Defining terms

I’ve had this blog running around in my head for quite a while now so I figured it was about time I got it written. Now anyone who follows my Facebook statuses (you know who you are) will probably have noticed certain terms featuring time and time again and maybe, just maybe, you might be a little curious as to what I’m gibbering on about. If that’s the case then this post is for you.

1. Synchrotron/Spring8

In short this is where I work and essentially where I live. A synchrotron is a kind of particle accelerator, the name coming from the synchronous tuning of a guiding and accelerating magnetic field that ensure particles in the accelerator ensure both a circular path around the synchrotron and also keeps there speed constant at just below the speed of light.

Now note I said accelerator, not collider. I do not smash atoms together. I do not create black holes. I am not looking for hitherto undiscovered particles (godly or otherwise). Right now that that’s off my chest I’ll tell you what I am doing which involves exploiting a handy little oddity of electrons.

As these electrons whizz around the ring at breakneck speeds they are constantly being deflected, to maintain that all-important circular path. At the deflection points they will slow down a bit losing energy. But that energy has to go somewhere and so it is radiated in the form of photons of light, x-rays to be precise. Originally this was an accidental side effect but these days’ synchrotrons are built with this phenomenon in mind and with that we come nicely to term number 2.

2. Beamline

These are the positions around the synchrotron at which the x-rays are actually emitted. X-rays act just like any other rays of light so they can be diffracted reflected and focussed in the same ways. The beamline contains the apertures; lens and mirrors used for this purpose as well as big end-station hutches that house the equipment needed for the particular experiment you want to perform. They are essentially a synchrotron scientist’s lab.

 

3. Beamtime

As you can imagine synchrotrons are not infinitely large, such a shame I know. As such the number of simultaneous experiments is limited. Unfortunately the number of scientists wanting to perform experiments is much greater than the number of beamlines. The usage period is therefore allocated in time slots that users refer to as “Beamtime”. This time is always fairly limited and precious so we try ti make as much use of it as possible, hence all the sleepless nights . In fact nothing causes more sleepless nights than the next term.

4. Beam dump

The original term comes from the piece of equipment used to absorb the energy of particles in a particle accelerator to safely stop them. For me and anyone working in a synchrotron however the term is synonymous with “Oh no not again”. Without circulating no x-rays will be emitted and therefore no experiments can be performed. They can happen for a number of reasons. Sometimes it can be down to hutch interlock problems meaning there is a chance a worker could be irradiated by escaping X-rays and so they need to be shut off as quickly as possible. Other times it is down to the electron source (wonderfully known as an electron gun) or the accelerator itself, which leads to instabilities. What it always is though is damned inconvenient. Sometimes a dump is a matter of moments, other times it can last for hours and when the beam comes back all it’s parameters may have changed, meaning the experimental set up has to be re-optimised and more time is lost.

5. Beamline staff

Golden rule, make these guys your friends. They are the people who run the beamline with expertise generally in construction engineering. They develop and maintain most of the equipment and software for performing experiments and will help your experiment run as smoothly as possible. Treat them nicely and you’ll have a nicer time during experiments, especially if there are problems – there are always problems.

 

6.Speckle patterns

These are the stuff that dreams are made of, provided you dream about coherent diffractive imaging (CDI). The experiments I perform involve illuminating samples with very bright X-rays and measuring their reflections from atoms within the sample using a detector similar to those found in digital cameras (though quite a fair bit more expensive). Speckles occur when photons of light with the same wave length, the distance between the humps of the lights wave form, interact with different regions in the sample and are reflected to the same degree. The photons interact additively or destructively and so we see spots of very intense signal or patches of no signal on the detector.

Each speckle contains contributions of reflection from the whole sample so it is the variation in intensity and the periodicity of the samples that hold the important structural information. If that is a little confusing don’t worry, I’m still not fully on top of it myself. What I do know though is that they can be very pretty. Whilst getting the hard structural information requires a fair amount of computation we can still draw some interesting conclusions about overall structural changes within a sample from changes in speckle position and intensity alone. It is quite nice that the data we collect is something you can physically see straight away.

Right science waffle over, hope you feel a little bit more enlightened in regards to my research and hopefully next time I post won’t be so far away.

Why am I doing this?

At last the Cheiron School is over. Don't get me wrong it was great fun, met loads of great new people and learned a hell of a lot about X-ray science, but, it was also a massive brain drain, not least because I’ve also been working on the beamline during the nights. Hooray for 4 hours sleep, I’ll be totally out of wack by this Sunday I feel.

