Cold beaches and twilight vistas

During my last NZ visit, I took some time off from lying around my mum's house playing Pokemon to visit my friend Melissa in Whakatāne. We did a trip out to White Island (photos to come later) and she also showed  me around some of the scenic spots in and near the town she's (grudgingly) called home for the past couple of years. In classic NZ style, this called for beach visits despite the late-autumn chill, and finding the highest point from which to survey the environs. Luckily, being in the Bay of Plenty meant that we had plenty of sunshine to keep us (vaguely) warm(ish).

Even after two years in Sydney, I'm still not used to the lack of proper hills here. I read somewhere once that the appreciation of aesthetic landscapes may have evolved from the survival advantage conferred by being able to see predators from a height and better strategise your attack or retreat using your view. It's certainly true that I'm never entirely comfortable with my whereabouts in Sydney because I can't climb up the nearest hill to see which way all the roads run like I used to do in New Zealand. Maybe this evolutionary advantage works better for the geographically challenged like myself.

And now here's a dude lying down, just chillaxing in the water, as you do.

Photos taken around the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand in May 2015.

Excuses, excuses

A month's blog absence can be thusly broken down:

• 1.5 weeks visit from my friend Ingrid
• 1.5 weeks visit to New Zealand
• 1 week furious film watching and light gazing
• 1 week laziness

I have a tonne of photos to sort through and edit, which I will diligently do this week, as I have lots of cool photos from White Island.

In the meantime, this got published. Congrats to my friend and colleague Shu for (finally) getting this paper out, and w00t for my first second-authorship ^_^

Holy water

I think it really says something about a place when it feels tranquil despite oppressive heat and even more oppressive hordes of selfie-stick-toting tourists. Looking out over the ocean on one side and surrounded by mountains covered with lush forestry on the others, it's easy to see why this former royal residence is a site of spiritual significance to the local Hindu population. The water that feeds the pools of the Tirta Gangga water palace comes from a natural spring which also provides water for the nearby village and surrounding rice fields. This was the most picturesque of the multitudes of temples we stopped over at on our way out to the east coast of Bali from Ubud. Despite how cripplingly hot the day was, we resisted the temptation of jumping into the water out of fear of offending the populous local catfish community.

 

Photos taken at Tirta Gangga, Bali in March 2015. Credits to Jeremy for taking some of these.

Yeah science, bitch!

WARNING: long post. Scroll down further for pics if your attention span is lacking.

There are 2 main ways people respond when I tell them I work in science:

1. Their eyes glaze over and they smile vaguely and quickly steer the conversation into a territory they're more familiar with.

2. They assume I'm some kind of genius and know everything about everything, and start asking me about how to fix their broken gadgets/bodies/sanity.

And no, contrary to what the title of today's post alludes to, I and 99.9% of other people working in science don't know how to make meth (and I'm not willing to try, based on my very average performance in undergrad chem).

Mainstream media is also prone to making science look way more exciting and/or insane than it actually it is, and I admit that sometimes I use this to my advantage and make my job sound way more gruesome and dramatic than it actually is (although admittedly I do get to play with highly toxic and flammable materials on a daily basis and routinely poke at bits of dead people). I thought I'd take the opportunity today to explain a little of what I actually do for a living and what my day at work kind of looks like to any curious friends and family (hi Mum). I'll try and use as much normal-person-speak as possible so that people who haven't lost their minds after years of science-ing can understand, so be warned that any science appearing here is a really really simplified version.

I work as a research assistant in a university research lab that works on motor neuron disease (that thing everyone was doing the ice bucket challenge for last year) and specifically, how people's genetics might help cause this disease. Because this really awful disease can run in families, our lab can "read" the DNA of people in these families and try to figure out if any of their genes has a mutation, or "spelling error", in them that's different from people who don't have the disease. Now how DNA works is that is "spells out" instructions for your cells to make proteins, which are like little cogs in the big super complicated machine that is a living being. Our lab also looks at the wrongly made proteins and what the effects of them being different from normal are in the cell, and ultimately in a person.

