Good afternoon,

The task these last weeks was to provide my lab-mate with more of a specific dye derivative.  She had a small store synthesized by a student, now graduated.   I didn’t think the process would be particularly difficult.  The other student seems to have operated the procedure multiple times and all I have to do now is follow her directions.  LIES.

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Hey Everyone,

Last week was a very exciting week for my project. As I stated in my previous post, we were having troubles with our silver nanosphere synthesis a couple of weeks ago. We have corrected the problem, although we never pinpointed what the problem actually was, and I have been very busy taking spectra of modified silver nanospheres on art pigments. We hypothesized that adding a salt to silver nanospheres would increase the intensity of our surface enhanced Raman spectra (SERS), and it would appear that we were correct. This has been noted several times in the literature, and it was exciting to be able to reproduce the results of previous experiments. Over the next week I will be working very hard to better understand the phenomena that create these trends and to analyze various pigments. We hope to see our modified silver nanospheres enhance the SERS spectra of different types of pigments. However, we hypothesize that it will be more difficult to identify a trend for other pigments.

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Last Friday, our lab was given a very unique opportunity.  A contact of ours at the Smithsonian offered to take us on a tour of the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute in Maryland.  Naturally, we couldn’t say no!  Our tour guide was a conservation scientist for the Smithsonian specializing in the study of fine art using GC/MS and FT-IR (sorry for the science jargon).   But, we  soon found out that her knowledge and expertise expanded far beyond these particular areas.  One by one she took us into every single conservation and science lab she could, giving us background information on what kinds of instruments and equipment we were seeing in each room and what kinds of projects they were being used for.  The applications of some of them extended far beyond what I could ever have imagined.  One of the most fascinating examples she gave us was in the Mass Spectrometry Room.  Researchers were using a Stable Isotope Mass Spectrometer to look at small bone samples from a Civil War burial site.  Based on the readout the instrument produced, the scientists were trying to determine if the soldier’s diet was more grain based or corn based.  From this info, the remains could then be classified as more likely belonging to a Union soldier (grain based diet) or a Confederate soldier (corn based diet).  While she never gave us an idea of how sucessful this project had been so far, I was very impressed by the kind of thinking and problem solving skills that these scientists were utilizing to answer all sorts of questions about the past.  In the process we hardly noticed that what was originally supposed to be a 90 minute tour had turned into three hours with all the questions we were asking.  This experience completely confirmed for me how much I want to pursue a career in this field!   However, before I can start thinking about that and the many steps required between senior year and a job, I must first finish the last week of summer research!  I can’t believe we are almost done.  So much has happened, including a recent break through with those tricky blue/green pigments I mentioned earlier, so hopefully I will have a final summary and update for everyone soon!

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