But enough of my moaning, I thought I’d spend this post talking a bit more about some of the interesting applications of synchrotron radiation that I’ve learned about over the course of the past week. It really has reminded me what I’m pouring my hours and energy in to.

To bring those who don’t know upto speed, Synchrotrons are giant circular facilities that are constructed to churn out light of high brilliance in the high end o the optical spectrum. What I mean by tha is the light has a ver small wavelength. In general they are in the x-ray region, between 0.8 and 10 nm although they do go higher.

They are produced by the periodic interference of a relativistic electron beam as it passes through large electromagnets, which maintain their curved path around the ring. These magnets can either be large individuals or, more commonly these days, arrays of magnets called undualtors and, yes this really is their name, wigglers.

Whilst synchrotrons used to be firmly in the grasp of high energy physics in recent years their doors have begun to open to all aspects of scientific research, from physical chemistry, materials science, geology and of course very close to my heart, biological and biomedical sciences.

I won’t bore you, or myself to be frank, by running through a list of all the crazy stuff that goes on here but I would like to outline some of the surprising things I’ve heard about. Hopefully after reading you’ll realize the work here is not all just abstract work by grand theorists, some of the applications are very real and close to home.

This is a good thing as these facilities are flipping expensive and horrendously inefficient. In fact the average synchrotron experiment utilizes maybe 1% of the total power output and often even less. This is partly down to the difficulties in alignment since if you want to see small you’ve gotta go big. But that's a story for another time.

So for my first example I’d like to present some work that is helping premature babies to breathe. Whilst being born the contents of a babies lungs have to rapidly switch from a liquid environment to a gaseous one. No one is quite sure how exactly this switch occurs but what we do know is that a lot of the time when babies are born premature, it doesn’t happen.

Now whilst with modern medicine a good proportion of these babies survivee due to assisted ventilation methods, around 30% will develop chronic lung complications in their mid teens. This is an obvious issue and in fact the cause is the assisted ventilation that saves the babies life in the first place, some of the time it will cause the lungs damage that is not fully repaired in the immature infant.

So how can we better understand this process? The answer is X-rays. And when I say X-rays I do actually mean like the radiograms you see get at your local hospital. Sort of. Scientists have found away to utilize the intense brilliance and high coherence of the x-ray sources to take highly detailed snapshots of living tissue.

So how do you do these experiments then? Essentially it is the same as normal radiography, you place the object you want to image in front of the beam and take an exposure. You then measure the change in intensity of the X-rays that come out the other end, due to the different densities of our tissues more or less radiation will be detected.

Of course synchrotron radiation has a very small beam size so you actually have to take multiple thin slices to get a large picture, however due to the much higher peak brilliance (the amount of light photons in a given area) exposure times are much slower.

The other major change is that your detector is a long distance away. By doing this some of the X-rays scattered by the edges of the things they interact with will interfere coherently and increase in intensity. The practical upshot of this is that the resolution at the edges of your image is greatly improved. Whilst thi can happen with normal X-rays it is more pronounced at synchrotrons.

So back to babies. Basically using the techniques described above scientists at spring8 have imaged lungs of premature baby rabbits whilst they breathe. The resolution is such that they can actually see individual alveoli within the lungs. This meant they could quantify the amount of air within the lung at a given time. Incredible.

In doing this they realized something. The rapid filling and emptying of lungs by artificial respirators was causing the lung damage as the lungs never fully filled with air and so water was never fully expelled and the lungs collapsed after each expiration.

They found that by either slowing the rate at which the lungs emptied through a technique know as PEEP (Positive end Respiratory Pressure), or by increasing the length of the first inhalation. the lungs would be fully aerated and would not collapse during expiration. This could really save a lot of lives in the future as it will prevent these fatal lung complications developing in preterm and C-section children.

Example number two of the awesomeness of SR comes this time from a technique known as X-ray fluorescence. This exploits the fact that all elements within the periodic table emit photons (fluorescence) at a given energy following x-ray exposure. Essentially by focusing on a particular energy level you can determine the composition of a material.

More practically, if you are good, this can be used in forensic like the example I’m about to show here. This case dates back to 1998 at a festival in Wakayama, Japan. During it many people grew critically ill and four eventually died. At the time no one knew the cause however after post mortem analysis it was found that they had been poisoned by an Arsenic trioxide laced curry.

