Max's Blog

First Blog

This is my second year in the Stanford Stable Isotope geochemistry lab (a.k.a. environmental measurements #2). I participated in this internship program last year, (its activities were a nice break from some of the monotonous labwork I did), took a class at my high school focused on scientific research and methods of communicating scientific results called science research projects (SRP), then came back to this same internship program for a second go. In summary, I have worked in this lab with different hours for the past year.

Working in the lab is a generic term, so I will explain the activities that includes for me. During the summer, I am a research assistant. My job responsibilities go something like make sure the benevolent overlord graduate students never have to set foot in the lab (joke). I often find myself weighing samples, grinding coral or even occasionally washing glassware. I also occasionally participate in higher order thinking like data analysis (this is the fun stuff). My supervisor works on coral, doing oxygen isotope analysis. In short the oxygen-16 to oxygen-18 ratio gives information about past temperature and salinity. In addition to the work with my supervisor, my labwork often consists of helping another member of the lab who deals with lake sediment cores from Patagonia (South America). At this point, I don’t know much about the significance of the lake sediment cores, but over the summer, I hope to learn more about lake sediment while continuing to expand my knowledge of coral.

Second Blog

This year (starting at the beginning of summer) has started off much different for me than the previous one. As a “senior” intern, I am expected to be able to deal with more issues for myself. Over the past week, I have been running samples almost independently on one of the machines. It is the CO₂ Coulometer and its job it to determine the ratio of a sample that is carbonate. Well, technically its three machines - the coulometer, a printer and an autosampler. In my case, this set of machines is only needed to determine how much of each sample to put into another machine (MAT 252 mass spectrometer), which analyzes the oxygen isotope ratio in CO₂ (and needs the sample to contain 75 micrograms of carbonate).

The coulometer is a funny old machine. It looks similar to a poorly designed personal computer from the 80s. It’s a box with one face cut at an angle.* This front side has a built-in qwerty keyboard complete with a number pad and arrow keys along with a screen. The screen uses some sort of older display in which each pixel is an individual light (possibly LED) and it is fairly low resolution compared to modern displays, but it gets the job done. The machine has a floppy disk drive in the side - there’s no USB slot, no VGA plug and certainly no wireless network connection to the printer. The floppy drive isn’t some obsolete function of the machine that no one cares to use either - to the contrary, every time the printer screws up (jams or runs out of paper) and no one is there to fix it, the only way to retrieve the data is from the floppy.

I find it borderline hilarious when in Hollywood movies, the scientists wear all white - white lab coats (understandable), white goggles (less common), and some handheld analyzer of sorts that looks like it was designed by apple. It’s as if the director honestly believes that scientists can afford whatever crazy gadget that they want and have so much left over money that they can worry about things like design.

This could not be further from the truth. The machine stopped working on Friday. First, it mysteriously ceased to render the number two. Whenever you pressed “2” on the keyboard, a space appeared on the screen instead of a two. Oh that’s the other thing about the coulometer - the keys sometimes misbehave. All the keys in one column of the keyboard either require pressing for a long period of time or a short period of time (or else they count as two presses). The 2 issue, while slightly concerning was not tragic, for as long as 2 is the only invisible character, it is fairly easy to determine what is going on. Next, the printer stopped working. It was during the night, in the middle of a run, when nobody could investigate the potential causes. This too may seem like a fairly inconsequential inconvenience; however, the machine needs the printer to continue analyzing. The coulometer has back and forth communication with the printer and if the printer can’t catch up, the coulometer will wait for it. The coulometer waited all night for the printer to no avail. In the morning, I fiddled around with the printer for about an hour, using guides from HP about how to fix it. Then one of my graduate supervisors did the same. It is still uncooperative.

In summary, the public sees scientists and labs very differently from how they truly are and some machines are a pain in the butt to maintain.

*To fully describe the coulometer’s shape, take a rectangle with approximately a 2:1 aspect ratio and cut one corner off. This is now an irregular pentagon. Make a right prism out of this pentagon with a height approximately half of the shortest side in the original rectangle. Now orient this object so the longest side in the original rectangle is going up/down and the slanted side is facing you. URL of picture (of someone else’s machine) : https://www.abbott-ir.com/upload/images/IMG_78685.jpg

To read more about Max's adventures in 2013, read https://sites.google.com/site/earthscienceshighschool/2013-general-program-intern-blogs/max-s-blog