Cluster 1
Number Theory and Discrete Math
So apparently, not all infinities are equal to each other. Coming out of the weekend, our professors wasted no time in taking the delicate wheelbarrow of knowledge we had built up over the weeks, and sending it, burning, off a cliff. Delving deeper into sets of integers and the concept of infinity, we used symbols such as ω and ℵ0 (learning the Greek and Hebrew alphabets are fortunate byproducts of our lessons) to better understand and classify infinite sets of numbers.
Meanwhile, a large portion of Cluster 1 has also been trying to understand and classify the license plates of the world. Geoguessr is a computer game that virtually drops you somewhere in the world, at which point you use knowledge of your surroundings to pinpoint your location. Every day, we learn to apply seemingly useless facets of a landscape to narrow down our guesses. Everything from the sun’s position, the language, the foliage, details on a Google car, and yes, even license plate colors, can drastically narrow down possible locations. Surprisingly, the material we learn in Number Theory and Discrete Math has given us an edge (albeit slightly) when it comes to Geoguessr. The Greek letter sigma, representing an ordered sum, is one that everyone in Cluster 1 is quite familiar with at this point. Thus, finding a sigma on a nearby roadsign is a dead giveaway to our location. During the evenings, Dorm 4322 has become a hub for several members of Cluster 1. 斗地主, or dòu dìzhǔ, one of China’s most popular card games, is easy to pick up but quite difficult to master. Involving a 1v2 match, it demands a strategic approach and coordination between teammates in order to win. As we wrap up our third week of COSMOS with our project posters completed, several of us have put together full research papers on our topics. Meanwhile, Cluster 1 is continuing to branch out and discover new pastimes and activities. By: Rohan Kaushikan |
Cluster 2
Nanochemistry and Nanotechnology
This week in Cluster 2, we wrapped up our last two labs of the program. In one, we made hand cream and sunscreen using a zinc oxide solution. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to actually use our end products since our course assistants (CAs) didn’t want to deal with the paperwork if someone were to be accidentally poisoned. Our other lab involved anodizing bismuth to create bismuth oxide, resulting in (most importantly) lots of pretty blue and purple colors that formed on our bismuth disks.
Other than that, we took a more hands-on approach to our classes, especially the afternoon ones. We spent a day with atom kits, putting together rods and balls to form a structure that simulated a complex molecule and enjoying ourselves in the process as we socialized and blasted music in the background. We also had a work day on Friday to finish off our group projects, during which we asked each other and our CAs for assistance frequently, building camaraderie in the process. For lectures this week, we focused more on the physics aspect of nanotechnology, discussing the chemical reactions that go beyond creating a functional battery as well as other topics related to voltage, current and electricity and how they connect to nanoparticles/chemistry. On Friday, we took our first official cluster “field trip” to the Scanning Electron Microscope on UCSC’s campus, as well as to a couple of other smaller labs. We got a detailed lecture on how the microscope worked; we also got to take a close look at some of the samples we had produced in our experiments, as well as random other things such as a mosquito’s eye. At the smaller labs, we found out a little bit more about the physics of light and magnetism. We also stopped at a cafe to get drinks and food on our way back. We’re all learning more and growing as a cluster every day! By: Maya Sriram |
Cluster 3
Bugs and Bones: The Biodiversity and Ecology of Vertebrates and Invertebrates in the Monterey Bay Region
Things are starting to get busy in Cluster 3! To start off the week, we took a field trip to the UCSC Younger Lagoon Reserve. In the morning, we explored the lagoon and made some interesting finds. Scurrying around the sand were velvet ants, which are known for their extremely painful stings. We also used our bone identification knowledge from last week to identify several rabbit skulls and bird bones. After we had some pizza for lunch, it was time for us to help out the reserve in exchange for letting us visit. A few of the workers there informed us of their efforts to restore a pond for the California red-legged frog. Our job in the afternoon was to help pull out invasive plants and plant helpful native plants. This would create the ideal environment for the native red legged frogs to thrive. Although all the work was tiring, it was still satisfying in the end to think about how our efforts were going directly toward building a new healthy ecosystem.
