The End

So... "here we are at the end of all things".

Well at least the end of this summer research experience in Spain.

Here is what happened in the past week: at the beginning of last week, we finished our lab work. By finish, I mean that we did all that we could, tried to wrap up any loose ends, and document everything so that the students that come next year can pick up where we left off. On Thursday we presented our work before a panel of scientists at the University of Cadiz. We had lunch with Francisco and our mentors. Francisco is the head of the alelopathy lab at UCA. By the way, lunch in Spain is a very big deal. This one lasted a few hours and involved much food and drink. We said a tearful goodbye to everyone there.

I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening finishing my poster (more on that later) with the help on Juan Carlos. When I got home at ten, I showered. Then we went out to hang out with some of our Spanish friends for the last time. Then I spent most of the night packing and slept for about an hour and a half. At 4:50am, a van came to take us to the airport. 2 (and a half) airports later, and 24 hours later we arrive at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA at around 10 or 11pm.

We slept. We recovered and ate. On Sunday I went to church with a friend who lives near Lewisburg. And worked on the final report.

Today we presented our posters. We were required to make a poster describing our work in Spain. So last week we made them with Powerpoint. They were printed out over the weekend. And today, we had a session that was open to anyone who happened to be hanging out at Bucknell this fine August. We explained our posters to some interested professors and students.

So that's it. Joanne and Michael are having a BBQ at their house tonight. After that I will say goodbye to my friends and leave for home. I am very thankful to have been a part of this program.

The Importance and Limitations of Good Quality Sharpies™

So now is the time for labeling and relabeling little vials with small amounts of irreplacable chemicals. Fun. Sharpies, also known as permanent markers, are good in this regard. One limitation of using Sharpies is that they aren´t really permanent, especially when we use acetone or some other organic solvent. So picture this: I have a vial with some really cool and rare extract that took weeks to purify. Mind you that I have dozens of these. Then I spill some acetone on the outside. The ink runs off and we are left with a vial with an unidentified material.

The good news is that that didn´t happen. It could. I´m paranoid that it might. So I label, label, label. Who knew that lab work could be so stressful.

Or dropping stuff. There is a story of one chemist with new shoes who spent a very long time working on a project. At the end he had a few milligrams in a small vial. He dropped the vial and the small sample spilled on his new shoes. So he had to cut up his new shoes and extract the sample from the leather. I believe that he recovered everything.

I spilled a few samples on the lab bench. Luckily we keep paper on the lab bench, so I was able to recover the samples. I broke a bit of glassware in the past two months. Oddly shaped pieces of glass that would baffle normal people. Chemists aren´t normal people. We like oddly shaped pieces of glassware.

Spanish is a good language. Someday in the future I may speak fluent Spanish.

In exactly one week, we plan to be on a plane heading west over the Atlantic Ocean.

The Countdown Begins...

So here we are in Spain. It is pretty hot today. But I am inside the lab which is air-conditioned which is good. At least the one lab I work in is air-conditioned. The other one doesn´t have it, but I don´t need to spend much time there so that is good.

This week is a sort of wrap-up week here in the lab. I have about 4 or 5 little semi-projects that need to be finished by Friday. Hopefully I will be able to send some samples to the NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) to help identify them.

By the way the NMR machine is very similar to the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines used in hospitals. They are used for different things, but use the same technology. The reason (so I´ve been told) that the hospitals drop the word nuclear from the name is because of people´s negative perception of nuclear technology. Just thought I would throw that little fact in there.

I´ve been buying some little things here and there to take back to the US. I bought a Morrocan teapot in a little tourist shop in Cordova. So last night, my Morrocan friends showed me how to make real Arabic tea. And they gave me a bag of leaves from Morraco. It is an unlabeled plastic bag filled with dried leaves. I have a feeling that it will be difficult to bring it through customs. We shall see.

En este mañana, tenemos un examen en nuestra clase de español. He intendado a aprender, pero es muy difícil. Pero yo quiero hablar español.

Hello, it is Thursday morning here in Spain. I am in lab, but haven´t started anything yet.