The problem lay in the source of the poisoning. It was discovered however, through XRF, that all of the people who had died contained unusual amounts of certain trace elements at a given ratio. By analyzing various samples from the crime seen they manage to discover containers with these elements at the same distinctive ratio.

It was too distinct to be a coincidence and this evidence has been used in the prosecution of the culprits, which even now ongoing due to the circumstantial nature of some of the earlier evidence. This kind of analysis can only be carried out at a synchrotron due to the intense brightness of the X-rays allowing the weak signals from such trace elements to be significantly detected.

Well I hope you have enjoyed that brief insight into some of the more unusual science that goes on here at Spring8. As a final present I’ll leave you with an image from my first attempts at electron microscopy. This is a microtubule, one of the protein structures involved in maintaining the internal organization of cells, at 70,000 times magnification.

So what really amazes or inspires you from your chosen path in life? What keeps you doing the things you do?

Mata ne minna,

Jiken Jikan, and home visits

I think one word could easily summate the events of the past week and a half. Stress. Work has been truly incredibly hard, but I got through it, which is certainly something. It was decided last week that from now on I’ll be in charge of sample preparation for our experiments. This corresponded to a lot of time spent looking through a microscope at very small things. The joys of a PhD.

Our chosen targets were three-fold. The plankton Microcystis aeruinosa which is a major water pest in japan and therefore an interesting target. Next was condensed chromosome and finally the yeast Sacchromyces cerevisea everyones favourite yeast (it’s bakers and brewers yeast).

So I spent more or less the whole weekend practicing viewing and fixing samples to the thin, I’m talking 30nm thin, silicon slides that we use in imaging experiments. Whilst the process is theoretically straightforward it is of course practically very difficult. Micromanipulation is something I’ve always struggled with due to my innate clumsiness. I’m ok when I concentrate but it can be quite draining.

With that in mind I was very nervous by the time the beamtime actually started on Tuesday and the pressure was mounting. After about 8 hours of set up I departed the beamline to prepare samples whilst everyone else was aligning the equipment. We mainly focused on the plankton as a collaborator had given it to us and we were keen to get some new results.

I worked really hard but for some reason we just couldn’t see anything. The background from the samples buffer solution was just too great and we couldn’t see anything clearly. What didn’t help this was the fact myself and Daewoong where really struggling to figure out what was plankton and what was bubbles. Either way we needed to get rid of that buffer. I had a brainwave and using a handy centrifuge we’d found on the beamline I pelleted the cells, poured off the buffer and re-suspended in water.

We loaded another membrane and managed to get a couple of datasets though the samples seemed a bit small. Things weren’t looking too good after day to and it seemed like my first sample prep experience would be a failure. I worked my bum off for the next day and prepared a large number of chromosome samples. Unfortunately fatigue seemed to have set in as we were suddenly getting funny circles in our diffraction patterns, likely just the grease used to seal the membranes.

So 65 hours out of 72 spent awake, about 20 miles cycled between the ring and the lab where the microscope was located and not much to show for it. A massive disappointment but I had definitely learned a lot. It has also helped me feel more integrated within the group and I think everyone has a bit more respect for me now.

Suffice to say though it nearly killed me and actually made me a bit ill. “Mimi ga itai” (my ears hurt). I must have been looking pretty rough on Friday as Dr. Park insisted on taking me to the hospital. We went along after we’d had some ‘shabu shabu’ at a nearby restaurant with the rest of the lab group. This meal essentially involves dipping very thin slice of meat and vegetables into a boiling hot broth. It cook in a few minutes and is a pretty fun way of eating. A classic example of the communal ways of eating in Japan and “oishikatta” (it was tasty).

I was very thankful to have Dr. Park along at the hospital actually as I wouldn’t have been able to get past the initial forms. I live in quite a remote area so there is not very much English about. The doctor also did not speak very much English but I got the gist and Dr. Park helped to fill in the gaps. I was given a crazy nasal spray, wish I could have got a picture it was a bizarre experience, and about 4 kinds of medicine. It was a nice first experience of the Japanese medical service and I feel much better now.

Right work and my moaning out of the way I did get up to a few other things whilst not working my bum off. The Sunday before we started at the beam I went with Arnaud and Chihiro to a friend’s house in Himeji for dinner. She had kindly agreed to let me kip on her floor as getting back up the mountain is difficult late at night.

