Accepting the little differences

Sometimes the life of a researcher is a good one, not least for all the opportunity to travel. I’m away from Japan right now at a conference out in Sydney and I must admit I’m pretty happy about it. It’s great to be surrounded by people who are on a similar wavelength to you; not having to explain what you do and have people look at you as though you are crazy or just immediately loose interest is nice.

It was talking to a fellow researcher that I realised as much as I complain and whinge about the hours and the frustrations, I’m pretty damn lucky. I can’t think of many jobs that afford such a freedom of lifestyle as the one I have now. I\m free to choose to work wherever I want in the world and you know what it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to find some work. I travel a fair amount and I’m exposed to people from all corners of the world. I can pursue the things I find interesting, within reason, and I’m almost constantly mentally engaged.

Hell I’m being paid just to read and learn sometimes. If you’d told me that at the age of twelve I’d have laughed in your face. I’ve met some old friends and made some new ones in my time here and I think it’s the best conference I’ve been to so far.

Anyway this is about my travels through Australia not my journeys through science, though I may throw a bit in every now and then. So my biggest shock about Sydney? It kinda looks and feels a lot like Newcastle, albeit a fair bit warmer. I thought this might be a good thing, I mean I have been a bit homesick for some time, but my initial feelings were really ones of disappointment. Maybe I’ve been in Japan too long? Maybe it just reminded me of the rubbish things I’d left behind at home?

I’m not sure but after the letting go of the initial shock I’ve started noticing quite a few little differences and I’m enjoying the whole experience a lot more. I think it's something I should take away from this and apply to life back in Japan. A lot of people were asking me about life over here and I just found myself complaining. I don't want to be that guy. Anyway without further ado rather than give some kind of proper list I’m just going to outline some random impressions I got in a hodgepodge fashion.

Firstly it’s a lot bigger. I’ve been to big cities before no biggie but Sydney is big whilst still being pretty open. There is a lot of open and green space around here, which does make it quite a pleasure just to wander around aimlessly. I’m also really enjoying being by the sea again. Like actually being by the sea not the Inland sea. On my first day I spent several our just wandering along the docks and the simultaneous waves of nostalgia and unfamiliarity where very refreshing.

Secondly, on the whole people are a little bit more laid back and pleasant than in the UK, or at least as I remember it. I’ve had random people just smile at me in the street, something which I’d completely forgotten happened whilst in Japan, a smiling face was usually coupled with giggles at the novelty of a foreigner. As always it’s nice to not feel like an alien.

One thing that really amused me was the contents of your average convenience store. A lot of familiar products are just that little bit different. Either it’s a slight difference in the packaging images, novel flavours of familiar products, or the same product with a different name; polo’s for example are under the alias of Lifesavers down under.

Woolworths still exists. Mental I know.

Obviously the weather is much nicer. I’ve managed to get here right at the end of spring so the weather is fantastic, not too hot but still much warmer than the UK. On the topic of weather though you often here people talk about the UV index in Aus. It is definitely there. Even when it’s 20 degrees outside if you are in the direct sunlight you can really feel it burn after about 15 minutes, some friends tell me that it gets even worse further south.

Town names are inconsistently interesting. Being a big mix of aboriginal and English names it makes just looking at a local area map pretty amusing. To the south we have Liverpool and right next door is Cabramatta. To the north? Well there is Penrith and not so far away Kurrajong. I could go on but I won’t.

People are well into health and fitness here. It wasn’t unusual to see large groups of people out running, or on bikes or together in boot camps getting fit in the early hours of the morning. This I think this is reflected in the easy access to sports supplements like protein drinks and low carb energy bars in pretty much every corner shop. There also seems to be a lot more gluten-free/dairy-free/vegan-friendly products everywhere too. With an allergy to dairy I’m not complaining.

As I said before I’m staying very close to china town and a major, major difference here is the Asian Influence. Since Australia is so isolated and with the nearest major landmass being south Asia It’s hardly surprising really. At any rate I love Asian food anyway so I’m pretty happy to have easy access to Vietnamese, Thai and Indonesian cuisine; something that is surprisingly difficult back in Japan.

Weirdly on the topic of Asia, and South-East Asia to be more precise, I seemed to be drawn towards the Asian delegates at the conference. I don’t think it’s deliberate and at the time I it was pointed out to me by a colleague and I thought he was being stupid but maybe he’s right. I think being stuck in Japan so long I’m unconsciously seeking out familiar sights and sounds when in unfamiliar environments. Well maybe I don’t know well but I think it might be something interesting to monitor when I go back to the UK.

