It's been a busy week, both in the lab and out.
I mentioned briefly that I picked up an assignment from the student newspaper this week. Since there's no journalism program at the University of Alberta, the paper is written largely by volunteers like me, and no experience is required. This is lucky for me, a unique opportunity to start learning the journo ways despite my age (I imagine in a university with a journalism program you'd need to 'prove' yourself first). So they gave me an assignment, loaned me a voice recorder and sent me on my way.
The piece was to be about the research finding of a PhD student at the U of A, and there were a couple of articles already printed about it I found online. This was both a pro and a con for me: on the one hand I picked a different angle on the research findings, but it led to a fatal novice interviewer mistake! While I was interviewing the researcher I felt it was going well, she thanked me for asking good questions so I felt my angle was a good one. I listened intently and learned a lot. But later, when I came to write up the article I realised my flaw: I had been too busy getting into the details of my 'angle' that I forgot to ask the basics - the simple facts and figures. This meant that such pertinent details, like the number of research participants, I had to take from the article I read before. And really that was the only one I took, since I can see how you could get into a lot of trouble for reporting details you didn't get from the horse's mouth. Sure, a lot of that happens, which is why a lot of news gets so distorted, but I don't want to get into that!
Still, I wrote the article up until I thought it contained a lot of interesting titbits, and sent it off to the editors for the deadline. Then I sent it to my foreign boyfriend to test if it made sense. He admitted it was a bit hard to read, too 'sciencey'. Ahh, I'm too used to writing scientific documents! Well, now I have to wait and see what the editors say, but I have a sinking feeling it will be something along the lines of 'simplify!' Still, it's an extremely valuable learning experience, both in journalistic practices and what I learned about the subject from the researcher herself. That would be a wonderful thing about being a science journalist, all the frontiers of science I could learn about!
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While I was in Alaska, I did get a chance to pick up some samples for my own research: one volcanic ash in several locations along with samples for carbon dating around the ash (my focus is on younger materials than Britta, hence I can use carbon dating to great effect). The first step in dating this ash is to make sure I actually picked up the same one in all the locations, so I had to test the chemistry of my samples, which should be similar within acceptable limits.
This involves a surprisingly lengthy process of sieving, dissolving organics, separating the mineral grains using some particularly toxic chemicals and finally mounting what's left in epoxy. All this means I have try to get as much ash as possible in my final sample that I analyse on the electron microprobe (a nice fancy machine that finds the chemistry for me). Sometimes this works better than others, for example this sample doesn't have a very high ash-to-junk ratio:
However, this was from a marine sample someone else sent to me, and you can actually see in it some life I didn't manage to eradicate! Hopefully you can see a couple of honeycomb structures in the above image (the largest is just above-right of the biggest grey grain), and these are tiny forms of marine life (it's a shame the scale wasn't preserved with the image; the structures are around 100 µm in diameter).
The electron microprobe is fitted with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), which allows such images to be taken. What I do is sit and look through my samples with this to find good pieces of volcanic ash, that are coherent enough for chemistry to be obtained from. I 'pick' around 25 points per sample - recording the position so that the machine can analyse it later. The reason we do it this way is it takes several minutes for the machine to analyse each point, so if we pick them all out during the day we can leave it to run all the analyses overnight. Sometimes, the ash is more cooperative than others:
In this image all the frothy, ragged shapes you see are volcanic ash shards (around 20-50 µm in diameter). These are pretty difficult to analyse since you can't find a good spot to point the beam at!
Needless to say, this is another one of those gloriously scientific long and boring processes. Still, sometimes the shards can be pretty shapes, you can almost make objects out of them, like cloudspotting. This one, for example, I think looks like a smiling gun:
No? It's been a long week.
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