SCOPE Stories Week 21: It's a Boa Constrictor Digesting an Elephant

Through the process of trying to change some of the properties of a particular stent in order to test a stent with our desired characteristics, we managed to pretty badly damage a stent. In this case, by "damage" I mean that we caused the stent to stay in deformed shapes instead of trying to regain its rest state.

We had a lot of fun with this.

At one point, one of my teammates pushed the wires into a shape and asked, "How would you mathematically describe this?" We debated for a little while -- kind of like a Gaussian, kind of like e^{-x}? Then Brian, our faculty advisor, said, "It looks like a snake swallowed something," at which point my teammate and I looked at each other and said, "It swallowed an elephant!"

After that, of course we had to fill the stent with runts candy to actually get it into a shape that really matched the Little Prince drawing.

(On a more serious note, we think we're actually going to get data soon, both from collecting it ourselves and from BoSci. Also, we've started on the final report. How is that already happening?)