Siliceous and Delicious

The day started out reasonably well when Evangelos was finally present at our designated meeting time and showed me how to use the Olympus CLSM. It’s very similar to the Zeiss, and it appears to actually give better images. Evangelos promised to authorize me for on-line bookings of the machine (although that hasn’t happened quite yet). I also quizzed him about other CLSMs in the Boston area; much as I had suspected, there are many, but (at least according to Evangelos) they are all substantially more expensive than the CNS facility, and not necessarily any better. Those at the medical school (both in Longwood and at MGH) are, in addition to the cost, hopelessly oversubscribed. Apparently there’s also a facility in ‘biology’ (which I assume means OEB), but that, too, is more expensive. All in all I was left with the impression that my best option is to stick with the CNS and get used to the Olympus. On the way out I also tried to prise a little into what he meant when he spoke of the ‘future of the center’ in his last email. He was very quick to assure me that it was nothing serious and nothing to worry about—perhaps a little too quick for me to believe it completely, but then again, who knows.

Spent some time trying to figure out what to do for the next EPS 8 lab, which is supposed to (nebulously) be about the P/T extinction, but couldn’t find any inspiration. Here’s a moment where I would ordinarily have spent the rest of the day ‘thinking’ about it and aimlessly clicking around the internet trying to find a starting point, but I’ve avoided that pitfall today and simply put it off to work on another time.

Tried instead to revisit my radiolarian counting-and-weighing exercise, the first step of which is to weigh an empty petri dish (which subsequently will be filled with a counted number of radiolarians, and then weighed again). Alas, the scale continues to be a royal pain in the ass—it will only measure to the nearest 0.0001 g (i.e. 100 µg), which is already the estimated weight of some 3000 individuals (using Moore’s estimate), but to make matters worse the scale drifts horrendously and won’t give the same reading over time, nor give the same reading when the same object is weighed several times—the weight will be off by several 100s of µg. So with the current set-up there’s just no hope of weighing the damn things.

Resorted to counting out 50 radiolarians (identified as best I can under the 50x lens of the Wild picking scope) and putting them into a little plastic vial filled with 1.5 ml of DI water.

Started the day by working on the next EPS 8 lab, which isn’t scheduled until after mid-semester break—but I’ve fenced off time for EPS 8 and I’m going to stick to it. That way I’ll have my sheltered time for research when the lab draws near. The next lab is on Ediacaran and Cambro-Ordovician body fossils and trace fossils. The lab is designed as a straightforward describe-and-interpret exercise and seems to be in pretty good shape, not much work needed at all! I spent the morning checking for spelling mistakes and reformatting the lab to fit with the format of the previous labs, with a view to having a consistent face on the labs next year.

Then, went out for lunch with a visiting student, Justin. Allie and I were the only dissonant voices in the general cooing over how marvelous Harvard graduate student life is. It both cemented my feelings of alienation over the rest of the scientific community, particularly at Harvard, and left me comforted to an extent that my feelings aren’t entirely unique (though I know Allie’s situation to be quite a different one).

Didn’t do much in the way of work in the afternoon, but planned for the week ahead and booked time on both the FIB and the CLSM, to try and regain some momentum on both of those projects. Pottered off to the lab for the last part of the day to take a first look at the radiolarian samples from Dave. Celebrated quite an achievement—my first successfully made epoxy slide, without bubbles. Huzzah! And, the radiolarian sample in it looks beautiful. Being able to pick out C. davisiana is going to be difficult under the picking scope, and will no doubt take practice, but shouldn’t be impossible. Since the picking scope in our microscope room is capable of doing transmitted light picking, that should help things tremendously, as long as there is decent refraction between the rads and the water they’ll be sitting in. We shall see next week. All in all a positive note on which to end the week.