Real field work...and real lab work
I've been a little lazy with blogging over the last month. Getting some real field work done, reviving the Social Club and even getting started on some experimental work have taken up a fair bit of time. I've done inductions for three residue deposit sites and been out to have a look at them. The images on Google Earth don't really do justice to the actual size of the residue deposit areas. Seeing them firsthand was great motivation to get moving on my experimental work. It's not that bauxite residue is particularly hazardous or anything like that; in fact, the more I work with it, the less harmful I think it is; and managed correctly, it's completely benign. It's more to do with minimising management costs and turning it into a resource rather than a burden. Or at least being able to do something productive with the land surface area that it occupies.
The first experiment that I ran didn't work at all, trying to get aluminosilicates to precipitate from suspensions of bauxite residue mud to which I had added a sodium metasilicate solution. The nice thing about scientific research is that nothing ever 'fails' as such; it just does or doesn't work, and you move on. An article emailed around by Andrew to the postgrads in our School on behalf of Martin Fey makes the point that "One of the beautiful things about sciences is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.' Although I have no idea how people doing organic chemistry PhDs can spend three years trying different ways to synthesise a compound, only to conclude that well, none of the ways they tried will work... The second experiment has been far more promising and I'm quite excited to finish off the rest of the analyses (once I've finished my morning coffee and writing this post).
Finally - Social Club stuff. The first meeting of the revived Soil Science Journal Club was reasonably well attended, and we managed to persuade a few more people to join in with the offer of cupcakes. There should be a post on Andrew's blog soon about what was discussed. Bree's choosing the next article, and then Dan Murphy after that. Friday drinks (on a scale larger than three people who are still hanging around the building for some unknown reason at 5 pm on a Friday) are kicking off this week and will hopefully be well attended. Fundraising chocolates and soft drinks are also being revived, with raised funds going back into the Social Club to support events and perhaps even subsidising postgrads for writing retreats, organised by Lucy Leyland. Exciting times.
I'm now looking at the bottom of an empty coffee cup, which is telling me that either (a) I need more coffee; or (b) it's time to finish off analysing the samples from yesterday. Time to finish off the samples.