Beamtime

So real work as a PhD student has finally begun. I had my first beamtime this weekend and it was 8 shifts (64 hours) of experimental time from friday afternoon till monday morning at 7am continuously. Thanks to mostly luck, I had people who would come and make sure things were going well at night so I could get some sleep, but significantly less than normal. We managed to align and measure around 50 bones automatically. While less than we had planned a decent feat. It was also nice to make the first real measurable dent into my project as the first year is now over, so it's time to get grinding.
I have never as fully appreciated the differences between engineering/physics project and real biological projects. With many of the engineering (specifically image processing/analysis) ones, it is nice to be done quickly, but there is lots of room for tweaking, and fixing little bugs later. You can really for the most part write code whenever it pleases you and as long as you work hard enough, it will work out. The biology projects really demand a huge tracks of dedicated time to do experiments and everything has to work perfectly or you could set your research project back years (destroying samples for example, many of the samples are unique or at least several decades in the making)
The setup I had at the Swiss Light Source

Where I work?

Yesterday while browsing around I found the kid-friendly version of PSI's site. This is how they describe the SLS to kids.

Aladins besondere Wunderlampe

Die Synchrotron Lichtquelle Schweiz (SLS) des PSI ist ein gigantischer Röntgenapparat und ein riesiges Mikroskop. In der UFO-förmigen Forschungsanlage werden Elektronen stark beschleunigt und auf Slalomkurs gezwungen. Dabei senden sie Synchrotron-Licht aus.

Das spezielle Synchrotron-Licht entschlüsselt kleinste Strukturen und ermöglicht so grosse Fortschritte in den Naturwissenschaften, in Technik und Medizin – z.B. bei der Erforschung schwerer Alterskrankheiten wie Alzheimer und Knochenschwund.

Ein spannender Rundgang führt Sie durch diese Wunderlampe modernster Wissenschaft.


Roughly translated
Aladin's Special Lamp.
The Swiss Light Source of PSI is a gigantic (ginormous also acceptable) radiation device and a microscope. In the ufo-shaped research facility, electrons are accelerated quickly and swung as if going through a slalom course, thereby emitting synchrotron light.
The special synchrotron light unlocks the smallest structures and allows great progress in natural science, technology and medicine. For example exploring complicated aging diseases like alzheimers and (bone-dissapearing, haha) osteoporosis.
An exciting journey leads you through this most modern of scientific Magic-lamps