Yugan

Day 1:
Meet up at NUSH where we first met our SLO(student liaison officers) Ryan and Priya, we had breakfast and set up our posters.
Icebreakers:
We played people bingo where we met our international students and their cultures and traditions. For example from that activity, I knew that the Philippines has a tipping culture and Australian's staple food is bread.

Opening ceremony:

The opening ceremony opened ceremoniously with the speech by NUSH principal, Mrs Lee Bee Yann. It included a drone flying with the 3 'keys' to officially start ISSF.

Poster Session:
During this session, we presented to international students, and we saw one another's posters. The posters were intriguing and thought provoking; the students explained their posters very clearly. The posters I liked most were the posters about superconductors and nerve cells in the brain.

School tour:
In the school tour, our SLOs brought us around to the school campus where we saw other labs such as the chemistry synthetic lab and life sciences lab. Compared to SST, the main campus was much bigger and had more labs and more equipment mainly because it consists of more students, for example, a lab in NUSH has more than ten flow hoods and a clean energy lab where they have solar panels to power an entire lab.

Day 2:
Nobel Lecture:
We had an interesting session by Professor Erwin Neher about brain nerve cells. He talked about action potential of brain cells and graphs of K+ and Na+ ion channels and nerve impulses. He used various methods such as the clamp method. He also showed us some pictures that will appear differently to the human eye. Like the picture below, there is no blue it is just the contrast of the background.

Student Oral Presentations:
We went for the student oral presentations for physics and mathematics. Chen Ning presented about solar storms and measuring the intensity of the solar storms. The judges were really interested in Chen Ning's presentation. Other international students also presented on their ideas such as flood preparedness app using algorithms and computer sciences.

Nobel Experience Workshop 1:

We went to workshops and we experienced what scientists did it the past to receive a Nobel Prize. 

We went to RNAi, we learnt more about miRNA(microRNA) and siRNA(longer, linear, double-stranded RNA molecules). We injected some double-stranded RNA into C. elegans(a type of wild worms), and it would cause the worms to be dumpy(shorter and fatter) or to have blisters which look transparent. The image below shows 3 Petri dishes with C.elegans fed with bacteria with double-stranded RNA.

Day 3:

Keynote Lecture by Professor Eva-Maria Neher:
She spoke about the XLab in Gottingen. We learnt about Xlab which includes hands-on experiments in a research-like environment. It consists of various research subjects such as physics, chemistry, biology/ecology and neurosciences.  Several NUSH students have come to Xlab and experienced their research programmes as well as the culturem and she showed us this formula: success = enthusiasm * effort^2. It showed us that success comes with a lot of effort and enthusiasm and this can be applied to our daily lives.

Science challange:
In the Science challenge, we toured around the entire school solving science and mathematical problems and scenarios such as QA in chemistry and microbial biology in biology. It was a truly interesting experience as I knew more about scientific concepts such as entrophy and enthalpy. In the end we won first place in the science challange.

Nobel experience workshops 2:
For the 2nd nobel experience workshops, we learnt more about the concept: 1 gene, 1 enzyme where 1 gene can be translated to 1 protein which is an enzyme. We used mutant bread fungi strains to test the complexity of amino acids by using the enzymes which is illustrated by this table.

Day 4:
Keynote lectures:
The first keynote lecture was by Associate Professor Tan Choon Hong and he talked about chirality which is a concept whereby a mirror image of an obejct is not the same as the object like shoes, it is completely the same in other aspects such as size and length but a right leg can't fit into a left shoe. He talked about chirl crytals and the clockwise or anticlockwise rotations.

The 2nd keynote lecture was by Professor  Sow Chorng Haur about nanotechnology and nanoscales.
Nano science is the manipulation of matter at molecular matter to create artifical structures such as objects with nanogold or nano silver will look differently then gold or silver respectively due to the electrons at nanoscale interacting differently thus showing a different colour. He also showed us many different experiments such as block of ice breaking easily but water with wet newspaper solidifed into ice will be much harder. The image below shows an aqeous form of nanogold which looks red in colour however the actual colour of gold is gold.

Brush Bot activity:
We built our brush bot which is a brush moving due to a vibrator motor and a battery. It was very interesting to apply physics concepts into the real world. We used bluetack, a vibrator motor, battery,  tape and head of a brush.

Excursion to NTU:

We went to several research labs in NTU such as biophysics lab and optical density as well as 3D printing lab. In 1 of the lab some scientists are trying to simulate vaccum environments for chemical experiments. The room is built on cushioned air and its walls is covered with copper plates to block up any waves in the electromagentic spectrum. 

Then we went to the 3D printing labs where we saw different types of 3D printing machines where they can print plastics or metals using electron beams or light beams to print the material.

These are some of the concrete blocks that are 3D printed using a robotic arm.

Day 5:
Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum
During the LKCNHM trip, we looked at many facts about various species of animals and looked at their skeletons especially bones of dinosaurs and some big mammals.

This is the bones and skeleton of the sperm whale found in the coast of Singapore and was found dead probably due to blood loss when it was hit by a moving propellor of a ship.

This is the skeleton of the dinosaur which is possibly a leaf eater as it has a long neck and tough thigh bones.

This is the most poisonous crab and it has enough posion to kill 40 men and thus has many predators will stay away from this creature.

Combined farewell party and cultural perfomrance: 

During the party and performance, we had our last meeting with our SLOs and had nice performances from international students.