I’m of course only basing this on my impression of one City in one state of an incredibly large country. I have a sneaky suspicion that other states would have a very different vibe and since New South Wales was the first region to be colonised by the British it’s hardly surprising that there are so many comparisons to draw.

 I'll conclude with the best quote from the weeks conference. "You wouldn't believe how accurate lego is." Laters.

Friends from Afar

Don’t you love those moments when things just seem to come together. Anyone who has been following me for a bit will no doubt have noticed that things haven’t exactly been going my way of late. Well that has changed in the past couple of days. Suddenly my proteins expressing exceptionally well. I fixed the piece of equipment I broke and whilst writing my 2^nd year report (a daunter at 25 pages) I’ve had a bit of an epiphany regarding my PhD direction. 

It’s remembering days like this that get me through all of the other rubbish. It’s easy to get into a spiral when things go wrong. They say that bad things always come in 3s, or 4s in oriental culture as that's the number associated with bad luck. I think I’ve had a bit more than three but my luck has turned, maybe it’s thanks to the Korean shaman treatment from one of my colleagues (link). I have been working stupid hours again recently but when things are going well it’s easy to throw yourself at it.

Capitalizing on my uplift I tried to make the most of the past weekend before my free time evaporates once more. First stop was into my local city, Himeji, for the Yukata matsuri (浴衣祭り). Now from an outsiders point of view this may seem like an excuse for pretty girls to dress up in pretty outfits and wander the streets gorging on food from the various yatai’s dotted about the place but in fact...nah that’d be a lie that's exactly what it’s about.

Many of Japan’s numerous festivals are deeply rooted in history and intertwined with the Shinto religion. This is not one of them. Well sort of. The festival commemorates the moving of the Osakabe shrine from within the castle grounds to downtown Himeji. This made the shrine available for all the people to worship at.

The movement was commemorated with a festival. Normally people would have to wear their formal (and expensive) kimono’s to such an event, however due to the suddenness of the ceremony many did not have the time or money to make such items of clothing. The feudal lord at the time permitted them to wear their less formal Yukata and it has remained that way for the past 260 years. Of course this isn’t well known and what most people think of is the abundant street vendors, I think it has the most out of every festival in the Kansai area.

Well it was certainly interesting. Besides the usual Japanese festival fare there were many other foods and games on offer, some I’d not heard of before. Sadly I had other plans later on that day so I had to rush off. I doubt I’ll get to it next year but to be honest it was ridonkulesly crowded and there wasn’t much going on besides the street vendors.

In Osaka I met up with some of the friends I’d made surfing. They own a bar out that way and since I had plans to be in Kyoto the following day it was a good excuse to make the journey. It was tiny though so we spent most of the night on the stairs outside. Whenever I’m in Osaka I feel like my Japanese comprehension has gotten worse, or maybe it has just gotten worse who knows?

I hadn’t really thought about where I was staying that night so I headed back to Umeda to scout out somewhere. I remembered being here last time and seeing a very cheap night deal at one of the mangakisa’s (internet café’s) that seemed as good a place as any, though not before netting my first ever win on a UFO catcher.

 

Internet café’s in Japan are something else. Besides renting sitting space and a computer you also get access to a library of comics, movies and all you can drink soft drinks and coffee. They are almost always open 24hrs and I think they do the most business between the hours of 3am to 8am. A night pack gets you a reclining chair and a blanket to get some shut-eye for about 1100yen. Or you could just be like me and stay up all night watching films and dossing around on the Internet.

The following day I set off for Kyoto. I’ve said it many times before. I love this place. It has none of the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, nor the Concrete Jungle feel of Osaka. Well it is massively steeped in history with a ridiculous number of world heritage sites so not so surprising.

My friends are currently on a yearlong tour of southern asia from their honeymoon and they were looking incredible. It was so nice to see them looking so happy and healthy. I basically had no plans for the day as I figured they had plenty of things they wanted to do. I was right fortunately.

First on the list was to try our hand at 弓道、Japanese archery. The “shooting range” was absolutely tiny, a dinky little shop tucked away behind the bushes in northern Gion with only three targets. It was very interesting however, considerably different to western archery.

For a start the bows (called yumi) are like 2 metres tall, it was bigger than me at any rate. Secondly the grip is about two thirds of the way down the shaft, compared to being in the middle in the west. This makes holding the bow a little clumsy at first as the weighting takes a bit of getting used to. Finally the method for drawing is very different. The string is drawn with the thumb whilst the arrow rests on the index finger.

