Day 1
On my very first day, I learned about making cups.
Here's what happens (it's quite exciting, really!): First, you set up everything you need - 3 pieces for the 'cup', a mortar and pestle, a scooper, and a piece of film 4 microns thick, and also whatever it is you're making a cup of. Next, you place the film on top of one of the body pieces of the cup, and slot the second piece into the first - stretching out the film and securing the two pieces together.
Then you crush up the sample, making an extremely fine powder, which you then mass out on an extremely sensitive scale (so sensitive that it registers when you breathe on it!! neat!), then you pour the crushed sample into the mostly constructed cup, stuff it with cotton (except that it isn't cotton because that would be silly) and then you cap it. On the cap you write all of the relevant information, and voila! You're done! Except not. Now you have to go wash everything you used (excluding the scale because you used massing paper on that) - but this is also fun because you get to rinse
everything with ethanol, which makes it all dry faster (since ethanol evaporates faster than water). Super fun :D.
So. That's how you make cups.
After we made cups, we ran them through a Xepos machine, which uses
x-rays to determine the elemental composition of the samples you put in the cups. You have to set up what you want it to do on a computer that's off the left edge of the photo, open the helium tanks on the right of the photo, then let it do its thing for a few hours (depending on how many cups you're running).
And that's Xepos.
Day 2
On my SECOND day in Dan's lab, I went to both MIT and Harvard - Harvard first, for a group meeting with the people we're running samples for, and also to discuss with some other people the data we've been getting for some of Dan's other projects. Right now we're working on Tar Creek, which is a study of a superfund site where flooding happens, so the study is on the transport of contaminants through flood mechanism (we're looking at tree bark from th
e banks of the river where the trees got completely coated in mud during the flood). We're also looking at soil samples from urban gardening projects where cities give compost that's been sitting in contaminated areas to people to use in their gardens (not realizing its contaminated, of course) - but we're also looking at samples of soil that's been decontaminated but which is slowly becoming re-contaminated just through transport of contaminants through
the wind (which is pretty dangerous in and of itself, because if they're wind-transportable, then they're inhale-able). The third project is what we're mostly doing for the Harvard folks - a guy there named Jim is studying fish (uh. I'm not allowed to say from where or what specifically he has learned. Wow.), but I didn't start working on this project until day 3. Finally, the fourth project is on a powder from India that women (I think Hindus) trace down the middle of the top of their head, along the part of their hair when they get married. Unfortunately (and that doesn't really cover it) it has an incredibly high lead/mercury content, and since these women are applying it directly to their heads, that's a real problem. (I just mentioned it to my dad and he says that it shines, hmm.) Of these projects, the first is being done with Harvard, the second with a non-profit, the third we're really just running samples
for Harvard, and the fourth is for some guy, I don't really know the story behind it. I'm most interested in the last, I confess.
Anyway, after we went to the group meeting at Harvard, we went to MIT to use their Scanning Electron Microscope (!!!!!) - here's something interesting:
^^ SEM at UCONN
SEM at MIT ^^
On the other hand, now that I'm looking back at the pictures, I think the UCONN one might have been more sensitive - those are carbon nanotubes on the screen...
But I don't actually know. It's entirely possible that in the three years between these two photos, the technology has improved so much that the ginormous piece of equipment on the left has been compacted into the more manageable piece of equipment on the right (and we all know how technology likes to become more compact and sophisticated over time).
This essentially works by shooting a stream of photons at a sample, exciting electrons which then ionize. When the atom regains equilibrium, it has to give off a ray of something (conservation of energy) and there's a detector inside the machine (something about liquid nitrogen? I'm going to go to a class later on how the whole thing works, I'll post something updated then.) that reads the wavelengths and matches them with the wavelengths given off by electron movement in various atoms, which the computer then displays for you to sort through. You generally pick the ones that match with movement to the alpha orbital, as that's the most likely, and then the computer tells you what's what on the sample. Awesome!
Day 3 (today)
Today, I worked with the fish and the Sindoor, and organized the lab. There was snow so Dan couldn't come in, so we just made cups and such. Oh! We got to look at the freezers in the bio wing - this one here was at -80 degrees F. BRR. ---->
And then we hooked up some samples that we need to make cups
out of to a dry ice freezer (or something like that); that was pretty neat.
<-- This is Emily doing that.
Tomorrow I have a meeting with Dan to discuss what I've done so far and what role I will play in his research team over the semester (yipes) - it's pretty cool to say that I'm on a research team!
And so, more later.
p.s. having a terrible time with formatting on here. sigh.
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