Boring fact: I was amongst the team of scientists who searched for the tiniest fossil plankton and we found some! There was already plankton tinier than 1µm during the Silurian.
Just know the SEM microscope was the best toy I've ever played with but researching and counting acritarchs and such was so boring I read the entirety of the fml sites (both English and French version) and wrote 150 pages of a novel in the span of the 6 months I spent on this project.
But I got my name on articles, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
Yeah, electron microscopes can me fun to play with. Everythings so weird on the microscopic level. Same on the other side of the spectrum too I suppose. Yeah, I had fun doing some organic chemistry things - like NMR and distillations - but yea some of it can be tedious. Counting things with a microscope - yea that can get boring fast. I worked doing research for a guy and he had this lab. It was like a kid in a candy shop. So many cool things to tinker with. It was fun and I felt somewhat undeserving. With that said, I did this other project and it ended up being sort of sponsored by a physics department and they had these beautiful archaic machines that were just amazing that we got to work with haha. They had set up a pirate radio station which was fun too
Oh ancient scientific tools are so cool! I've felt like exploring the moon when I was looking at a grey surface on the SEM and suddendly saw a tiny acritarch that looked like a mountain, but old machines have this poetic feeling and it's fascinating to see them work...
It's great that you had fun! In the labs I've worked in we didn't have a pirate radio (so badass!) but an old bed and a note from a guy named Pavel stating in a very convoluted way that it was crucial to set the microscope back to the red objective before turning it off, to which someone had scribbled in response "get fucked Pavel". It had become a saying in the lab. I miss this ambiance sometimes.
But I got my name on articles, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
It's great that you had fun! In the labs I've worked in we didn't have a pirate radio (so badass!) but an old bed and a note from a guy named Pavel stating in a very convoluted way that it was crucial to set the microscope back to the red objective before turning it off, to which someone had scribbled in response "get fucked Pavel". It had become a saying in the lab. I miss this ambiance sometimes.