So onwards to Uchi no Emily we went. We popped into a conbini on the way to pick up some drinks and Arnaud’s keen eyes noticed a special promotion on a kind of Japanese alcopop. They came with a pair of silicon lips apparently molded from the lips of Japanese female Idols, pop stars, movie stars or models e.t.c. Bizarre I know but the premise was that you could feel as though you were kissing the idol whilst you drank. Even weirder right?

The dinner was delicious a kind of pseudo-Chilean chicken stew with rice cooked by Luis, funnily enough from Chile.  The whole night was a great laugh with great people and helped me to feel a bit more normal. Also in attendance were Gerard and his partner Kumiko whom I'd met previously, Damian, Hiroko and Joshua.

The conversation flitted all over the place but from what I seem to remember a large portion was devoted to talking about how to say particularly rude things in other languages. A very worthwhile topic of conversation of course. Actually due to the highly international nature of these gatherings language seems to be a recurring theme. Not a problem with me to be honest it always makes for good craic.

There were too many highlights to really pick one although Hiroko’s reactions to Joshua and Luis’s vulgarities. She is either very naïve or extremely candid. Either way she pulled some awesome facial expressions. We also had fun demonstrating our party tricks. I managed to shock and amaze a few with my weird body, hurray for stretchy skin, but I couldn’t compete with all the magic tricks Luis had learnt, I guess you need something to keep the kids attention.

It was a great night and I got a good night kip on Emily’s floor to boot. I really need to get a futon at some point I think. It was also cool seeing inside someone else’s house and realizing just how rubbishly small my flat is. Actually it's not that small really but not very well spaced.

Ok jump forward to the Saturday after experiments. I was still feeling a bit rubbish but I’d been invited, alongside Arnaud and Sam, to Gerard and Kumiko’s apartment for lunch, with a short hike in Aboshi beforehand. Well I was exhausted but it beat being stuck inside so I dragged myself out of bed and to the Bus.

The ‘hike’ itself was nothing really, more a stroll up one of the many mountains (read hills) in the local area. There was a nice Buddhist shrine at the top, which made for good photo fodder. To be honest I was totally shattered so it was a good thing really.

In fact I spent a good portion of our walk around Aboshi whining about how tired I was, though after the week I’d just had I feel it was justified. In saying that I did manage to take in a bit of the local area. It seems Aboshi is almost as out in the countryside as our home. There were many rice paddies across the district and it was very flat, not many apartment blocks either.

We got back to Gerrard’s apartment at around 1 o’clock where Kumiko was waiting for us having cooked a “oishii-sou” (tasty looking) Thai curry. Also joining us for lunch where Yuka and Oliver, Yuka was a good friend of Kumiko and Gerard’s and Oliver was visiting her from France.

Wherever I go I seem to be surrounded by French speakers so I guess I need to start learning the language again. Gerard is very into the French language and a keen student, taking every opportunity to cha with Arnaud and Sam it seems. Also Arnaud and Sam delight in introducing me as French so maybe I’d better learn a few key phrases.

Once again a lot of the conversation was focused on of course language. In particular this time the development of regional dialects. I’m particularly interested in Japanese dialects actually. It’s interesting as the Japanese lexicon is limited by the fact there are only 50 unique sounds used to compose words, meaning a lot of homophones. What this means is that dialects in Japan are characterized by the major differences in grammar and word placement where in English accent is much more important.

I was fairly overwhelmed to be honest. I was very tired and as conversations tended to jump between being held in Japanese and French I was constantly struggling to understand. It was kind of fun but not when I was so exhausted. Still I was very happy for the company and Gerard and Kumiko were lovely hosts.

Alongside the curry Oliver had brought some ‘confit de cunard’ to the great excitement of both Sam and Arnaud. This is preserved duck meat simmered in its own fat and, I’m told, is classic French comfort food. I must admit I wasn’t really old though it could have been the old anxieties about high fat food skewing my perception. Though in honesty I’m just not a big fan of duck really. After that Yuka had brought some taiyaki for dessert. Now these things are delcious. One contained anko and brown sugar the other “goma” (black sesame seed) paste and walnuts. “Umaa” they were very tasty.

Soon it was time to return home, Kumiko had to head to the gym to work and it was rapidly getting close to time of the last bus sadly. We washed the dishes and said our goodbyes. It was a nice day all in all and I’d happily go again, it’s nice to get off the mountain from time to time. Can’t wait for my “natsu yasumi” (summer vacation). I have ten days off and should get some good exploring done with the “ryoushin” (parents 

Mata ne minna.

