Becky Update

Becky Larson has been caught… that was supposed to be like unsolved mysteries

I have been working hard day and night with no sleep, I am used to the sleep deprivation by now, especially because I have started to drink coffee on occasion… I should say though I can still drink a cup at 1 am and fall asleep 10 minutes later. I am excited to have my second annual murder mystery party this weekend, and am pretty pumped for the rain to come for sampling… next time it is 3am and raining imagine how lucky you could be to be outside at the dairy farm collecting manure runoff samples (actually it is kinda great to be outside at night in a rain storm, it’s just the 4 hours of lab work that follow that are undesirable). I won an award, but unfortunately it was just a resume builder (meaning I got no money) so it wasn’t very exciting. I am hoping to go on vacation in a year or so…. And then every week after that until I have bankrupted whoever I can convince to finance my travels. Other than work I am enjoying all east Lansing has to offer, that is when I can avoid being Caltropped by Steve and Dan. All in all things are pretty good, work has long hours but is relatively rewarding and I am excited to be rounding the bend for my last year (which is a drop in the hat for anyone who has already been in college for 9 years)! I am also teaching an engineering computer lab class that teaches Numerical Solutions using Matlab

I thought I would teach everyone a little about what we do in my lab real quick. A recent study we have worked on had to do with food processors in Michigan. Food processors use a lot of water to clean and produce their product, meaning of course that after they have a lot of polluted water to dispose of. A common disposal practice is to spray this water onto large (usually grassy) fields. Unfortunately as the water leaches through the soil profile it reduces the oxygen within the soil (due to chemical, physical and biological processes that I will not go into detail about). The problem with reducing the amount of oxygen, is the soil is now a reducing environment which reduces metals. Many metals when reduced become soluble, meaning the can mobilize and leach through the soil within the water. This means things like dangerous Arsenic can move into your groundwater, dangerous and common (please get your water tested every few years at a minimum if you have well water, city water is tested every day before distribution, many counties offer testing very cheap sometimes even free). So we are using sensors to monitor the soil for things like dissolved oxygen and soil moisture in order to predict prior to when the soils will start to leach metals, so that they can start and stop applying waste at the correct times to limit metal leaching. I will stop here because I am sure this is by far the longest science class you have had in a while. There is much more detail to these processes and what happens (but it is the more boring stuff), and I have been hearing some disturbing news concerning groundwater contamination so get your water tested! The column tests are now in their second phase and we have a manuscript out for publication detailing all the work. After the next phase hopefully we will see these babies get into action at the actual sites. Stay tuned for your next Biological Engineering lesson (tried to limit any sort of terminology that may throw you off, hope I was successful).