We were ushered inside by a wonderful Ojisan who seemed very happy to have oversees customers. Small though the place was he spoke exceptionally good (albeit very specific to his purpose) English so I’m guessing he gets a fair few people passing through. After a quick demo and some patchwork instruction we were sat down on the cushions and firing away. It was pretty reasonable, 10 arrows for 800yen and hopefully I’ll go back given the chance. I even managed to hit the target with my final shot.

Finished up we did a bit of temple hopping before lunch. I can’t remember which ones, there are like 1000 in Kyoto, but I do remember the gardens of the second being particularily amazing. There were also some incredible trees, old and oddly shaped, inside. It got us talking about how amazing it is that in Japan even in this day and age they have a reverence for nature. In the UK we’d just level it, here they work around it, even in the major cities.

 

For lunch we hit a famous Okonomiyaki place in central Gion. The front of the store has a statue depicting a little boy having his trousers yanked down. That is nothing however compared to the menu. Each table has a large European style menu book and when opened it reveals...a giant picture of an okonomiyaki.

Having only one thing on the menu is pretty amusing when the name of the food translates literally as “your grilled preference.” Tasty all the same and very different again to Osakan and Hiroshima style. I do love all the quirky little regional differences in dishes around Japan.

We had a great chat over lunch about our travels so far. It is amazing how much just seeing a little bit of the world changes your out look on life. I could see the changes in my friends and it helped me see the changes in myself. Sometimes I don’t realise it and I think it’ll really hit home when I get back.　

One thing I think it has done for me is made me more mindful of all the little things around me. When everything is so different, when everything is outside of you comfort zone, it all stands out. I’d like to take that back with me. All three of us agreed that spending so much time away from home has made us realise how little of our own country we’ve really seen. I think travelling is any time spent outside of the known. Any little venture into the unknown is a journey and we take them everyday.

I’ve not been sleeping much again recently but insomnia does make for wonderful introspective time and so I’ve been doing a fair bit. I need to travel more, that much is true. Even though my course has less than a year left I’m not sure if I’m ready to come back home just yet. I miss my friends and family sure, but how will life feel when everyday is just that bit more normal. Perhaps normal is just a perception; time is just what we make it maybe? Who knows but I think there are more places left for me to look to really find out the answer.

長いだけど、継続的な関心をしていただきありがとうございます

Mata nee.

Being an Adult

Ah 久しぶりです。This past month has been somewhat mental. Between all the work (oh so much work) and the other writing I’ve been doing I’ve had very little time to blog. Nothing serious mind just some short fiction but I did manage to get my first story published (a whole $5 is mine to do with as I wish.)

Now to the meat of this post. As I said lots and lots of work so no real adventures, and to be honest not much sleep either. Still when you aren’t sleeping it does give you plenty of time to think and I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

The thing is it was my Birthday recently; I’m nearly a quarter of a century old now. I’ve never liked the run up to my birthday and I think these days I just assume the worst and get into a bad frame of mind. Quite a few mishaps have occurred between my last post and now and I put it down to bad birthday luck.

But that's crap. 90% was my own carelessness and the other ten, well it just couldn’t be helped I think. The thing it got me thinking about is what really makes you “an adult”? When do you cross that line? I always thought it was something to do with making it out on your own, being accepted by others and respected and so on, and yet sometimes I still feel like a kid.

The thing is due to my own carelessness I’ve lost or damaged some things at work recently. Now these things happen I know but I truly am week to things, facts figures, faces, quotes, no problem. Things, forget about it (and I do). Either way that's not the problem. It was how I handled it.

Now obviously I was upset and what made it worse was a dressing down from the administrative staff. I’m sure I’d of had it worse if I was Japanese but they were still pretty stern. Suddenly I felt about ten again. The trust was gone, I’d let them down and I felt incapable.

I’ve got a real thing about letting others down, it really triggers my mood and I need to get a handle on it. Thinking on it though it is childish. Sure you can let people down but I think the ‘grown up’ thing to do is accept it, apologize sincerely and then get on with it.

Most people are pretty tied up in their own lives you see. These little mishaps impact them so little in the long run. I do want to keep a low profile though and I’ve not helped that this month, sticking out is not a good thing around here. Maybe I’m just trying too hard these days, definitely I’m working too hard. I can’t please everyone and I should just accept that.

