AAAS Convention

Last weekend, a couple of the other interns and I had the opportunity to go to the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Convention in Boston!

We were able to choose what lectures we wanted to go to, and we spent all day listening to different scientists talk about their work! I attended lectures including:

• Language as an Adaptation to the Cognitive Niche - Steven Pinker
• More Than Pretty Pictures: How the Process of Making Science Images and Graphics Clarifies Understanding - Felice Frankel 
• The Robotic Moment: What Do We Forget When We Talk to Machines? - Sherry Turkle 
• Resurrected Ancestral Proteins: Fundamentals and Applications - Joseph Thornton 
• Stroke Research: New Concepts and Innovative Solutions - Moll Shoichet, Constantino Iadecola, and Stephen Meairs 
• The Connectome: - William Seeley, Jeff Lichtman, Mark Bear, and Steve Petersen 

I really enjoyed the lecture about resurrecting ancestral proteins because it used some of the same technology that I am learning to use in my internship! I also really enjoyed Felice Frankel's lecture because it combined science and art in a really interesting way! We were also able to visit different booths that were set up, including one that focused on enantiomers. An enantiomers are a pair of molecules that are mirror images of each other. They have identical chemical properties, but they can react very different in biology! For example, +Limonene smells like oranges and -Limonene smells like pine! We were able to build these molecules (below). 

Overall, it was a great experience to be immersed in the world of science! It definitely inspired me to pursue my next steps in becoming a scientist!