P.S. I realise the last photo is random but how could I not include a pick of a sports drink called thorpedo?

Oodles of noodles, string and cello tape.

The mere mention of those two common household binders, string and cello tape always makes me think of Moving to black water by Reuben. Such a quality song and one close o my heart. Well all of Reuben’s work is actually since it evokes such strong memories of friendship. It’s good to hold on to fond memories like that. I must admit I’m starting to get a little homesick, especially with how crazy busy I am at the moment, I can’t believe I’ve been here three months already.

Anyway enough of my moaning that's not what you want to read about is it. This week we have had yet another slot of beamtime and we’re currently four days in. I decided to take the night shift this time around in the hopes I could easily get in touch with people from home. Alas it was not to be as most of the time has been spent working. What has made things worse is that I’m still struggling to get something delivered back to the UK, so I’ve had to work extra hours since the admin staff are only in work 9-5:30.

The reason beamtime is so mental is because it is very precious. With only 50 experimental hutches and millions of prospective users world wide, experiment time at a synchrotron is very precious. As such we try and make the most of any time we are assigned and this means performing experiments around the clock. Straight off the bat I won’t lie, it’s not fun, it does awful things to your body, but it is very interesting.

For this series of experiments I’ve not been working on my own project but helping the experiments of other members of my group, development of a Coherent diffraction-imaging (CDI) chamber. This has again meant long hours stuck inside the controlled atmosphere and artificial lighting of the ring. Fortunately the weather outside has been rubbish so I’ve not been missing too much.

Now I’ve talked about the theory of CDI before but here is a little refresher. Essentially you are using a very fine X-ray beam to probe the structure of small biological samples, usually a few microns (0.001cm). When the beam interacts with the sample it is scattered. The various types of scattering give different information. The small angles give information about the overall shape and size of the sample, whilst the higher angles will give you an impression of areas of electron density, and from this you can infer internal or surface structures.

Now of course this is just the theory and what I’ll discuss now are the practicalities. Firstly you have to make your X-ray beam coherent. Coherence describes light in which all the photons are travelling in-phase, or parallel, to each other. Picture a 4-lane motorway with four cars that are all driving side by side, then imagine that their paths bend to the left and right rather than being a straight line, but the cars remain side by side. This is kind of what coherent light would look like.

The problem is that when X-ray photons are emitted it is not coherent but in random bunches. To make it coherent we must filter out the unwanted photons and retain just those travelling in the direction we want them to, in the previous sample this would be the restricted lane of the motorway. This is achieved by placing a series of mirrors and slits in the path of the beam to filter the unwanted photons giving us a single beam. This is then reduced in size by passing it through a small aperture called a pinhole. Typically we reduce the beam size from 1mm to about 10 microns.

The crucial part is that all these focusing elements must be precisely aligned, as x-rays will scatter when they interact with any matter. This will give us a lot of ‘noise’ when the final beam eventually reaches the detector. The way we’ve gotten around this problem is to have each element mounted to a very fine motor stage all held within one chamber. Using computer software and a photodiode to detect the x-rays, the various optics components are aligned one by one.

This process is very time consuming and actually took up the first two days of our experiment. This is again why it is so important to make full use of the 24 hours we are given. We were in fact slowed down at one point. A new component we’d purchased for the chamber had not been designed quite right. It was too heavy and under the high vacuum the chamber is maintained at it cracked the Perspex hutch of the chamber. Nightmare. The group made some quick blue-peter style repairs and fortunately the equipment has been working fine since. Who said science needed to be high tech ey.

The next step is to mount samples and fire X-rays at them. The first stage, actually finding the sample also takes some time. A stepwise movement of the motor stage the sample mount is  mounted on allows the beam to scan its entire surface and the resulting patterns are recorded. Usually a signal from a sample will jump out but it requires a bit of focus and experience to be certain that what you are looking at is what you expect to see.

The main issue is that the image recorded does not look like your sample generally. The X-ray detector simply records the position and intensity of a diffracted photon. The trouble is that X-rays can interfere with each other and where there were three photons there can suddenly be one much brighter photon. The pattern produced is said to be in reciprocal space (i.e. 1/real space) and so the exact positions of electron density cannot be determined. Fortunately there are some characteristic patterns that occur due to regions of symmetry so that if you know the rough shape of your sample you can guess the kind of pattern it would produce.

