Science has plenty of quiet weeks. When an experiment fails, the broken test tubes make noise, and I have to decide what to do. More than once, I have written about failure stimulating a new melody. Likewise, when an experiment succeeds, this brings on a roar as the new data sing and chortle at me. The noise from success or failure make for compelling narratives. But it was quiet this week. There was simple continuity of the on-going work. I could call it a purr, tho given the sections I am struggling with, it might be more appropriate to call it a growl.

Now to go after some noise, I recall that part of my ‘lab time’ was spent talking with Ellen and Xiaohang, who work in my lab, and who last week both hit obstacles. These bangs would be fair game if I decided to include here anything and everything that happened in my week. Talking is a happening. Maybe in time I will; but I started this blog by recounting work done with my own hands, and for now I will stick with that material, even it makes for quiet blog posts. One advantage: they’ll be short!

Last week, I wrote about the difficulties of imaging the sections sent by Joe and that I had managed a compromise to move forward. Still that week I had only one hour on the scanning electron microscope to evaluate this compromise. This week, I had two hours. Status quo confirmed. The sections were no worse and no better. I collected more images, many of them reasonable, none perfect. I did make sure that the data bar was saved in the regular way. I also mounted and coated another set of samples. I did that because the sections that got harder to work with after sitting around for weeks and months were stored in the vial in which they were dried. I thought I might as well store them on stubs and coated. I have no idea what could be happening as they are stored. But at least this removes one variable. I will also image these new ones this week while they are comparatively fresh.

And there you have it. A quiet week but not entirely motionless.