Do we ever really grow up though and in the end what does that mean? I haven’t the foggiest. Independence? Nah everyone needs help sometimes? Not screwing up? Haha with my scatterbrain that’ll never happen. Screwing up and setting it right? Yeah that’s probably more like it. Maybe being n adult isn’t about controlling your life but taking ownership of it.

 

So where do I go from here. Well just keep doing what I’m doing I think. I guess I’m still busy and I’m still a scatterbrain so I’m sure accidents will happen again. The key is to accept it, be mindful of ones self and hope for the best ey?　There are still plenty of things I can do and am capable of. Maybe I should write them down one day. When the brown stuff hits the fan I've always been someone that gets stuff done at least. Anyway I’ll be back with something more interesting next time I’m sure.

Ja mata neee.

Get me the hell off this rock.

Seriously man what a month. There have been more ups and downs for me than Nemesis in Alton towers. Between beamtime experiments, most of which didn’t go too well, the Cheiron School and the passing of my Grandma, I’ve been totally physically and emotionally exhausted. I’ve also not had a free weekend in a month so the past one was a very welcome break.

In the past half a year that I’ve been here the 4000 miles between me and home have never felt as far as last week. At times I just wanted to curl up and sleep but I had to keep going.

The external pressures of work were definitely reaching into my psyche and when colleagues started to say things like “Is that enough for you?”  and, “You know I’ve noticed you don’t take much food.”, I realized it was time for a break to get my head screwed back on. Old habits die hard I guess.

Anyway before shooting on to the weekend I’ll backtrack to Thursday. My experiments with Josie last week did not go so well. I couldn’t take any readings as the DIT just wouldn’t work and being a team of two people we just ended up exhausted without achieving much.

So on Thursday Hikima-san, my colleague on this project, and myself headed to the local Izakaya Shunsai to commiserate our shortcomings. Exchanging an “otsukare sama” and a “kanpai” over a Kirin free and some food was a nice way to wind down and get to know Hikima-san a bit. We had a lovely chat over some food, the mochi bacon was definitely worth a mention. I learned a bit more about Hikima-san’s background and interests, in particular how he found moving to Kansai from Kanto and his fondness of home brewed beer something that is not so common in Japan.

Right so for the weekend I was determined to escape from the mountain. Arnaud was headed for Osaka to take a flight to Spain to attend an international conference so I asked if I could tag along. We were first going to a Mexican restaurant in Shinsaibashi for lunch with a friend of Arnaud’s before mooching about in Namba for a while.

At Shinsaibashi we met Arnaud’s friend, Mai, before ascending one of the nearby buildings for food. Japan never ceases to amaze me for its careful use of space. The building was pretty thin but each floor had it’s own tiny but fully functional restaurant.. They really know how to pack stuff in here.

The place was suitably Mexican with plenty of bright reds, oranges and yellows, tinkling acoustic guitars and interestingly writing all over the walls. Apparently some guy called Gen had been at our table two years previously. The place also seemed to be popular with the non-native contingent of Osaka. I picked Up American, Australian, British and Irish accents during our time there.

The food was nice, tortillas and beans make a nice change from rice, and also something with a bit of spice was very welcome. I was very glad Arnaud had invited me along, I don’t think I would of ever come across this place otherwise and I do love Mexican food.

So well fed and the conversations were rolling. Well sort of. I made an effort to speak as much Japanese as possible but my vocabulary is still frustratingly lacking. I can understand a lot but when it comes to expressing myself I always come up short. Admittedly Mai’s English was excellent but that's not the point really.

I’d voiced this to Arnaud before but what he said is right, I just need to practice more. I guess I make a lot of excuses, I’m too busy, I work with all Koreans, but they are just that. If I really wanted to I could speak better, I just need to practice more and ask more questions. I look stupider sitting there like a lemon than asking how to say something.

After killing about 3 hours in the restaurant, Arnaud was hesitant to leave due to his rather heavy luggage, we spent the rest of the time wandering through Namba and laughing at quirky shop names. I also had my first introduction to “プリクラ” (puri kura) short for purinto kurabu.

This is a phenomenon that whilst originating in the 90’s has managed to persevere in Japan, particularily amongst tweenaged girls. The premise is simple, insert your money and get your pictures taken. However the camera tweaks your looks subtly; emphasizing eyes, skin tone, mouth e.t.c. You can then add objects backgrounds and messages before finally printing the images as stickers. It made a nice souvenir at any rate.

At 6 o’clock we departed, bon chance pour la presentation Arnaud, and I headed to J-hoppers to spend the night. I’m just going to give this place a shameless plug now. It’s a hostel very close to Umeda station that I frequently visit. So much so that the staf recognize me by name and sight.

