Whats going on?

So ohisashiburi desu ne? About time for an update from myself. I'm sure many of you (Ha I wish that many people cared about my life) have seen/heard/read about this.

And most likely this as well.

I won't do the catastrophe the diservice of trying to sum it up here. It's a major disaster, truly awful and I'm not a good enough writer to do it justice. Many talented journalists around the world have done that already. What I will say is that Spring-8 th synchrotron at which I'll be working is over 400 miles away from Fukushima. It's also on very high ground, at the foot of a mountain in fact, and has it's own power supply so it shouldn't be hit by the electricity cuts. Here's a nice picture of the synchrotron (look it up :P) ring in the day time.

So what that means is I'm still going to Japan at the end of the month. How do I feel about, well friggin terrified to be perfectly honest. I'm miles from home in a completely different culture in a country thats going through hell. Am I excited though? Hell yizzle. I've been wanting to go here for years and I don't think anything could stop me right now. A good friend once told me that fear and excitement are more or less the same emotions in terms of the neural pathways they employ. I'm definitely feeling that right now.

On a side note I've been doing a lot of work this week in preparation. So as some of you know I'm off to Japan for work. I'm doing a pHD right now in molecular biophysics. That essentially means I'm using x-rays as a means of producing structures of biological molecules. This is something thats quite common practice however I'm trying to take it a few steps further.

Normally this kinda thing is done using crystalline samples of protein, exploiting a property of x-rays known as braggs diffraction that amplifies the intensity of x-rays diffracted by regular crystalline latices, you still with me? Well basically there is a problem with this process and that is most proteins don't form regular crystals, particularly a very important class, membrane proteins. These line the periphery of the cells of our body. These babies are important drug targets and are involved in a lot diseases so it'd be nice to know what they look like.

Back to me :). This week has been totemo itsogashi. I've been tinkering with a machine called a Digital Ion Trap. This thing is used to store proteins that have been artificially charged and vaporized to a gaseous state. It's main application is actually in determining masses of proteins, usually to figure out what is in a complex mixture. We (myself and my supervisors/collaboraters) hope that we can use this thing to capture proteins in the gas phase in a small area so we can bombard them with high power x-ray lasers and ultimately produce an image of them. Sugoi desu ne?

< The DIT

Well anyway I've been fiddling about with this thing all week trying to get as many ions into it as possible. We had some success earlier in the week, but the past couple of days haven't been great, currently I can't seem to get some of my proteins into the trap to begin with. Not the confidence boost I was expecting before leaving :(. I'm just trying not to let it get to me , there are a few more things I wanna try and I do love tinkering anyway so fingers crossed.

Now good news. I can see now  yay. Or at least as well as I ever could. My eye has stabilized now so it shouldn't deteriorate any further, awesome news right. It's only  been 10 days so hopefully things will only get better. Can't wait to play some frizzers :D.