Siliceous and Delicious

I thought I’d launch right into labwork this morning. I just had to print off this afternoon’s labs… but that ended up ballooning into a nearly two hour long effort that involved manually collating all 17 pages of the 28 copies needed because the auto-feed auto-collate function on the copier was, for some reason, putting a line across each page. And the whole reason I wanted to do this on the copier—to better render the lines on the table they’ll be filling out in the dice-rolling exercise—ended up disappointingly, too, since I’ve realized (too late) that the copier actually did a worse job than our laser printer up here. Well, we can but try.

Anyway, now that the lab is finally off my table (or, technically speaking, on my table) I can get on with the rest of work. I have CLSM time tomorrow afternoon, so my first avenue of investigation probably ought to be to have another try at making a better fluorescent-embedded diatom slide. What I did was to mix a small amount of epoxy (barely covering the bottom of a large weighing boat) with three drops of fluorescein Na dissolved in DI water. While the mixing didn’t look perfect (it seemed that the fluorescein solution wanted to be on top, forming a faint ‘bath tub ring’ on the weighing boat at the surface of the epoxy) it seemed good enough and so I used it to make a slide of sample ODP/Zoe 24#C. The difference this time is I decided not to put it onto the hot plate to cure the epoxy, but rather let it cure slowly at room temperature (I know this works because the unused epoxy left over is always hardened the next day from just sitting in its weigh boat). I am hoping this reduces or perhaps even eliminates the formation of bubbles on the sample.

It’s also high time today to start thinking about the shape my thesis progress report is going to take. What’s starting to take amorphous form in my mind—thanks entirely to my conversation with Beau last Thursday—is five parts: (1) progress on the development of the FIB-SEM method, (2) progress on the development of the CLSM method, (3) a few pictures of the poorly preserved radiolarians from the Ohio concretion and a discussion of the major obstacles in this project, (4) graphs and a discussion of my progress so far in replicating Dan Rabosky’s diatom diversity subsampling, and (5) a short description of the idea for a silicon isotope paleoproductivity proxy involving radiolarians.

The afternoon was filled with they joys of attending lecture and teaching EPS 8 section, during which I was dying to see whether my fluorescent-epoxy slide had cured yet, and if so, if it hardened without making bubbles.