Week of February 19th

Today, I finally returned to Siena! First, Dr. Bellis and I went over all the work I did independently for the past two weeks. He explained the concept of cross sections more in detail to me, and talked about some of its applications in dark matter theory. We also reviewed WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) Theory.

Dr. Bellis also took me on a tour of Siena's revamped particle physics lab. Siena just got some new hardware for their computers, including a processor called (I think) the Tesla K40. This enables researchers to perform complicated calculations in a fraction of the time that it used to take them. It's the same kind of hardware that animators at Disney and Pixar use to create movies, except in this case researchers are using it for modeling and programming. Dr. Bellis demonstrated some of the different functions the new computers could perform. It was really cool to see all of the new equipment and learn more about how scientists do their research.

Since I haven't worked on my Python skills in a while, I also practiced some more programming. Dr. Bellis introduced me to Rosalind and Project Euler, which are two sites that have Python coding problems. Project Euler has mathematics-based problems, and Rosalind deals with bioinformatics, which is a field that develops methods for analyzing biological data. I'm interested in biology, so I tackled the first problem on the site:

The website also provides helpful reviews of molecular biology, which was great because I've forgotten a lot since AP Bio! My Python skills were a little bit rusty, so it took a while to figure out how to solve this problem. Eventually, I figured out that I had to create counters for each base and then use an "if/then" statement to define how the computer should return the four integers.