Control
This week was all about brainstorming how to control for the independent variable since. Initially, distilled water seemed to be a good control but when I ran it through the filtration system and analyzed the sample, I saw a significant amount of microfibers and other unknown pieces of material under the dissection scope. As a result, I decided to try and filter a large quantity of distilled water several times in hope that I would see the quantity of microfibers and particles decrease after each filtration. After filtering the distilled water sample three times, I can still see the presence of microfibers and unknown pieces of material. I am going to try and filter the sample a few  more times and see if I can at least filter out all the microfibers.

S2:7 Out of the Lab and Off to D.C.

Out of the Lab and Off to D.C.
This past week was particularly hectic, but I would redo it in a heartbeat. I missed the first part of the internship week, because I had to fly to Washington, D.C. for a few days. I'm part of this political advocacy fellowship program where we are taught to advocate to our legislative members for the continuance of antipoverty programs like SNAP, MEDICAID, USAID, and the Global Fund. During the fellowship year, we fly out twice to Washington, D.C. and speak with Senate and Congressional Representatives. My favorite part of the policy summit was speaking with representatives on the importance of continuing to increase the funding for the Global Fund and USAID Fund, because Tuberculosis is the leading infectious disease killer among people around the world. Supporting programs like the Global Fund and USAID  can help other countries gain access to newer equipment and educational support to help with programs that reduce childbirth-related death rates, lower rates of TB infections, and many other programs. I also really enjoyed seeing how science can intersect with policy. After lobbying some AZ representatives, I flew back to Phoenix and picked up on the Microplastics project. Project highlights from this week included receiving the all glass jars and disseminating them out to fellow interns. I also spent some time brainstorming faster ways to collect water samples from around the Valley of Phoenix. I decided that I am going to ask my biology classmates to bring in samples. I think I will be able to collect water samples from all 13 villages in Phoenix. My goal is about 30 samples. We shall see what happens!

S2.6: I Saw Some Stuff Under the Microscope!!!!

 I Saw Some Stuff Under the Microscope!!!!

This week in internship, I started to run samples through the vacuum filter. So far, I have a total of seven samples (Shout out to everyone who collected and brought in a sample from their home!) and have tested four samples. The video above provides insight into the experimental process. Our attempt is to reduce contamination since theoretically, microfibers can be found in the air, and basically everywhere. With that being said, all the samples are ran in a laminar airflow. The first seven samples were collected in glass jars that contained black plastic caps, and this was due to lack of access to other collection containers.  Moving forward, we are now able to collect future samples in glass jars with metal lids to reduce water sample interaction with plastic. After running the four samples and analyzing them under the microscope, I saw what appeared to be microfibers in most of the water samples. I am looking forward to using non-plastic containers to collect and test more samples.