I mainly work on the cell/person side of things, and only occasionally help out in the "DNA reading" side, as the latter requires more knowledge of bioinformatics than I have. My days at work are extremely varied, as it all depends on what projects are currently being worked on. As a research assistant, I don't get to have my own projects like postdocs do. However, I do get to have intellectual input into other people's projects that I'm helping out on, plus I don't have to deal with shit like writing grants to keep myself funded, so my job is pretty sweet. Because my boss is awesome, I also get authorship on papers when I help with the experiments, unlike many other poor assistants in the world of science. By the way, I'll just mention now that when I say things like "help out", I don't mean in the way that a surgical assistant just stands to the side and hands the surgeon scalpels in surgeries on TV. I do pretty much all the hands-on stuff for an experiment, usually by myself, then hand on the results to whoever is working on the project, who will pull together a bunch of results from lots of different experiments and write them up coherently into a paper. Besides experimental work, I also do a tonne of housekeeping (labkeeping?) stuff, like making sure that everyone has all the equipment and reagents they need for their experiments, keeping everything in the lab clean and tidy and in good working order, making sure that students aren't burning down the lab, harassing salespeople of scientific goods for better prices, etc.

I work an extremely flexible 9-to-5 day, as demanded by how long different experiments take and the hours of whoever I'm working with that day. My boss is a really nice chilled out guy and very into maintaining a good work/life balance, so he doesn't mind people coming and going whenever, as long as they've put in the hours they need to. I work with a bunch of awesome ladies and we probably spend too much time talking about non-science things at work  like Game of Thrones, shoes, and cute fluffy animals. Our group works pretty closely with a few other groups working on different aspects of motor neuron disease (some looking more closely at specific bits of cells or proteins, some looking at what biochemical reactions are happening in the disease, some making fish with the disease so we can test potential treatments on them), so there is a bunch of people at work to get drunk and complain about how hard it all is with.

Anyway, to better illustrate (quite literally) what I do all day, I took one photo every hour last Thursday at work. This isn't my everyday routine, because there's no such thing, but it does show a few of the things that I get up to when I reply "yeah it was alright, pretty normal" when I get asked about my day at work.

9 am: Oops running late today, so I'm still on the train. All hell breaks loose on Sydney public transport when it rains. I'm wearing sensible shoes because that's rule number 2 of working in a lab, after "don't put anything from the lab in your mouth". I've pretty much stopped buying footwear that I can't wear to work.

10 am: having done some other random stuff, I'm getting ready to do some cell culture work in the lab. We grow cells from both animals and people in this pretty pink liquid that had food for the cells in it, and changes to a gross yellow colour when your cells get unhappy. I keep a bunch of cells growing almost all the time in case we need them for experiments, and change their food and housing maybe twice a week or so. We wear gross gown thingies instead of proper lab coats because we're not cool enough.

11 am: working on some cells that I preserved yesterday and now I'm dyeing them funky fluorescent colours so we can look at where different proteins are inside them using a microscope. You can't see them, but these cells are taken from the skin of a person with motor neuron disease and another person without the disease, and we're comparing whether the two act differently when you put icky toxic chemicals on them, as the last experiment for a paper we're hoping to publish soon.

12 am: I've just finished cleaning this water bath and putting a cell incubator to steam sterilise. Cells from mammals grow best at 37 degrees Celsius, but the warmth makes gross things like bacteria grow fast as well, so we have to keep everything very very clean all the time, or else the bacteria take over our cells and make them die off. I do like 70% of the cleaning of everything in the lab, so I put extra effort into being a messy slob at home to make up for it.

1 pm: Not too much lab work today, so I'm back in the office doing random admin stuff, like laminating signs to put up in the lab. Using my last to-do list as a mousepad. My new to do list has grown to twice the size shown here *cries softly*.

2pm: Late lunch today! Ok I cheated and took this photo 10 minutes early, otherwise this would be an empty box. This is my default lunch for when I can't be bothered thinking too hard about what I want to eat.

3pm: helping edit the paper that the cells from the 11 am pic are going into. I've just made a pot of editing tea to help me along. Cue mad dash to bathroom in 20 minutes when I've finished the whole pot.

