BIG REMINDER: SEAL Con 8 is just under a month away on Sat May 13th!!! Everyone should be starting to prep their talks and posters and winding up experimental work. Since there will be less research happening and we want to leave final results for reveal at the conference, this will be the last “Week in Review” for the school year. Thanks everyone for your diligent updates and thoughtful comments and questions. Hopefully we’ll be able to make this blog work even better next year!
Very brief updates this week from San Marino and Poly. Throughout month of March, Poly continued to have issues with HARPOON data not showing up onto the software. Moving on they tried out a new website called the Materials Project, which is a huge database of compounds with information regarding band gap, stability, etc. After researching on the Materials Project database, they decided to testing a Yttrium Manganese compound by mixing manganese sulfate monohydrate and yttrium nitrate hexahydrate. They are currently making the material and will test it next week.
San Marino had some problems with their kiln getting too hot and damaging the FTO plates making them non-conductive. They will try and even lower setting next time to avoid this. They also have a new idea for testing plates without the SEAL kit. They would attach the leads of the voltmeter to the plate, attach and tape the black gel template to the bottom of the bowl and line up the plate with the spot on the bottom of the bowl. Then they would turn the setting on the voltmeter to current, such as 10 mA, and shine a flashlight and measure the current. No bias voltage! The other San Marino team had problems with the software and were unable to test but observed that their NaVO4, Fe(NO3)2, and CuSO4 materials turned into a yellow orange color. The spots with only NaVO4 washed off when they tried to test it. Next week they will try to test the plates again.
Thanks everyone and see you all at SEAL Con 8!! 
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