Elephant seals

It takes only two hours by car to get to one of the tourist attractions in California, the elephant seals which give birth to their children at the Californian coast, roughly between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Hundreds of these animals basically lie on the beach and do nothing else then throwing sand at themselves from time to time (but not too often, that might become stressful ;-)). Indeed, they resemble elephants in some way since the males have a very large nose and in general, they are large (3-9 m!) and heavy (1000-5000 kg!):

In total, five people went, but only one of us was older than 25 years, so effectively we only had one driver: Renting  a car is about 30$ a day without any insurances, if you are 25 years or older. But below 25 you have to expect the doubled amount! Thus, only one person was driving all way, but since the highways are long and broad,  it's rather easy to drive. We basically turned right twice within 100 miles to get to the elephant seals.

Don't get sick

Last year I got very sick and had to vomit several times in a few hours. So I managed it to get to one of the Health Centers around here (single physicians seem to be rare) and after two hours of waiting time a medical doctor (MD, unlike Dr. in Germany) saw me for maybe 15 minutes - and I was charged 130$ for the diagnosis: normal stomach indigestion. Treatment and medication: Isotonic drinks and salt sticks. 
The weirdest part is, that I have three insurances and none of them covered the incidence. One is my normal German insurance, another on is included in my scholarship and the university makes sure that every student has an insurance as well. The insurances cover a lot, but that's only in case you go to hospital or the costs of treatment are above a certain amount, e.g. 300$. But as a normal student, how often do I end up in hospital and how often do I catch a cold? Of course, the costs of a hospital visit outnumber my minor complaints, yet, I guess that this happens a lot more often.

If you come to the Health Center and you're not an emergency, you are sent to the Advice Nurse who can prescribe simple medications, take tests or lets you go to an actual physician. This makes the system apparently more efficient and reduces wait times.

However, I am not too upset since we have a Health Center on campus and a few days ago I was sick again and I got treated after 10 min waiting time (since it was the University Health Center I didn't have to pay... yeah, this system is a bit different). They also sell common medication for lower prices then pharmacies due to student discounts!

Recently, my colleague (who is also an international student) went to the dentist and apparently the dentist was not too happy with the teeth he saw. Instead of calculating the total costs of the treatment, the dentist asked my colleague when he would fly back home to go to the dentist - the costs of the flight (he comes from the Middle East) plus the dentist fees would save my colleague 1000$ compared to the US dentist costs only!

We'll get there

Eight months ago: "Well, actually, I'd like to toss it."

Two weeks ago: "Okay, let's toss it."

One week ago: "Waaiiit... There's hope!!"

The state of our project was not the most promising one when I started. After three months we reached the state that we had re-invented the wheel successfully. Or at least it felt like. Two weeks ago we were close to finishing up and mentioning everything we did in our theses, but please let's don't write a paper and get as fast as possible to the next project.

BUT then we talked to some people who are experts in image processing and who have the same problem as we have it right now. Most people either ignored it or changed the project in a way that the did not have to care about it. The point is, that many people reconstruct shapes from fluorescent confocal images, but often not the absolute intensity value, i.e. the concentration of a certain protein at some depth in the sample. 

We try to do exactly this and we ran into some issues. But now we have a simulation which will help us to predict how certain signals in the sample are changed (e.g. attenuated) by the sample and it looks like we will be able to quantify the concentration of our protein :-)

Effort vs. Productivity

"Women in Physics" is a student group at the UCSB physics department and they meet every Tuesday for lunch, organize events like presentations from companies which are interested in hiring physicists and visit schools to tell students how awesome physics is. But no worries, there are also male students in the group :-) !

Prof Jennifer Ross, a biophysics professor from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, joined us for the lunch last week. She's also writing a blog ;) about being a scientist and right now about her sabbatical which she's spending here. (A sabbatical can be half a year or a year in which a professor moves to another university to conduct research and to talk to researchers at this university.)
We talked about a lot of things, e.g. the organization in her group, research in general and what changed during her sabbatical. I learned about the effort-productivity-relation as sketched here (the parabola is just a model and I can't give you a source except our conversation, but it makes sense):

At first, I thought it would be best to be at the peak of the curve, but then there's no space for an increase in productivity e.g. if you have to work more intensely before a deadline. The graph came up when we chatted about work-life-balance and Prof Ross said that science is important, but the priorities should be 1. sleep, 2. food, 3. science and then 4. gym etc. And science would be best if it's only eight hours a day. That really settled me down since so many people talked to me about showers, which are installed in science buildings because people don't have time to go home and shower. Or about the professor, who has not slept at all last night because he had to finish some grant applications...

Camping and water rafting

I needed one light sleeping bag, three jackets, two towels and one blanket to stop shaking while we were camping last weekend. It was still so cold that I couldn't sleep until everybody closed ranks. So even in California in the end of April it's summer during the day, but the night reveals the true season.

But the water rafting on Sunday was worth sleeping in a fridge! We stayed in the Sequoia area near the Sequoia National Park and went down the Kern River in small boats of about 4-6 people. We were wearing wet suits, jackets, life jackets and helmets - and it was cold again when a wave hit you (that's like showering).

Only a small part of the river was raft-able and we went down that path about three times. It's important that your team paddles together (like in rowing!) and that you do what your guide tells you (at first, I didn't know we had a guide, but it turned out to be absolutely necessary!).

Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics

Every Physics Bachelor's student in Göttingen has to attend the theoretical introductory lecture "Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics". We only considered systems in equilibrium and now I understand why: It can get a "bit" messy if you include out-of-equilibrium terms...

Now I am attending the lecture "non-equilibrium systems in Statistical Mechanics" and small perturbations to a systems are okay, so even graduate students can handle them in their homework problems :) or try to handle them... For nonlinear and strong perturbations the integrals become a lot more complicated (and they are already "non-trivial" - what's e.g. the integral of cos(x)*exp(-(x-a)^2/2a^2)?). When I was doing my homework on the plane, a women sat next to me and looked at me very confused. Finally she said: "I am so scared of this." I replied, she shouldn't worry, it's fun! (I added the thought "And no, it's not going to crash the plane.")

In addition to that, I really enjoy this lecture because it's directly related to my research. The microtubule network I look at is out of equilibrium as well since energy is "consumed" and we apply fields and forces to beads in the network.

The lens equation and the reality

We bought a new camera for our lab, which is going to be used for a bright field imaging microscope and especially bead tracking in two dimensions. We've got our microscope built up and the light beam comes out at the bottom and is already focused by a relay lens.

Until now, I haven't heard about relay lenses at all - our experimental optics lecture was covering a lot of different scenarios, but then the real world says hi and everything is a bit more difficult: Our microscope gives out a parallel light beam, which is focused by the relay lens and you could mount a camera directly after the relay lens. There would be an image at this point and if you moved further away the image would get less sharp.

However, the image we get so far (about 1.5 cm) is too large for our camera chip (it's so small! 6*5 mm^2!), so we are going send the image through another lens and get an overall smaller image, so that the image size will roughly fit the chip size.

Back in the optics lecture, we would use 1/b+ 1/g = 1/f and we would know the focal length we would like to have for a certain object and image distance. Looking up the possible focal lengths of lenses is destroying this illusion of getting any focal length you want! The smallest one we could buy for a certain diameter has a focal length of f = 3.8 cm. Yay. So b and g become larger than we would like to have them, so you need a mirror etc. And the table is finite! It's not a simple paper sheet on which you draw your optical axis... In addition to that, if the lenses and mirrors are not aligned as well, you'd get a tilted image, so we have to be careful.

But all this is awesome, hands-on lab-work and we can play around! It's fun!!