Greetings from the third floor of Brockman Hall for Physics, at Rice University. I am working in the lab run by Jason Hafner and coincidentally titled the Hafner Lab.

It is a lab that is a cross between physics and chemistry research, the later being a topic I am wildly unfamiliar for. Most of their research involves gold nanorods for various real world applications.

But I am not here to talk about gold nanorods. I am here to talk about milk. The dairy product that many of us consume well past baby status in various forms. Now I am not using actual milk straight from a cow or a bottle, but creating it with a powdered milk supplement. A company that I am not sure I can name has requested specific research to be implemented with this powdered milk that only Dr. Hafner is aware of with my current tasks on a need to know basis.

However, after getting the initial measurements done, I found myself without Dr. Hafner as he was on a week long family vacation in Europe, so most of my week has been various tiny experiments with the powdered milk, for data gathering sake.

Measuring out small samples of milk, with Pyridine!

The main crux of this research has been looking at the powdered milk mixed with various amounts of Pyridine (a smelly chemical) and looking at the results with a Raman scattering laser. The two types of scattering that are rare are the Stokes and Anti-Stokes changes in a chemical, so it is important to look at results that are scanned over a period of time and not just a quick measurement. Some compounds need to be scanned for a long time in order to get decent measurements, but powdered milk and Pyridine thankfully don’t need to be in the machine as long.

Mixtures placed inside the device and recorded on a nearby computer.

Here are the various experiments I have run so far:

1) Determining how different the results looked for mixtures based on different amounts of Pyridine. Tested values were 5% pyridine by volume, 10%, 15% and 20%. The data was scanned for 5 minutes.

2) Our biggest values were with the 20%, so we wanted to see if we would get higher saturated values if it was in the laser longer. We tested 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 20 minutes.

3) We started to get errors with the milk settling, so experiments were redone and are earlier results were much higher than anything we could recreate, which will lead to further experiments.

4) We also wondered how long does it take to settle, so data was taken every 10 minutes on a 5 minute scan, from a 20% by volume sample, to see how the graph changes over time. This experiment was done over six hours and the data has not been analyzed yet.

I know what you are thinking, every 10 minutes over six hours? It was mostly a passive experience, requiring a button click every 10 minutes, but the lab is set up with state of the art beds to allow a more relaxing experience.

Oh and finally, Dr. Hafner is a big cheerleader when it comes to using 3D Printing, for practical lab experiences. It is my hope that I somehow will get to use the machine over the summer as a necessary part of my research, of which the goals are still a bit up in the air. But here is a bonus picture of me, because I love you all.