We started bioassays on Monday and are finishing them this week. A bioassay is a way to measure the biological activity of a compound or collection of compounds. We were measuring the biological activity of our hexane, acetone, and n-butanol extracts from our lichens. For each of these three extracts we created solutions with five different concentrations (333, 100, 33, 10, and 1 ppm). We split each one into three different samples for a total of 45 test tubes. Into each test tube we put five coleoptiles which are small plant shoots. We left them in a rotating device for 24 hours, them took them out and measured the length of each one using a camera and a computer program. We can see if the compound is biologically active by seeing if it inhibited or enhanced the growth of the coleoptile.

Ok I have to get back to work.

And another week goes by

So it's another week. And time to update. Actually I should be updating this thing every other day, but I´m not. That´s too bad. There is so much to do and time is running out. I haven´t been sleeping as much as I should and it´s beginning to show. I yawn frequently, have trouble focusing, and have this constant desire to lie down whereever I happen to be and take a nap. Just a few minutes ago, I went to the break room and lined up some stools and napped for about ten minutes. It was very refreshing.

So this past weekend some of us went to the city of Cordoba. It took about two or three hours to get there by train. Please note that this train was cruising at a cool 150 mph.

The most famous thing that Cordoba has is a very large and very old building called the Mesquita. Here´s the short version of it´s history: It was originally a church. Then the Moors took over Spain and it was a church and a mosque at the same time. Then it was a mosque. Then some people who called themselves Christians drove the Moors out of Spain, and built a cathedral inside the mosque. Now it is a tourist attraction. It is a very large and ornately decorated wonder built by many people over the course of hundreds of years.

We also visited a castle, the Palace of the Christian Kings. It is pretty much exactly how I imagined a castle should look like with high walls, towers, gardens, etc. So that was pretty cool.

I am still learning Spanish little by little though being permanantly exhausted isn´t helping me.

Sitting in the Lab, Waiting

Ok, so I am sitting in the lab waiting. For what, you ask. I am waiting some ethyl acetate to find its way up a silica-coated piece of glass in a technique that I did not know about. In Spanish it is called placa preparativa. It is basically a giant TLC. So I am waiting for the ethyl acetate to defy gravity and climb about 12 inches of silica-coated glass. That will clean the plates. Then I will throw them in the oven for awhile and wait for them to dry.

This past weekend (fin de semana pasado) we went to the nearby town of Bolonia to visit some Roman ruins. Archeologists started excavating the ruins about 100 years ago, and are continuing to excavate. It is an entire city that is buried under your typical Andalucian landscape. There are statues, roads, temples, houses, gates, an ampitheatre and much more. The Romans built the city about 200 BC. After a couple earthquakes and the economic decline of the empire, the city was finally abandoned around 400 AD.

So we were given a guided tour of the city. It was really neat to walk on streets and step inside of buildings that were used by the Romans ages ago. For us it was interesting, but for them it was their life. The temples, the houses, the markets, the tuna fish factory. That was their reality.

Thursday

We are pretty busy in the lab. I am working on about four different things at once. I am finishing the extraction of the lichen (Stereocaulon Glabrum), trying to identify a compound that crystallized in one of the extracts, characterizing the lichen (finding the percentage of proteins, fatty acids, lipids and sugars), and isolating compounds that were extracted from another lichen (Cladina Rangiferina) they started working on last year.

So these things are keeping me pretty busy in lab.

In my quest to learn the gabbering that is commonly known as Spanish, I have learned a new word. An important word for someone like me who knows about 5% of the language. The word is cosa. The meaning is thing.

Life in general is going well. I went to the beach last weekend for three days in a row and took some pictures. Some of us discovered this restaraunt last night that has really good tapas. We have walked past it a million times and I didn´t think it looked that great, but I guess sometimes looks are deceiving. A tapa by the way is a small plate of food served with drinks. The food could be anything such as seafood, potatoes, meatballs, etc. The original purpose tapas, according to some sources, was to cover your drinks so that bugs wouldn´t fly into them. They are a sort of snack that people eat. Most people in this part of Spain don´t eat dinner until 10 at night, so they snack in the late afternoon or evening.