So I did a six week placement earlier this summer in a lab in my department. I got to do some pretty awesome stuff.

As part of my write-up I made a podcast about my experiences. Click on the link below to listen to it, or right click to save it to your computer.

Zinc Ions and Stefin B Amyloid Formation

(Be warned, I mumble a bit - about halfway through I say "the amount of amyloid formed was much greater", not "would be much greater").

If you'd like a tl;dl version: I was looking amyloid fibres, which are involved in various degenerative diseases. The presence of zinc ions might have some effect on the formation of these fibres, and my project has contributed a modest amount of data towards finding out what that effect is.

To speed up data processing, I made a little macro to pick out specific lines from text files and collect them in an excel spreadsheet. It's useful for any bits of equipment that spit out lots of single data files. I'm going to do another post with some documentation on how to use it, but in the meantime you can click here to download it if you want to have a look.

The very last thing I did was to get some pictures of my fibres in the electron microscope (which, liquid nitrogen and fiddly prep notwithstanding, was a lot like using a normal microscope). They're underneath the cut.
Continue reading My Vacation Studentship

So my farm on FarmVille is doing well. I don't know what it is about farming games - whether it's this or Alice Greenfingers, there's just some part of me that finds the whole thing deeply satisfying. Perhaps this is a sign that I should get a real garden, who knows. Or perhaps it's just a sign that I'm supposed to be revising at the moment and that procrastination is quite the enchantress.

Speaking of procrastination, I have rather a list of things that I've vaguely thought about getting around to making/doing At Some Point Maybe. Continue reading Farmville and plans