The BioBus Daily News

Donald busts up some flakey paint

After an entire week of scraping, scratching, scrubbing and sanding, the bus is ready to be painted! Of course the weather forecast for the next few days is RAIN, SHOWERS, and more RAIN. Oh well, we’ve had perfect weather up to now, and it will be good to have a day off tomorrow to send email to all of the teachers that I’m visiting or hoping to visit in the coming months.

One of the exciting things we did today was replace the gaskets that are supposed to seal around the edge of the back windows – previously they had just been taped. Well, the rain had a way of getting around the tape – and tonight’s showers will be a good test! 

After the painting is done, the BioBus is heading west towards Illinois.

Rick Cleaning the Wheel Well

Rick Becker will be joining me for this exciting mid-west tour. We will be teaching at public schools as well as museums along the way, as well as making a stop at a bus customizing company as well as a bus garage to get some estimates and perhaps start making some improvements to both the bus and the lab elements of the bus. Many of the people we will be visiting are people that we met with on the way over from California at about this time last year. I am very excited to give them all tours of the lab – without some of those people’s help, this project may have ended in Columbus, Ohio or Washington, PA!!

You see the mucky

Spent the day prepping the bus for painting. Disconnected the photovoltaic solar collectors and started scraping and sanding the roof. I definitely had some karate kid moments up there, sanding away in circles with my sanding pad. But tomorrow I’ll get to use the electric sander and let my muscles start to atrophy again.

It is minor archaeology, scraping through layers of paint and seeing what colors are underneath. There are places where the aluminnum and steel are starting to peak out, but for the most part the existing coat is tight enough that we are going to just paint right over it.

We’ve finally settled on a blue and orange color scheme, and bought the paints today. We spot tested the paints, and I think it is going to work really nicely. The bottom of the bus will be a burnished orange – an earthy base. Then there will be a broad blue swath around the center, representing the ocean – muraling will go on top of this light background. Above this will be more orange as well as yellow sun-rays sweeping through. The roof will be silver with a special insulating ceramic mixed in order to keep the bus as cool as possible under the sun. Here you see Donald pondering over colors.

Pulled in to Grace Church in Jersey City this morning. It was a little tight, but with Donald’s help, we guided the bus into the alley parking lot. There is a lot of work to do, but it is going to be fun and the end result I believe will be stunning!

Anyone who is interested in lending a hand with this, there are lots of things that can be done, from finding good chemistry and biology pictures to put on the bus, to enlarging and stenciling the images onto the bus, to scraping away at the crusty, old paint job.

I am starting to really like Jersey City – it is like a smaller-town version of NYC! I am looking forward to the week or so I’ll be here, and am going to start contacting schools in the area to see if they might be interested in bringing the BioBus in. There is also the Liberty Science Center, which is a beautiful building right on the waterfront – they have a great big wind-turbine setup, and it was spinning away this fine, breezy morning.

The first day of the community supported agriculture (CSA) was really fun! It was my day to volunteer, and I spent the time weighing out 1.75 lbs of tomatoes for everyone in the share (there are about 80 shares in our group, which means a little less than 80 people since some people get double shares).  Today we got greens, tomatoes, carrots, garlic, and a watermelon.

The BioBus took a nice trip to Liberty State Park in Jersey City this afternoon. It is a little funny, you get a wonderful view of Lady Liberty’s  back side from the park – not a view you see in the postcards!

The RV park there is packed – I was lucky to get a spot! After I dumped the waste holding tanks, I pulled in to a spot between all these fancy RVs. Well, I have to admit to a small amount of jealousy over their slide-out sides, generators, and lots of slick gadgets. But, I take refuge in the fact that none of them can see a cell at 1000x magnification!!

Tomorrow I will move the bus to Grace Church, a few blocks away. Then Donald and I will start to work on painting. We are going to work on cleaning the old paint up first, then do the base coat, probably a light blue, and then work on the trim, some orange and perhaps copper or gold or bronze. I am excited that the bus will start looking really good!

Later tomorrow is my volunteer time with the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group that Lynn and I are part of. Basically, you pay everything in advance to give the farmer some financial security, and then you get a share of the crop every week. It will be fun to see how it works and to see what sort of food we get! I am also very interested in developing some food sciences curriculum for the BioBus, particularly in light of the fact that we’ve been invited to Poughkeepsie for a farmer’s market at the end of October. More on that soon.

Finally, I’ve updated the BioBus mailing list – you can now easily sign-up for the mailing list on-line here: http://biobus.org/contact.html. If you had been signed up previously, your address should have been moved over. I am preparing the first mailing now which will be the Fall newsletter.

I am settling in to my new office at NYU. I am here collaborating with Prof Jasna Brujic, who is a great young scientist doing biophysics research. She likes to pull on proteins and cells with the atomic force microscope (AFM) to see if they are like snot or like yarn or like rubber bands or maybe even like velcro.

Here is the new microscope in the lab:

One of the things we will be doing in the Brujic lab is maintaining tissue cultures, preparing samples, and developing experimental protocols for the BioBus. This microscope is the first step in getting all that going!