Later in the week, we all started work on data collection for our final scientific posters. Half the cluster focused their project on mammals, while the other half focused on insects. For mammals, data collection involved looking for squirrels. We walked around campus, keeping track of the various squirrel species that we spotted and the locations they were found at on campus. With this data, each group was able to choose what path they wanted to take with their hypothesis. For insects, we used the line transect sampling method to collect data on insect abundance in a meadow on campus. This involved people walking in a straight line at a rate of 5 meters per 3 minutes and catching insects along the way. Since there were eight different transects, we had enough data to look for patterns and form hypotheses. We have a lot more work to come, and we can’t wait to share how our projects turn out! Make sure to stay tuned. By: Leo Zhang |
Cluster 4
The Physics of Single-Atom-Thick Sheets
At the beginning of the penultimate week of COSMOS, Cluster 4 had the chance to go kayaking in the sunny Monterey Bay, surrounded by carefree seals, sea otters, and countless long-beaked pelicans. Afterward, many of us drank creamy Santa Cruz clam chowder (the soup which no trip to the wharf is complete without) at Woodies Café, and ordered an exorbitant amount of garlic fries, which we still were eating well into the evening. The smell of fish entered our noses as we approached the line of fishermen lined up neatly along the metal railing of the wharf, prompting many of us to hastily pull up our masks. Our supervisor for the day, Mr. Antoine Bracy, frequently warned us not to “peel off” — to not break off from our Cluster 4 group. But in reality, I knew there was no risk of us “peeling off”; I knew we wanted to stay with each other, experiencing the joys of the Santa Cruz Wharf together, rather than go off on our own.
This week, Cluster 4 changed up the typical humdrum of morning and afternoon lectures with five guest lectures and an in-person lab tour of Prof. Aiming Yan’s Scanning Electron Microscope. The guest lecturers included professors from Princeton, Columbia, Cal State Long Beach, and UC Santa Cruz and San Diego, all of whom discussed topics relating to 2D materials — single atom-thick sheets of specific elements or molecules. Preparing for our final projects, we are diving deep into theoretical topics in Quantum Mechanics, ranging from Quantum Computing to solving complex, 3-dimensional Schrodinger's equations. Each group is prepping hard, using graduate-level textbooks, while also challenging themselves to go “beyond the textbook,” as Prof. Yan reminded us one cloudy Wednesday morning, by extracting additional research from scientific papers. Each project will prove a formidable opponent, and completing each is a laudable achievement. By: Julian Chen |
Cluster 5
Video Game Design: From Concept to Code
This week in Cluster 5, we delved into some special topics: more specific design and development skills that we hadn’t covered in depth or at all yet. We started off with an introduction to 3D modeling by Prof. Mirek Stolee, where we created a table. We later added textures to it and exported it to Unity. We also began to learn the basics of making 3D games in Unity. With Prof. Stolee’s guidance, we created a controllable character that could collide with the table we made earlier and jump off of it onto another platform. The platform game seemed very simple, but it was actually quite difficult to code.