 

Only once you have gone through all this can you start getting data. This is actually the dullest part as you simply expose the sample for a given period of time at a fixed position and combine all the patterns recorded by the detector. Of course our samples are tiny and we are trying to hit them with a tiny beam so getting to this stage takes a lot of time.

As I said I’ve been working the night shift this week alongside Daewong and Dr. Kim from my group as well as Chan, a member of Dr. Kim’s old group in Korea. Once again I’m the only a) none engineer and b) none Korean and so I have been left out of the discussion quite a lot. It’s frustrating but it can’t be helped as everyone is pushed for time and explaining things to me in English takes a while. Not that these guys don’t speak English very well but putting together complex ideas in your native tongue is hard enough, it’s about 5 times harder in another language.

Chan has actually been really awesome. He took the time out to explain in English some of the things that were going on as he could see I was feeling a bit left out. I’m starting to get a much better handle on how these experiments work now and his instruction was really helpful. Also since he’s a PhD student and learning these things himself, I hope I’ve helped further his understanding to. I think I’m going to be working alongside him again over my 2 years so it was good to get to know him a bit better.

The major thing that has sucked about working nights though has got to be the food.  I’ve been reacquainting myself to the eastern, and a personal, obsession with the instant noodle. I actually stopped eating them for a while whilst I was at my worst, god knows why “men ga daisuke desu.” (I love noodles). In fact I do remember my dad once telling me that when I was younger I was practically made of noodles I ate them so much. The same probably holds true now. There are an incredible variety of pot noodles over here because there are just so many ways to eat them.

 

So far every conbini I’ve been to has an entire section dedicated to instant noodles, we’re talking two aisles of a corner shop having nothing but noodles. There are so many types of Ramen, Soba and Udon to go for so you could theoretically live off it without getting bored. So far my firm favorites are “Kitsune udon” (Fox udon), which has strips of deep fried tofu and Korean style spicy ramen. Chan actually brought a load of cartons from Korea with him, sadly they all contained shrimp and I couldn’t try them.

Of course pot noodles are no substitute for real food, even if the quality is vastly higher than those found in the UK. I can’t wait to get to some proper Udon/Soba/Ramen-yas and try some real hand made noodles, something I’ve disgracefully not managed yet. Either way I’m feeling the effects now. Pot noodles aren’t great as their ingredients lists are massive. I hate having to scrutinize food labels, it holds bad memories for me, and when you can’t read the language it is even tougher.

This has of course meant a few allergy fails, mainly from the use of shrimp powder in the soup bases. “Onaka ga ittai” (my stomach hurts). Amazing though it is I am actually missing the cafeteria and I can’t wait till I can eat something that only contains about 4 ingredients again.

This whole experience has actually reminded me of my gaming days, throwing the old body clock to the wind and keeping the mind active at ungodly hours. Unfortunately the strange hours have disrupted my eating patterns another source of pain. I’d forgotten how sensitive I was sadly as I’d gotten into a nice rhythm. Never mind it’ll be over soon, plus it’s been fun subsisting on junk food for a bit.  

Two snacks of note, Biro no bino a kind of crisp made from pea starch instead of potato, they were interesting not crispy but not soft, an interesting place in between. The other was warabimochi a traditional Japanese sweet. This is a kind of jelly made from braken starch that you coat with “kinako” (toasted soy bean flour) and “kuromitsu” (literally meaning black honey but its actually treacle).

It is helping me dealing with some of my neurosis actually. For one these guys are nearly all super skinny yet I see them packing away noodles and rice cakes and so on. I know I don't actually want to be skinny, I don’t care about getting fat consciously, but unconsciously something’s still there. Either way being around Chan and Daewoong has put me a bit more at ease with food. Also I’m being forced to be flexible with my eating, something that's been a struggle. You can’t eat on the ring so it’s been a case of just having to eat when I can.

It’s nice to know I’m getting there. It would have been easy to fall into bad habits this week. It’s been stressful and disruptive and I recognize these as major triggers for myself. Instead though I’ve been able to let go and just experience and learn from these experiments. I can say one thing for sure being a Synchrotron scientist sets me up for being a great globetrotter, I’m going to be able to switch up my body clock on demand soon.

“Dewa ijou desu” (well that's it). Not so many exciting travels or cool pics but hope you enjoyed reading all the same. Oh also I spent some of my birthday money purchasing some rather swank new T-shirts from some web comics I’ve been reading. “Chou Kakokii ne.”

Ja ne.