Wading Through Research

Failing better   Rather than talk about my research directly, I’d like to use this blog post to talk about something much more personal and important: the F-word. I would put forward that to be a PhD student almost inevitably forces a confrontation with an unmistakable, devastating, and utterly confounding acquaintance with Failure.    For everyone it will take a different form, and have its own timing, like the boogie man under a child’s bed. For me Failure loomed large over summer of 2014.  At the point when I became confident that I was ready to start generating publishable graphs – that was when I noticed things starting to get dark. One week’s work culminated in a failed experiment, then another. There were the stupid mistakes. There were the skills that I thought were good enough, and weren’t. And then there were the experiments that had to be written off to trial and error, as I adapted a common experimental approach to my particular samples.  Ag...

by Luca Marazzi* ‘Who’ is it and where does it live? This centric diatom’s c ells are drum-shaped, the valve diameter and the density of marginal striae are highly variable. Cyclotella meneghiniana   is a rather cosmopolitan species; in tropical freshwaters, it is associated with various water depths and salinity 1 , and, in temperate regions, it is a typical planktonic taxon in the late summer-autumn 2 . In North America, this species can cope with a wide range of conditions, for example from freshwater to saline waters in the Great Plains lakes 3 . a)                                                                         b) Cyclotella meneghiniana , with a) chloroplasts and b) silica frustule after ‘chemical digestion’. Source :  http://fcelter.fiu.edu/data/...