Those of us who were still struggling with programming split off from the rest of the class to review the basics with Prof. Dani Wright, who explained variables, classes, and objects to us. We also received lectures about other important topics, such as sound design from our CA Kyle Gonzalez, community-focused games from guest speaker Rose Klein, and level design from Prof. Stolee. Overall, these new skills helped us feel more prepared to make our final projects, which we will start next week! Outside of class, Cluster 5 also spent some time preparing for Prof. Stolee’s Discovery Lecture on Thursday. Though there was initially disagreement over what to do, we eventually came up with a unified plan to showcase our support. We would arrive at the lecture hall early, occupy the first two rows, do a special chant, and give a standing ovation at the end of the lecture. Our new chant was “Hatsune Beeku, fun, fun, fun.” We decided on this for two main reasons. Firstly, Hatsune Beeku (a bee form of the Vocaloid singer, Hatsune Miku) is Cluster 5’s unofficial mascot. Secondly, in our group, saying “fun” is strictly forbidden and it is referred to as “the f-word.” Thus, chanting these two inside jokes would not only be funny but also encouraging for Prof. Stolee. After successfully carrying out the chant, intently paying attention to the best Discovery Lecture (in our opinions) so far, and cheering loudly and excessively, all of us in Cluster 5 felt a strong sense of camaraderie. We are all looking forward to working together on our final projects next week! By: Aadya Sharma Cursed Slides |
Cluster 6
Introduction to Smart and Sustainable Power
This week in Cluster 6, we bid our farewells to Prof. Yu Zhang and welcomed Prof. Yihsu Chen (with his lightsaber)! We started our week on Monday by bidding on Prof. Chen’s lightsaber. We scribbled down the amount of money we’d be willing to spend to buy the saber on pieces of paper and handed them to Prof. Chen. We still don’t know the purpose of this exercise, though — we’re excited to find out in week 4! As the week went on, our professor taught us about microeconomics and how it’s applied to bidding in the electricity market. He also taught our cluster how to optimize profits using Excel. During demonstrations, he passionately pulled up the tall screen to point out small numbers on Excel that we might have missed. After the demonstrations, we tried to solve optimization problems independently.
Aside from the academic part of our cluster, we played Pictionary and potato sack races against other clusters. Although the artists in our cluster tried their best to pull our team through the hard words, we struggled to guess the pictures on the board. Unfortunately, we couldn’t beat Cluster 3’s speedy guessing skills. However, we were able to beat them during the potato sack races. One by one, we would hop across the field in our potato sacks, carrying the water balloon back and forth. Some of us tripped over our feet, and some got wet after the water balloon popped. As our cluster spent more time together, we finally devised a chant we had lacked for two weeks. Our chant includes the youngest member in our cluster: Gordon Chen. After the muted response to chants, we, at last, screamed a chant (“Gordon Chen! Gordon Chen!”) along with other clusters to support our youngest member. Although our cluster still lacks spirit, we have sworn to have the most spirit in our last week! By: Melody Yoon |
Cluster 7
Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology
Week 3 was full of excitement, hard work, collaboration, and cluster bonding! We started off the week with prepping for labs, which included blending our food samples and diluting them, as well as creating standards to test water samples for various properties. We spent a good chunk of our time in the lab collaborating with our groups to create our research posters, reading a ton (and I mean a ton) of papers, and conversing with the professors to finalize our projects.
Research is a grueling and challenging process, but staying up late with my group members and revising my research question repeatedly more than compensated for all pains. In microbiology, we focused on analyzing the microbial growth in non-organic versus organic produce, including cabbage, kale, and tomatoes, using agar plating techniques. Prof. Carlos Castillo emphasized the dangers of observer bias in research, duly mixed up the samples, and had various groups work with different samples at different stages of the lab. Interestingly enough, we discovered bacterial growth was significantly low in both organic and non-organic tomatoes when compared to leafy greens. In environmental toxicology, we analyzed trends in different water indicators — such as pH, alkalinity, chlorinity, hardness, iron, and copper — of known standards and water samples sourced from our previous field trips. We also went on multiple mini field trips throughout the week to the oceanography-intensive Kudela Lab and UCSC greenhouse. The researchers from the Kudela Lab gave us an extensive tour of their lab and explained their sampling techniques to analyze phytoplankton and water quality. On Wednesday, we walked to the top floor of our lab building to explore the greenhouse, view the diverse species of plants and flowers, and bond with each other and with our professor! As the third week of COSMOS comes to an end, our cluster has adjusted fairly well to the rhythm of things. We now know the way to the Discovery Lecture hall and our lab by heart. Our cluster has grown incredibly close throughout the program, and we look forward to a final week of research and COSMOS fun! By: Hailey Van |
Cluster 8
Wonders of the Ocean: From Bioluminescence to Marine Mammals
Guts splattered along the stainless steel table-top. Children’s hands stained with blood. How could COSMOS condone this gruesome behavior? In a necropsy facility, of course! Cluster 8 revisited the Joseph M. Long Marine Laboratory this week to study the visceral anatomy and physiology of a harbor porpoise. Simmer down parents, your children aren’t murderers with an voracious thirst for blood yet (see Cluster 3). For those worried and speculating that the lab is deliberately killing marine mammals for the porpoise of analysis, I must disclose necropsies are only performed on mammals that die of natural causes. Evident by the rake-like looking teeth marks on the porpoise’s blubber, Cluster 8 hypothesized dolphins were the culprits. Dolphins? Vicious? They would never!! Yes, they are. Yes, our reality is a hoax. It was like being at the aquarium touch zone when Cluster 8 participated in the necropsy. The scientist cut samples of blubber, muscles, and other visceral contents onto the table for us to squish and hold. It also smelled fishy rather than rotten. Perhaps the sea gods heard our professor’s prayers for a fresh specimen and conjured this two-day-old porpoise just for us. Back to guts, this opportunity allowed us to visualize marine mammal’s differences compared to terrestrial mammals (for example, darker colored muscles and more blood cells for oxygen transport and conservation).
