Lasers and Quasers

actually this post probably won't talk about quasars. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar instead.

So yesterday we took down the old laser and put up the new old honker of a laser. He works beautifully but is rather on the noisy side as I was forewarned. We aligned all the mirrors and lenses which was really interesting for me since I had never done it before. Then finally after three days of sitting on our hands we did some experiments!
The results didn't come out too snazzy though.

Today, Rachid was working with the students, this is his last class with them, so I began some trials on my own. First I redid the photobleaching experiment. I put NucS on a slide for two minutes, washed it out, put water, and then looked at it with the microscope to find out how long it takes them to photobleac for analysis purposes. For ten of the trials I kept the NucS in water and for another ten I put them in the buffer. Contrary to theory the NucS in water came through a lot better. More were stuck to the surface and were brighter. I redid the entire set of ten trials with buffer after Rachid saw my data but it didn't come through that much better and he said to delete all 20. That's Science I suppose.

Headed to Switzerland this evening to see my Uncle and his family!!!!! I cant describe how excited I am to see them again.