4pm: oops got distracted and took this pic 15 minutes late, because the boss came round and distracted me with cake. Cake and 2 pots of tea later, having a quick look at some pretty pictures I took with a microscope a few days ago. This is what I meant by dyeing things fluorescent colours. This is for a different project, where someone from my lab found what might be a new gene mutation, so we shoved the mutated gene into some cells and are now looking to see if the protein that gets made gets put into a different place in the cell compared to the not mutated one.

5pm: oh god how is this day not ever yet?! Sugar crashing from the cake and the fact that I did some reading which made me realise how little I know about what the hell I'm doing. Can has home time nao plz? 

Anyway, that's a day in the life of a biomedical research assistant! As much as I may bitch and moan, my job is pretty damn sweet (and they pay's not too bad either!). How does one obtain such a job? Well I have a Master of Science in biomedical science, which only cost me my soul, sanity and $10000+. Increasingly, people are hiring PhD graduates for my job, which is fucking ridiculous and makes me really think twice (or thrice, or a hundred times) about doing a PhD. I just got super lucky (and may have made promises to bring baking in my interview) with this job! And now, I must plot ways to hang on to this job forever! *fade out with evil laughter*

Make some noise

Due to my inability to check important dates on a calendar, our recent trip to Bali coincided with the one day in a year where nothing is open and you are literally not allowed to set foot on the street. This is how the Balinese usher in the first day of the new year on Nyepi Day. Fortunately for us, what happens on new year's eve is a lot more interesting for observers. People in the surrounding community gather on a main street for prayers, and ladies arrive with absurdly large baskets of offerings balanced on their heads, many featuring items like an entire roast chicken perched on a mountain of fruit. Meanwhile, a gamelan ensemble plays for literally hours non-stop as the growing crowd find seats on any available road surface. A nice shopkeeper lets us take refuge on the front steps of his convenience store and we gratefully huddle in front of a drinks fridge, trying not to pass out from the heat and thankful for the easy access to drinks and snacks.

The sky begins to darken while the collection of gathering people and roast chickens swells, and dancing and prayers soon follow. A man in white sprays us with holy (?) water on a brush, which evaporates before it hit us because by this point we have pretty much melted.

I cheer internally as the sun finally comes down and the crowd rearranges itself at an intersection in the road. We nab ourselves a good spot near the front of the crowd and try not to fall onto the people behind us as the cops (?) come around to shove the crowd back. It soon becomes clear why they were so intent on clearing more space in the road. A crowd of screaming youths race into the cleared intersection from down the road, carrying the first of many Ogoh-ogoh, huge lurid statues in the shape of demons mounted on a bamboo platform. These statues are built by the local youths and represent the evil in living beings. After they are paraded cacophonously through the streets, they are burnt as an act of purification.

The parade we saw was in a small village on the east coast, and thus probably less extravagant than in the main tourist areas like Ubud. However, there was a real home-grown feel to it as lots of kids participated and it didn't seem like a show put on just for tourists. Turns out my lack of foresight when planning worked in my favour for once!

Photos taken in Culik, Bali, March 2015.

Cigar box blues

There's a neat little bar around the corner to my place that's slowly turning into my "local" due to their decent rotating tap beer selection, decent taste in music and the fact that people bring their dogs in on nice weekends. The usual fare for a Thursday night is the relentless dancing and laser shooting of a mohawked DJ in bright undies worn over a white morph suit while playing terrible 80s music. Thankfully, this pattern is occasionally disrupted to make space for less Bee Geestastic acts. We ventured out last Thursday to enjoy the musical stylings of these two fine gentlemen and their finer guitars.

The guy on the right makes his own instruments, including a vegetable steamer banjo, a cigar box guitar (which makes some sweeeeet noises), accompanied by a bucket drum. I can't remember the guy on the left's name because I fail at life and had far too much beer.

That time we got up at 1 am to climb a volcano

Things learnt:

• I am way less fit that I thought I was
• Taking photos before sunrise is hard
• Clouds are cool

Photos taken at Mt Batur, Bali in March 2015.