After living a marine mammal surgeon's fantasy, Cluster 8 also conducted experiments studying E. coli contamination in Santa Cruz beach water. After a long strenuous day of meticulously plating our samples, the following day, our lab welcomed us with the oh-so comforting news: somebody disposed of our precious plates… again! Indeed, again. This occurred with our single colony E. coli isolates. Instead, we dissected squid to extract the ink sacks, which went like our own necropsy, except less odious. Squid anatomy was bamboozling, but we eventually succeeded in our biological scavenger hunt. We then streak-plated the squid ink and prayed for bioluminescent bacteria to grow. Why culture bioluminescent bacteria? Because organisms making light is cool! Can you make biochemical light? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Unsurprisingly, most didn’t glow, though some did! In addition, we viewed bacteria in various solutions using microscopy. Some squirmed! Albeit most were too small to see, and bubbles were frequently mistaken for organisms. Despite the stress, microbiology was action-packed! Now for week 4, where we’ll update you on our cultures! By: Theonne Mendiola |
Cluster 9
The Building Blocks of Life: Molecules and Cells in Biology
Days seem to fly by as COSMOS swiftly approaches the end of its third week. Though the students of Cluster 9 have exhausted their mental stamina (and often their snacks), morale remains firm during our final weeks in the program. Long lectures no longer seem so long, and days ironically feel shorter the longer one stays on the UCSC campus. Daunting treks to class that promise extended uphill inclines no longer seem so daunting to the seasoned COSMOS student.
Although new content seems never-ending, and weekly projects often have students scrambling to google convoluted vocabulary (gastrula, in-situ hybridization, etc.), I find that our lecturers harbor no judgment towards inexperience or ignorance. Our morning lecturer, Dr. James Shanks (referred to as “Jimmy”), often encourages questioning, investigation, and failure. During downtime between bacteriophage and Enhanced Green Fluorescent Protein (EGFP) experiments, we painstakingly review the steps of the experiment procedure. The material itself is often unfamiliar and difficult to digest, especially for many of us who have not yet taken biology or chemistry courses. And yet, through Dr. Jimmy’s careful explanation, these puzzles of academic rhetoric become simple, logical, step-by-step instructions. Procedures such as a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) become more than just a type of COVID-19 test, and we learn how many resources we take for granted are generated, such as insulin. Hand-in-hand with this newfound knowledge comes a profound appreciation and inspiration for modern science. We are reminded that the materials available to us right now are innumerable compared to those available 30 years ago, and with this comes an exhilarating and daunting pressure to go and discover. Although we may complain about our tight schedules and the academic rigor enforced in the COSMOS summer program, I believe that deep down the students of Cluster 9 know they will walk away this summer with something truly valuable, aside from another activity to write on their college applications. Walking out of the lab, I truly believe Jimmy when he says “my goal is to inspire you”. - Dr. James “Jimmy” Shanks By: Lindsey Huh |
Cluster 10
Semiconductor Materials and Device Engineering
Week 3 was certainly a week to remember for Cluster 10. After a fun carnival event on the weekend, we headed into the week with excitement, learning more about the physics of semiconductors, such as their fermi levels, and depletion junctions. We also finally had the opportunity to dive into PN junctions with bias (which explained the functionality of solar cells) during class, since we had finally finished covering the fundamentals.
