we have a sister lab in washington state that's currently working on the same issues as us, the potential effects of hydrokinetic devices. mark has mentioned them several times and he may be a bit envious of their $40,000 (!!!) electromagnet.
so today he sent me an email with this link.
the article is about our sister lab, but if you make it all the way to the 11th paragraph, there we are!
skeeeee, i was so stoked when i read this. because it means that stuff i'm working on, at least stuff that's like what i'm working on, is worthy of an article on the nyt website!
i wrapped up my minnow experiment last thursday. basically, this experiment consisted of putting our newest permanent magnets (which are 2x as thick as the old ones and therefore the magnetic fields are 2x as strong) under three fish tanks, and setting up three more tanks in a similar fashion but sans magnet, and putting a fathead minnow in each. then i recorded the location of the minnows every 5 minutes. we wanted to see if the magnetic field in the experimental tanks would cause the minnows to be distributed differently than the minnows in the control tanks.
since then i've finished collecting all of the location data and have concluded that the minnows don't give a shit about the magnets. just like the snails didn't. which isn't so surprising.
hopefully i'll get to start experiments with an electromagnet soon. we are hypothesizing that the electromagnet, which produces an AC magnetic field, will actually affect the distribution of aquatic organisms. unlike the permanent magnets with their DC field.
and glenn may have found a suitable electromagnet (maybe). some company in chicago sells demagnetizers that produce AC fields and won't overheat when left on for 24 hours a day. they are also of a decent size and not prohibitively expensive. looks promising!
i like how "not prohibitively expensive" is $1,000. wayne and joann, the stockroom workers at LU, would flip shit at how readily the lab spends money. it's crazy.
also, nine of us aquatics people went barge electrofishing at a reference site called brushy fork last friday. it was suh-weet! electrofishing is like a treasure hunt. it was also nice to get outside and wade in a creek after spending all week in the lab, staring at a computer monitor for hours on end.
as for the social side of things, everyone in the ORSS program but one kid went whitewater rafting this weekend. we went on the ocoee river, which is a gorgeous, fairly wild river. most of the rapids we went down were class 2-4. nice nice. it was a pretty busy section of river, though, because several raft companies use that section. also, some guy in another raft, but from our same company, fell out and ended up breaking his leg. i saw the blood, dude. so we sort of had to chill out and wait for him to get to safety.
after rafting, which i think everyone enjoyed, we went and had a late dinner at a nearby restaurant called good fellas. in GEORGIA. yeah. we were in another state. it was a super fun dinner though. i think everyone is really starting to gel. we've started to have legit conversations, not those canned, script-like conversations that we started out with. gossip has also begun to occur, another good sign.
good. great. awesome. pics soon hopefully. my camera cord seems to have hidden itself, boo. i did finally give up on my damn iphone and i went and ordered a new one at at&t today. i can't fucking live without a smartphone these days. i almost couldn't even find the at&t store without mine!
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