Instrumental Difficulties

I'm sorry to inform you all that there simply wasn't much activity on my end tonight. I awoke in the early evening with word from some of the others that we had done some moorings during the day while I slept. Moorings are where we place instruments that record data out at sea for extended periods of time, much like the NAS I told you about in an earlier blog. Well, come to find out, the first one they placed still had some sort of protective covering on it which wouldn't allow it to do it's job. I suppose an analogy to explain it would be to say it's like leaving the lens cap on a camera. It protects the lens but if you don't take it off, there's no point to using the machine. We can't leave a machine out on the sea that won't work so we had turned around to go get and repair it. Due to this interruption in the schedule, our work was put off a bit. I still labeled several amber vials for our later experiments for krill eyes, but then found out that our HPLC, which is crucial to our work and project here with lipofuscin, is inoperable at the time. It can be fixed, but of course with parts we don't have with us, so that work was put to a standstill. While sitting in the lab I talked to a fellow scientist named David who is testing ocean water and sediment for radon. It seems that radon is spawned from the deterioration of radium but has a much shorter half life. By his work of testing for levels of radon, he can go on and use the data he collects to do all sorts of things, such as gas diffusion measurements and predictions. We then cracked a few jokes and went back to work. I haven't been outside yet today but I hear the weather yesterday was pretty nice so maybe it will be this morning to. Farewell and have a pleasant day.