July Newsletter: Catalyzing my Life
Fuel cell catalysts, routine optimizing, and scientific intuition
July was the freest I’d felt in a REALLY long time, I didn’t have to study ahead for high school courses for the coming school year, had no summer courses, no university application essay writing, and I could do whatever I wanted at any time I wanted to— IT WAS AWESOME! So here’s some stuff I did with all this free time I had…
Hey! I’m Julia, a 17-year old in the process of learning about what the world has to offer, and what I can offer it. Right now I’m obsessed with long-term carbon-free energy & fuel solutions and about nanomaterials + their applications in medicine & agriculture!
Each month I discuss 3 life things I learned (with a good quote) recapping the past month, what I’m working on now, and at the end I leave you with one question to think about.
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August’s Quote 📖
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world.”
- Albert Einstein
This quote made me stop and think about the reason why I am doing the things I am, and I hope it does for you too.
Why do I spend so much time researching plants just for them to die so quickly? Or why do I spend endless nights cramming for a test the next morning?
Especially in a society exploding with information all the time it’s often hard to stop and think that anything you have ever learned, known or will learn has no use without the direction of imagination. Without even a little creativity, imagination, or free thinking, the new information you just took in has absolutely no purpose. Imagination is the reason you can listen to music anytime you want, the reason you can cross a river on a nice-looking bridge, or the reason you have a really fluffy sweater when it's cold.
But, to really understand imagination and its incredible ability and uses I think you have to spend A LOT of time thinking about a certain area, like way beyond whatever your idea of A LOT is. When you think about a certain area long enough for example plants, you’ve had so much practice solving problems in that area of plants, you even think about plants when you are not intentionally working. Over this time you get so good at thinking in this area of plants, such a good understanding that you develop an intuition for it, a gut feeling for it that you revert to a based on many past experiences. I have found that this sense of intuition is especially important in science. Often times when you get an idea, you need to back it up with existing research to prove it is mostly possible before spending resources to test it out and prove it with real, physical evidence. To do that you need to have a really good feeling that you are correct while not fully knowing what the outcome will be or the reason behind it.
These articles helped me think about this idea a lot more:
Month 1 of Catalysts
I’m working at the Fuel Cells and Green Energy Lab of the Energy Research Center (ERC), University of Waterloo this summer! Thanks so much to Xin Zeng & Prof. Xinguao Li for this awesome opportunity!
We’ve been doing lots of work around synthesizing catalysts for fuel cells. The catalysts are probably the most important part of a fuel cell, they are what allow for the separation of hydrogen into protons and electrons
Catalysts are generally made of precious metals like platinum, which get SUPER EXPENSIVE for development. So, we’ve been combining platinum with other transition metals to lower the cost. Out of iron, copper, cobalt, and nickel. Iron and copper rust too easily so they were out quickly, and we were left with cobalt and nickel. This past month we tested out catalyst synthesis with cobalt alloyed with platinum.
Many catalysts also have a carbon support layer that makes them more efficient and durable. For the carbon support, we are using carbon black (CB) which is the industry standard for fuel cells, and graphene which is the best conductor out of all carbon materials.
The catalyst samples looked like this under the TEM.
The thing is that CB is super durable and cheap but has pretty bad electrical activity, while graphene has amazing electrical activity but horrible stability and is kinda pricey. So far, equal portions of both work best. But when we tried graphene on its own, this weird light gray layer started forming on top (never happened before).
Switching up the routine
I decided to try out the routines of 4 super successful people each for a week this past month to see how I could optimize my own. I also tried to get some variety between them, so I picked one from a different industry I’m interested in Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, Mark Cuban, and Maya Angelou.
Here are 3 things I learned:
1. “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential” - Winston Churchill
What all these people had in common with their routines is that they optimized their time to make the most out of their performance. So, they prioritized the things that they knew would make them perform at their greatest potential, the order of these was different for each but overall they were sleep/rest, practicing their skill, thinking, and exercise.
2. Practice, practice, & patience
All these people weren’t just successful because they were smart. They harnessed their “smarts” through consistent practice. Really successful people don’t even have bigger brains than me or you. For example, when scientists dissected Einstein’s brain they found that his brain wasn’t necessarily bigger, it simply had a higher concentration of connections between brain cells in specific areas known to be linked to mathematical ability. These connections are formed through lots of consistent, long-term practice. Musk, Cuban, and Angelou talk about practice a lot in interviews as well, with Musk being known for his huge 80-100 hour work weeks. In fact, the most successful people tend to have huge work ethics.
Then, Maya Angelou, she didn’t just write, she lived her writing, her work, spending the majority of her day in solitude working every day not just when she had a light bulb moment but every single day at a hotel with a deck of cards, a bible, dictionary & thesaurus, crossword puzzles, and a bottle of sherry.
Patience in many cases is just as important as practice. Take, Julius Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory for the Manhattan Project, who was said to be incredibly brilliant but never actually did any long calculations or long publications himself. Murray Gell-Mann, one of the physicists who discovered quarks, said it was because Oppenheimer didn’t have “Sitzfleisch,” (sitting flesh) the patience, ability to sit still for huge amounts of time to truly focus and follow through in hard situations to finish a project. He said this in the American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
3. Good old curiosity
The world is rapidly changing, and incredibly successful people have accepted that and made it a mission to consistently be learning and adapt to the change. Cuban said that “I recognized that learning was truly a skill, and that by continuing to learn, to this day, I’m able to compete and keep up and get ahead of most people.” Angelou also has this incredible sense of freedom, she had a fearless outlook on life where she famously said in an interview “give everything, all the time. It’s great fun, and it is liberating.”
