Splash Biography

From sky scrapers to space shuttles, humans have always been interested in building complex structures and vehicles to do our bidding. And yet, in a few years time humanity's greatest accomplishments by far will not fly through or tower into the sky, but will be made in small glass beakers. Protein engineering takes some of the most complex structures in the universe, proteins, and allows humans to custom build them in a way your own cells never could. In this course you will learn how to build using chemistry, what proteins are, and how to customize them. Most importantly, you will learn how to think like a synthetic chemist by seeing the world through the eyes of a molecule. Be prepared to get up, collide, and polymerize.

Everyone has been taught that the solar system is made up of nine planets (more or less) and our sun. Usually the solar system is shown as globes laid out side-by-side from the sun all the way to Pluto. However, even the best textbooks, museum exhibits, and analogies fail to capture how enormous our solar system really is...how big is something that is 7.5 billion miles across? In this class, you will get to see how fantastically huge the solar system is by laying out scale models of the planets along the nearby Midway Plaisance.