It really is a nice place. The staff are good fun and very helpful, the rooms and facilities are always clean, the location is great and best of all, it’s cheap. Right so enough advertising I settled myself in with some dinner and started watching the TV. It wasn’t long before I was joined by a couple of Japanese guests who wanted to change the channel. They put on a show called “Ippon Grand Prix.” I really didn’t understand too much but I think it was sort of like ‘whose line is it anyway’. They found it hilarious at any rate.

I moved upstairs eventually, tiring of the fact I couldn’t get any of the jokes and started chatting with a guy from Vancouver called Rob. Another reason I love staying in Hostels is you meet such interesting people. Rob is a freelance animator and had come to Japan, in his own words, because hey he’d never been to Japan, as good a reason as any I guess.

He was actually particularly interested in the art and had been picking out art books from second hand stores. He had a sketchbook to document his travels and kindly let me have a look. I’m always envious of people who can draw, it’s a skill I just don’t have. I guess words are just my means of expression. I had a good natter anyway before finally going to bed for a Good nights sleep.

At least that was the plan. Alas not to be. Unfortunately the guy sharing my room was a bit of a pleb. He strolled in at 4am bladdered, tried to hold a conversation for about 20 minutes before passing out and snoring the hostel down. I kid you not Nori, the manager, told me she could here him on the 2nd floor when she was cleaning, impressive since we were on the 4^th.

Still ever the philosopher, it was a disguised blessing as it gave me the opportunity to have more time exploring. I didn’t have much of a plan but thankfully due to the rain on Saturday a festival in Kyoto I had wanted to see was postponed until Sunday.

Since I was arriving so early, the festival began at 12, I decided to walk to th imperial palace from the station. Whilst it didn’t look so far on the map, never trust Japanese maps, it was actually an hour and a half walk. Still it gave me a fair opportunity to check out downtown Kyoto. It has such a nice vibe, totally different to the world of crazy that is Osaka and it was nice to experience a bit more.

On my way up I dropped by the Higashi Honganji temple. Honganji means primal, original or true vow depending on how you want to translate it, and it is the largest sect of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism in Japan. The complex itself is massive and the front gate, called the Mie-do, is in contention for being one of the largest wooden buildings in the world, it was quite impressive.

The main event began at the gates of the Imperial palace. The Jidai matsuri (festival of the ages) is a huge parade, which commemorates the end of Kyoto’s status as the capital of Japan in the 1800s. It consists of a parade of roughly 2000 people dressed in traditional costumes representing different periods of the cities history. It’s an awe-inspiring sight, especially given that many of the costumes are particularly intricate.

 I arrived to see huge crowds of people lining the streets leading from the palace to the Heian Jingu where the parade concludes. I was supposed to be meeting an acquaintance however she was yet to arrive in Kyoto so I decided to head towards the gates. The parade began dead on 12 o’clock with a group of men dressed as soldiers from the mid Meji period playing various instruments. The parade then takes us back in time from the 1800s back to the 700s when Kyoto was established as the capital.

It was an amazing a different way to get a view of Japanese history.  A bit more engaging than a museum or gallery for sure however as the announcements were all in Japanese I feel I didn't get as much out of it as I could of. Still I did finally get to see Geisha and Maiko, something I still hadn’t achieved since my parents visit.

I didn’t manage to meet my friend as planned, sadly the crowds were a bit intense, but instead met someone new. I noticed a young lady struggling to see over the crowds and let her go in front of me. Whilst I’m not tall back home I do have a good few inches on the average Japanese person and it’s great for situations like this.

We got chatting and I ended up spending the rest of the day with her. She was out in Kyoto for a year studying Japanese language and had been here about six weeks. It was nice to someone who was fresh in the country as I keep finding myself sounding a bit jaded and hearing someone’s fresh enthusiasm really helps bring the amazement back.

I love meeting new people, everyone’s got a story, and I also love a good gab so I was very happy she chose to stick around with me for the whole event. To my delight she was from England and from the North, a double whammy of nostalgia. It was nice to chat with someone from the UK it’d been quite a while.

The hours passed very fluidly, I was lucky to find someone as gabby as myself and with such different motivations and reasons for being in Japan from the norm. It was a fantastic day and as always nice to chat freely with someone my own age. It’s also inspired me once more to study the language a bit harder. I’ll get there in the end, “できるやんか“。しゃしんをみて、たのしんでください。

Mata kondo ne.

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,