The uni prep continues
This past month I participated in the Soft30 challenge for a month (a shorter version of the Hard75) with some friends at The Knowledge Society to level up my discipline which has been seriously lagging from the bad habits I built up during my last round of high school exams. Also, I recently internalized that I’m going to spend the next 5 years back at school, in university! So, I decided I should probably build some good habits to at least start off strong. In July I made it through 3/4 weeks of the Soft30; now I’m back for round 2!
Here are the daily conditions:
30 min of exercise
Daily journal reflection
No junk food
Drink 128oz of water
Read 10 pages of a book (in July I finished The Enchiridion, How to Make Friends and Influence People, and halfway through Who Moved My Cheese)
Spend 30 minutes developing a new skill (I decided to learn web design & redo my personal website)
Update the tracker to say you met these requirements (a survey shared with the group for accountability)
Cool Things I Found
Invasive Seaweed Bricks
Sargassum seaweed is a shelter for migrating organisms like crabs, sea turtles, and commercially caught fish, but when it moves closer ashore it suffocates coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrasses which impacts water quality.
Plus it starts rotting within a day on the shores, so it must be removed fast which can cost millions, or lead to respiratory problems.
Sargablock housing, by Omar Vasquez, uses this invasive seaweed to make bricks that withstand hurricanes. They grind seaweed, mix it with dirt from construction sites and water to make 3,000 bricks/day that can be recycled over and over again.
Electrocuting plants makes them grow faster
Electroculture is the practice of using electricity in agriculture to make plants grow faster & it’s been researched since 1900 — here’s the first published study.
Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers put a triboelectric nanogenerator powered by wind and rain (turns mechanical energy from materials rubbing together, wind/rain & the generator to electricity) near pea plants to make them an electric field. The electrocultured plants produced a 1/5th more peas + germinated faster than the normal peas.
The whole thing cost less than €35 & the electrocultured peas had more chlorophyll (the green pigment in photosynthesis), so they could collect more light and metabolize quicker.
DIY Nanogenerators - How Triboelectricity Works: 3-minute video about how to build a TENG
Swarming honeybees can produce as much electricity as a thunderstorm, study shows: 2-minute article about how insects affect electric fields in the atmosphere
Realising a century-old dream to make electricity from air: 4-minute article about converting humidity to electricity, hygroelectricty
Stimulation of ambient energy generated electric field on crop plant growth: the research paper
The Egyptians inspired a² + b² = c²
Many cultures, including the Egyptians, Chinese, Babylonians, Mayans and Indians used right-angle equations long before the Pythagoras. Incredible examples of their ancient math are the Pyramids of Giza, the Maoling Mausoleum, Chichén-Itzá, and many others. They learned that right angles would ensure stability for their buildings, using the Pythagorean triple— 3 positive numbers that make a2 + b2 = c2 true like 3, 4, and 5.
With this, and other techniques many still unknown, the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid with nearly a perfect square base, and each corner almost perfectly aligned with the cardinal directions. It’s thought that Pythagoras either rediscovered the theorem or learned of its applications while studying in Egypt.
How they would survey land in ancient Egypt: 2-minute tik tok about how Egyptians used the Pythagorean triple
Did Pythagoras Study Philosophy in Egypt?: article about Pythanoreas and validity of the stories about his studies.
How were the pyramids built?: 6-minute video of techniques used to build the pyramids in Egypt.
Something to Think About 🧠
Should you trust your intuition?
Intuition can be twisted to mean so many things from natural instinct to professional judgements, but it is commonly defined as the ability to know something without evidence or rational thinking to come by it.
But what if instead intuition is entirely based on all of your past experiences, and the more experience you have in a particular area the more likely you are to make a good intuitive decision in the spur of the moment? This article makes a very good argument for intuition as internalized and in-depth experience, in that "seeking is the opposite of finding." where they talk about when you put aside intuition to find the "true" answer even though it may be wrong, like on a multiple choice quiz where you put aside your intuition (studying experience) to try to remember the "perfect answer." But if intuition is just a lot of experience and research shows that our brains are continuously unconsciously identifying patterns, then we could be making patterns that don't necessarily exist between a past experience and a current. This article makes some good points about why intuition may not be fully reliable.
Overall, I think that if you fully devote your time to a specific area, day in and day out, you have Sitzfleisch for it, and become so good at identifying problems and solutions in this area then trusting your intuition will do you more good than harm.
See you next month! 👋
Into august
Catalysts with Xin
In August we will continue testing catalysts, but now with nickel—so long cobalt!
Benchsci x TKS challenge
The Knowledge Society is hosting its 2nd or 3rd challenge with Benchsci where we are partnered with mentors at BenchSci to build the company an AI or ML solution to their problems - this time it is based around company culture & employee wellbeing
Hack for the Environment
I am also doing another Hackathon this summer that is focused on software solutions for environmental issues & we have decided to work on the plastic waste recycling issue with chemical recycling, mechanical recycling, and bio recycling.
Biochar & water in agriculture
I am also working on a project with Manoj Thacker & some other students from The Knowledge Society where I’ll be doing research on optimizing the usage of water and biochar in the agriculture industry.
Uni prep continues
Through August I will continue practicing the good habits I built over July & I plan to finish at least 3 more books this time around Soft30 + you will get to see my new personal website built completely without a website builder!
No way! Electrocuting plants makes them grow faster? That’s so cool 👀