However, life really threw a curveball at us when our course assistant went missing out of the blue, at the critical moment when she was about to release information about our final project that was due at the end of the week. With no proper direction or instruction, we had no choice but to organize ourselves into groups and decide on our project topics. Amidst the chaos, we had also originally planned a midterm on Thursday to test our knowledge of everything we learned in lectures during the past two weeks, but thankfully Prof. Mike Oye saw the urgency of the situation and moved it to next week. With that off our minds, we could dedicate ourselves to working on our projects, allowing us to research further into our topics. To end the week, we visited a lab at Baskins Engineering Center here at UCSC, where we got to see a SEM (scanning electron microscope). Although much of the time consisted of frantically running rounds around in the engineering building trying to find room 268 when we could only find 267 and 269 (and later realizing that the room was in a whole other building), we quickly settled in. Our tour guide patiently explained to us how the powerful microscope works. We saw the microscopic structures on a variety of items, from the tip of Abraham Lincoln’s nose in a penny to the eye of a dead ant, all in real time. At the end of the tour, the tour guide even carved our RA, Daryl, into a piece of metal using ionization beams. Cluster 10 has been having a great time so far as we approach the last week of COSMOS! By: Skylar Qian |
Cluster 11
Feedback Control with Applications to Robotics
The third week started much like the other weeks: we learned more about feedback control in the morning and applied those concepts in the afternoon. However, we are now also busier than ever doing research on our final projects and creating our posters. In the transferable skills section on Tuesday, we learned about online LaTex editors such as OverLeaf, TexWorks, and Emacs. They are mainly used to produce scientific and technical documents. This week was full of more challenges that required us to use MatLab in order to solve. The first step in these challenges was usually to find the right algorithm, and afterward, we just needed to code it.
In one recent challenge, we had to write code to simulate what would need to happen if our robot was to run into an obstacle and then plot the position of the robot in a graph. For the past challenges, all of it was mainly conceptual, but now that we were writing code that could be potentially useful for when we build the robot, everyone was eager to start building, which we started later in the week. As for the social aspect of the cluster, some people have decided that they want to buy their lunches from a food truck near the engineering building. In addition, we have been perfecting our roll call as well as our cluster chant. By: Claire Lin |
Cluster 12
Scattering and Diffraction of Materials
In the third week of COSMOS, Cluster 12 started by getting their poster project assigned. With final projects in the forefront of our minds, l, we finally saw the end of COSMOS approaching. Nonetheless, we were not discouraged by a single project but rather were excited by the joy of learning and the experience of cooperation with our fellow cluster mates.
Our class contents turned out to be more challenging than in the first and second weeks. In the morning class with Prof. David Belanger, we learned about the phase transition in what heat or pressure allows an unknown material to either be a solid, liquid, or gas. Also, we further broadened our learning by diving deeper into how magnetic fields start to change over the Curie point (Tc) and whether it is ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, or other types of magnetic. Prof. Jeremy Barnett’s class also followed a similar mechanism to what we did during the morning class. We had an in-depth lecture about X-ray scattering and crystalline lattices. However, the most fun part of the afternoon lecture this week was the lab on Friday. Continuing from the lab last week, discovering the mystery element “Y” let us feel like we have become actual chemists. By using perchlorate, we found out the element “Y” was tetrafluoroborate. It was a thrilling moment when our group defined the element. After spending half a day with lectures, we felt tired but did not forget to enjoy the afternoon time. During rec time, cluster meetings, evening activities, and even late at night, we all studied hard, and played hard. Then all of a sudden, on Thursday, one of our friend groups said, “Hey, we only have a week and some days left for COSMOS…” We all noticed we have already completed the third quarter of COSMOS 2022. Looking out for the last quarter of COSMOS, Cluster 12 is excited about more learning and memories. By: Andrew Woo |