The Chemistry Team in the Urban Ecosystems stream have been conducting “canned” experiments. These experiments have procedures that already written out for students to follow, and are designed to help us become familiar with the instruments that we will use later for our independent research. My team conducted two canned experiments. One of these was designed to find the amount of caffeine in two different samples of coffee using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry. It was important for us to become familiar with this instrument so that we can use it to determine the amount of

Three weeks ago, on January 31st, students from the Urban Ecosystem stream in UT’s Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) met at their lab at 9AM and proceeded to collect water samples from Waller Creek at sites around Austin. These students belonged to two research teams within the stream: Naturalized E.Coli, and Molecular Source Tracking & Fecal Indicator Bacteria (MSTFIB). We sought to establish a baseline bacterial level for the creek, or in other words, figure out what the average bacterial levels were for the 12 sites we sampled. Some of our sites were north of campus (Hancock