The strudel and puree. The excuse for the sticky toffee pudding and sauce was the 4.30 start and consequent missing of breakfast as I slept from 7 to 11 (see below) |
The gnocci gratin
On the work front it has been a mixed day. After Beatriz arrived she busied herself in the labs making some amorphous calcium carbonate (quickly washed with isopropanol to wash away the water and therefore stabilise the ACC), some ACC stabilised by incorporation of magnesium and some calcite.
Beatriz in the lab. making standards |
We had hoped to use these standards to confirm our identification of ACC in the FTIR maps of our granules. Unfortunately the ACC managed to crystalise a bit and investigation showed that the Mg stabilised ACC showed peak shifts that meant we couldn't use them as standards. The calcite standard also had shifted peaks compared to our samples, we're not sure why, possibly something to do with the synthesis. The long and short of it is that we can 't use the standards. Shame, good try.Last night we set up a map that we estimated would finish at 4.30 this morning. Liane and I left the beamline at about 11.30 in the evening and arrived back at 4.30. Unfortunately for reasons we don't fully understand the map didn't finish until 7ish despite our calculations and those of the computer. This means we could have stayed in bed until 6.30 (which in synchrotron terms is almost civilised). So that was quite annoying, however the map was good and we were then able to measure the standards (sadly unusable) and a final detailed granule map. This finished around about lunch time and we then switched to Steffi's snow algae.
I have spent the rest of the day processing data and will try and get some more processing done now.
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