I did my 8-hour grind of work at CTS again today! The highlight was visiting BAT and OM for their research report at the Villanova Room. BAT’s topic was looking into the behaviors of a kind of Samonella bacteria (bad for human guts) when they missed a specific regulator. This research is only the first phase, but in the future, it could be applied to humans to improve our immune system or for medicine manufacturing. Completely irrelevant to BAT’s, OM’s topic was seeing how verbal phrases are processed in the human brain. They found out that the brain process these words parallelly to when the sound came out. This was very interesting because it’s different from our thought initial thought that information follows in a chain, not in parallel to each other.
While I was there, I bumped into A, a friend of TN, YN, and M from Special Olympics and I stopped to listen to their topics. TN’s research was using a scientific method, a scaled metric invented by the professor, to measure a social issue, racism. They found that among Amazon users (the group of people who received the survey), videos about racism only improved those who were always against racism, while it had little to no effect on those who were racist since the beginning. On the other hand, M’s research was the relationship between yeast and native and invasive plants. She was still in the middle of it, so she will need more time to process the data and complete her research, but she seems to be getting there and doing so great!
At the end of my shift, I rushed back home so I could go with AK and HO to Chinatown for Haianese chickie rice! Turned out, it’s HO’s boyfriend’s favorite place in Philly, called Penang (117 N 10th St, Philadelphia, PA 19107). We also ordered homemade Roti Canai (a bread similar to naan with flavorful chicken broth) and Malaysian Spare Ribs on top of half a chicken and chicken rice. We really inhaled the food because they were so deliciously made! The chicken was perfectly cooked – when paired with their chilly good sauce, there is a kick, making the taste 10 times better. The Roti Canai surprised me because it was close to the flavor of Indian food, but I so loved the texture and the juiciness that I couldn’t stop eating this dish! I was so glad that I joined them for this dinner – it’s exactly what I need after a week of lazy cooking and eating crap food!
Trang "Tee" Nguyen 