Day 5

         Dr. Hornak had a meetong this morning so Elaine and I were on our own to collect samples for the NMR tubes. It's pretty hard to find samples that fit in the tubes because the diameters are less than half a centimeter wide. Which means that most of our samples were bugs, plants, seeds, and one tiny fish.  
        We went to see Kelsey's lab on the third floor. She is working with the freshman project of the imaging science class. It's half a dome and an object is placed in the center of it. There are cameras set up in spots throughout the dome so that they take pictures of the object from different angles. After that we, went back down to our lab and started imaging some of the samples we had collected with the NMR machine. We imaged the cross section of a chive, a string bean, plant stem, a tiny snail, and a tiny worm. Of all the images the chive and the plant stem were the most interesting. The snail and the worm just created a round blob. We used several different techniques to improve the picture quality. Unfortunately, one process (creating a thicker cross section) did not work. And the other technique, which was to wait longer inbetween scans (there are a total of 256 scans to get one image), made the original image twice as defined but the time it took to image the picture went from .5 minutes to 4.5 minutes.
         We are still brainstorming for the final project because the tadpoles are too big to fit in the NMR tubes. But it was a good day because we really got right into the imaging.