Saturday, August 18, 2012

Scientific missions are hard!

Hello everybody! Just got back today. Boy is it good to be back home and in front of my laptop after a 1 week break. Well it wasn't exactly a break but a field work project that all undergraduate medical students have to go through. Ours focused on community health and my classmates and I spent 2 days of our 1 week leave to survey the Tanzanian coastal city of Tanga to see how children under five years fare with respect to their nutritional status i.e. how much of an adequate, balanced diet do they get and what forces influence the amount and/or type of food they get.

We're still making our final report but the situation can and needs to be improved. It's not Somalia that's for sure! But such projects tend to show us that when you plan a scientific endeavour or any research endeavour of any sort, it WILL tax your time, energy and sometimes patience. But in the end we explore to understand and act on the information we obtain from our various scientific missions to better our lives be it medical policies or Mars exploration. Curiosity and our field work may appear to be different in terms of monetary/resource priority but that may not be the case as I plan to illustrate in a future post. Stay tuned!

Curiosity has certainly been busy while I've been away. They plan to do a short drive later to test out their mobility following a successful updating of the rover's computer. Afterwards the rover's gigantic arm will be next in the checkout list I believe. We'll talk about all that later. But right now I really need to crash for the night.

Stay curious...

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