A Lab Notebook

 
Slashdot as Right-Wing Noise Machine

- posted by alex @ 00:15 0 comments

 
AlphaTemp1.7
I monitored thje cultures for John today. I sampled too late in the day run the 18 deg culture through the flocculator. We should do this tomorrow.


- posted by alex @ 16:59 0 comments

 
FlumePost
This is more of a note to myself rather than a general post since I left my notebook downstairs.
Dilution for CC => 5%
pH = 9.25
Fv/Fm = 0.575, Dilution =>0.1/3
- posted by alex @ 16:32 0 comments

 
AlphaTemp1.5
All of the cultures are in slow decline. Not a serious crash per se, but with Fv/Fm in the high 0.3s, they aren't looking too hot at the moment. Sampling of the cultures on 16 November occurred a bit later than I had hoped. There was considerable difficulty with the other concurrent experiment we are running. I had serious issues with the machine that controls the position of the laser we use to measure particle velocity in the annular flume. As a result, I didn't get a chance to sample from the temperature experiments until 5pm. Fortunately, we are waiting for the Fv/Fm of the cultures to drop below 0.3 to run another flocculator time series.

- posted by alex @ 09:20 0 comments

 
AlphaTemp1.2
Started the first day of full scale sampling. The basic numbers are posted below while the goods are kept in secrecy for the killer science paper John and I are planning on writing based on the results of this experiment. In reality however, we started sampling at 1430, John left at 5:45 for class, and I finished around 1930. We used a 100um orifice on the Coulter Counter, and may have to use a larger orifice in the coming days. We filtered 6x60ml from each culture, 3=>chl-a, 3=>TEP/Alcian Blue.
- posted by alex @ 22:01 0 comments

 
AlphaTemp1.1
The basic numbers from today. We are conducting an experiment to test the coagulation efficiency, or stickiness, of Skeletonema at various temperatures. We are using the efficiency of PSII as an indication of culture physiology. The stickiness of each culture at a given physiological state will be compared. Today, the efficiency of PSII was less than our sampling threshold of 0.2. No sampling of the cultures today. The spreadsheet has been moved to the most recent day of the experiment.
- posted by alex @ 14:37 0 comments

 
Marine Snow Image
Below is an image of marine snow. The imaged marine snow was made using a compound microscope and my canon SD300 digital elph camera. The sno itself was made using a "flocculator". The flocculator is essentially a small jar spinning inside of a larger jar with the space between the two jars filled with seawater and phytoplankton (Skeletonema in this case). Anyways, the horizontal scale of the image is about 1cm across. As one can estimate, some of the imaged phytoplankton aggregates are on the order of tens to hundreds of millimeters.

Hopefully, I will be posting a bit more regularly again, after my brief internet hiatus.
- posted by alex @ 11:34 0 comments

 
Back in action
It has been a while since i last posted to my lab notebook. For the most part, this can be attributed to the fact that I my lab work was interrupted by some field work. Hopefully in some future posts I will post some pictures from the top secret exercise I conducted with the Navy in Norfolk for the past two weeks. For now, I am making a boring science post and a brief running post. Today I made progress on determing the steady state of the the volume flux from the Jackson model. Mutz helped me devise a method to determine the steady state while trying to keep computation to a minimum. I'll post how my tests of the method proceed.
Otherwise, I ran moderate for about an hour today. Today was my first serious run since my fourth place finish at Promise Land a few weeks ago. That race was a bit of a shock as I was running with Scott Jurek of all folks for a good part of the race.
- posted by alex @ 22:15 0 comments