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Place your hand on your throat. Whether you know it or not, you’re holding your thyroid glands, some of the most important in your body. The team of Sloane Lipkin ’11, Andrew Brodsky ’11 and Evan Taddeo ’11, working under Professor of Biology David Gapp, are working this summer to determine the effects of decreased thyroid function, or hypothyroidism, on mice.

Over the past few years, people have become aware of a health threat in an unexpected place: traces of bisphenol-A (or BPA) that leach from reusable plastic water bottles. Because of his interest in endocrinology and toxicology, Dan Brimberry ’13 has decided to further pursue this subject with funding from an Emerson grant and guidance from Timothy Elgren, professor of chemistry.

If you told your 10-year-old nephew to eat three pieces of broccoli before he could eat dessert, he could probably figure out that eating four or five pieces would still get him that sundae. But at what age do children learn to distinguish ‘at least n,’ ‘at most n’ and ‘exactly n’ and apply them? Celia Yu ’12 received an Emerson grant to study the numerical acquisition of children with regard to their interpretation of such expressions.

The Utica Observer-Dispatch recalled the friendship between the Rev. Samuel Kirkland, founder of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy, and Skenandoa, chief of the Oneida Indians, in an editorial titled “We must not forget our first allies” (8/6/10). This day marks the 233rd anniversary of the Battle of Oriskany, one of the bloodiest battles of the American Revolution.

In a chemistry lab, Eric Kuenstner ’12 and Jack Trieu ’11 place a round-bottom flask on an instrument called a rotovap. With a push of a button the flask begins spinning, making the solution flow from the flask through coiled tubes. “It always makes me feel like a mad scientist,” Kuenstner laughs, and Trieu nods agreement. But the result of this seemingly diabolical processing is hardly sinister; the students are looking to find the most favorable conditions for a [2,3] sigmatropic rearrangement to occur.

The Ninth Annual National MERCURY Conference on Computational Chemistry, devoted solely to undergraduates who are working on research projects in computational chemistry, was held at Hamilton from Aug. 1 through Aug. 3. The program offered an opportunity for undergraduates to learn about the breadth of research in computational chemistry, particularly in interdisciplinary topics and to discuss their work with other undergraduate computational chemists as well as some leaders in the field.

Professor of English and Creative Writing Doran Larson published an essay “Writing Behind the Wall” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (8/1/10). The piece details Larson’s experiences in teaching creative writing at a maximum security prison and the related class he teaches at Hamilton, “20th Century American Prison Writing.”

Pablo Picasso once said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” This summer, Eva Hunt ’11 is discovering how art is used cathartically, but for some heavier dust than Picasso’s; through internships with Project Create and The Smith Farm Center, Hunt is learning that art can be therapeutic for children and adults.

When you tell people you are spending the summer on an archaeological dig, those who have any experience with excavations begin to tell you how it will affect your daily life.

In researching and experimenting with magnetic properties, scientists use beams of neutrons with all the same spin. They ensure that the neutrons are all polarized the same way with the help of an apparatus called a helium-3 polarizer. Jake Zappala ’12 is engineering a helium-3 polarizer test system for researching the diagnostic tools used in the polarization process.