Week 4

Once again we attempted to melt the large bottle of agar for our trial. After about 45 minutes we realized that this could not be done in the one hour slot we were given. We then came up with the idea to start the melting proccess early then split the melted agar into smaller bottles so it would be easier to melt.

Today was the day that we put our plan into action. We got to the research room two hours early and put the large bottle of agar into the hot water bath. Once research class started we pulled it out of the water bath and put it over the bunsen burner. After it was melted we divided it into 50ml containers so we had preportioned amounts. We also made sure to steralize the containers  using UV light.

Today we measured the proportions for our hot sauce dilution mixtures. We decided to go by tenths, with a 10%, a 1%, a 0.1% and a 0.01% hot sauce mixture with distilled water. To conclude the day, we acquired some additional 100 ml beakers from the chemistry teacher.

Today we attempted our first trial with the new method. Unfortunately, we ran into a few complications. We had to re-mix the hot sauce mixture and melt the agar very carefully due to the small container size. The final complication arose when the agar hardened before we could conclude our process, which led to plan revisions being made.