A new discovrery: Fractals

Recently, I was told about something very cool in Math that i did not know exist before. I found it very amazing so I decided to share it with my peers. I am talking here about fractals. According to Wikipedia, a fractal is a mathematical set that has a fractal dimension that usually exceeds its topological dimension and may fall between the integers. In another fractals are mathematical repeating patterns that we have in nature. We see those patterns in our everyday life, but we do not really pay attention to them to see catch the pattern that was buried inside

Monday april 1, the STEM Program with me include we decide to inform students about fractals in our rubric ASK ME ABOUT STEM
A lot of students did not know about the existing of something called fractals and they were very amazed by looking at the pictures and then watching the videos.
We set up a boot at the sophomore square to illustrate the fractals and to students about it.
Here is a picture of me demonstrating to students how to do fractals by hand.

During our rubric ASK ME ABOUT STEM, we also did some other activities such as DNA extraction from strawberries, some experiments in Chemistry presented by Dr Ed ONG and also we looked at some plants and insects under a microscope with Elena Ortiz, a Biosciences department faculty member. the purpose of these activities is to get students interested and major in the STEM related career fields in order to increase the number of graduate in STEM. I think we reached our goal in a certain way because we got a lot student signed up during those activities and we just need to follow up with them next to see how they are doing.

As usual, I was in the STEM Program last week helping student with their and any questions they might. last week was the week before finals so it was little busy. everybody was trying rushing to finish their late assignment and have them submitted before deadline. I myself was busy. i had some stuff to submit too. it was little rough but we went through it and survive. It is a great pleasure for me to be able to impact students' life and give them the taste of success. I really enjoy doing that! One more week and can't wait for my graduation!!!

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Struggling with a software

I have been working on the second part of my project few days after i presented the first at ASU conference. When I was at that conference, one of my judges gave me a brilliant ideas of how to quickly realize the second part of easily. he showed me the NCBI website where i can get the sequences of my bacteria ready to be used. He also showed me a software called CLUSTAL W which i can used to build my phylogenetic tree. when i started the experiment, I had trouble finding the same 16S sequences for all the bacteria in the right format. After many attempts,  and after been very consistent, I finally get the same 16S for twelve bacteria out of fifteen. For the other three bacteria, (pseudomonas mirabillis, staphilococcus epidermis, Proteus vulgaris) I could not find any 16S at all. Now that I get the sequences, I need to aligned them in order to build the phylogenetic tree. This was my biggest struggle. Everything that I try did not give me any result. They all came out blank saying there was formatting errors. This means that I am not putting the sequences in the proper format and I could not figure out the right format. I looked online and I tried everything i got from but it did not work. I asked help from my mentors and apparently they have not used this software before so they was unable to figure it out too. I was stocked on this software for almost a week trying to figure out how to do. After many research and many attempts, I finally figured out the proper format in which you need to submit the sequences in order to get them aligned and then build the phylogenetic tree. It was a very though week for but i was glad that it ended happily.
After that i knew how to use this software, I was very amazed about all the other things you can do using this software. I found it very cool and useful.
Below is the fruit of my struggle--- my beautiful tree