The end is in sight....
I know I haven't updated in ages, and I suspect that no one even reads this anymore, but:
I have just under a month left to finish my Div III. (Paper is due May 1st, final animation is due May 3rd.)
I just just made a day-by-day schedule for the rest of the semester, and for the first time all year, I had this feeling of "oh my god, I might actually finish this."
While I've never been genuinely worried about my ability to finish my Div III, until now, that's been the blind faith of, "I'm working on it almost every day, my committee isn't worried, and not finishing is NOT an option, so I'm just not going to think about the possibility of failure." Right now, for the first time, I can actually see how I'm going to finish everything. The end is actually in sight, and while I'll have to work hard every single day from now until the end, it is doable. And I can get enough sleep most nights, and eat food, and have time for friends while I do it.
Since I haven't posted since I started working on my Div III, I guess I should probably say something about what I'm doing. The short version: Creating molecular-level animations of two cellular processes-specifically a dynein walk cycle and a comparison of two types of membrane transport proteins (an ion channel versus lactose permease).
I'm sure that made perfect sense to everyone reading this.
Dynein is a protein inside your cells, and it's one of two main proteins responsible for carrying stuff around inside of cells. It carries cargo from the outer parts of the cell in towards the nucleus. (Dynein is also involved in moving cilia and flagella, but that's not what I was focusing on.)
I ended up animating only half of the walk cycle of dynein, because......I had technical issues and realized that I was missing important pieces of information, and ran out of time. So it's more of a "hop" than a walk. It's like if I wanted to animate a person with a backpack, but realized at the last minute that I didn't know what their torso or arms looked like, or how they moved, or how the backpack was attached to their body, and realized that solving each of those problems would take me months. So I just animated the left leg.
Dynein's left leg.
My second animation is a comparison of two different membrane transport proteins: ion channels vs lactose permease. Both of these are proteins in the cell membrane, which control what goes into or out of the cell. Ion channels let ions get into and out of the cell. They are completely passive-they hang out on the membrane and ions go in or out as they please (sorta). Lactose permease is how lactose gets into or out of the cell. Unlike ion channels, lactose permease actually changes shape when lactose binds with it so that lactose can enter the cell (but not other things).
A preview of the membrane transport proteins. Lactose permease is blue; ion channels are purple. The tiny glowing dots are ions, and the white lumpy thing is lactose.
Some of my goals with this:
I have just under a month left to finish my Div III. (Paper is due May 1st, final animation is due May 3rd.)
I just just made a day-by-day schedule for the rest of the semester, and for the first time all year, I had this feeling of "oh my god, I might actually finish this."
While I've never been genuinely worried about my ability to finish my Div III, until now, that's been the blind faith of, "I'm working on it almost every day, my committee isn't worried, and not finishing is NOT an option, so I'm just not going to think about the possibility of failure." Right now, for the first time, I can actually see how I'm going to finish everything. The end is actually in sight, and while I'll have to work hard every single day from now until the end, it is doable. And I can get enough sleep most nights, and eat food, and have time for friends while I do it.
Since I haven't posted since I started working on my Div III, I guess I should probably say something about what I'm doing. The short version: Creating molecular-level animations of two cellular processes-specifically a dynein walk cycle and a comparison of two types of membrane transport proteins (an ion channel versus lactose permease).
I'm sure that made perfect sense to everyone reading this.
Dynein is a protein inside your cells, and it's one of two main proteins responsible for carrying stuff around inside of cells. It carries cargo from the outer parts of the cell in towards the nucleus. (Dynein is also involved in moving cilia and flagella, but that's not what I was focusing on.)
I ended up animating only half of the walk cycle of dynein, because......I had technical issues and realized that I was missing important pieces of information, and ran out of time. So it's more of a "hop" than a walk. It's like if I wanted to animate a person with a backpack, but realized at the last minute that I didn't know what their torso or arms looked like, or how they moved, or how the backpack was attached to their body, and realized that solving each of those problems would take me months. So I just animated the left leg.
Dynein's left leg.
My second animation is a comparison of two different membrane transport proteins: ion channels vs lactose permease. Both of these are proteins in the cell membrane, which control what goes into or out of the cell. Ion channels let ions get into and out of the cell. They are completely passive-they hang out on the membrane and ions go in or out as they please (sorta). Lactose permease is how lactose gets into or out of the cell. Unlike ion channels, lactose permease actually changes shape when lactose binds with it so that lactose can enter the cell (but not other things).
A preview of the membrane transport proteins. Lactose permease is blue; ion channels are purple. The tiny glowing dots are ions, and the white lumpy thing is lactose.
Some of my goals with this:
- I want these animations to be as scientifically accurate as possible. This means that the sizes and shapes of everything is based on actual data. The motion is also based on data, to the extent that I have access to such data.
- I want my animations to be immersive. To create an environment which implies that what I'm showing is just a small glimpse of a much larger world.
- I want my animations to be, for lack of a better word, "beautiful." I want them to be aesthetically pleasing-something you could watch and enjoy for their own sake, even without the educational aspect.
- With the dynein animation, I really wanted to play around with personification. How much character and emotion can I convey with motion alone?