Category Archives: lab

So remember when I said the week before last was my last full week at the university? Well, I was wrong. I had planned to just go Monday and Tuesday, when I would show Ana, Joan’s undergrad student, how to weigh the samples for isotope analysis. However, she couldn’t make it on Tuesday so since I still went to the university I started weighing some samples, but I thought on Wednesday I would show her and she would do the rest. Nope, Wednesday she couldn’t make it either. At that point, I just decided to weigh everything myself and show her on Thursday the last ones. On Thursday when she came it turned out she couldn’t be in the mass spectrometry lab anyway without signed authorization, so I showed her in 15 minutes how to prepare the samples and then she had to leave. I finally finished all my samples that afternoon only for the technician to tell me now the standards had to be weighed…all 73 of them. I was practically crossed-eyed after weighing over 300 tiny milligrams of soil samples into tiny tin capsules for almost 3 days straight, but I still thought I’d come in on Friday and do the standards as well. Luckily, however, Joan convinced me to just leave them for Ana, so at least I had Friday off. Which was great because the reason I wanted the rest of the week off was because my mother was visiting until Sunday on a stopover on her way home to Paraguay.

Weighing samples for isotope analysis

My last 2 weekends were pretty full of activities. It’s always at the end when you’re like, Oh, no, I didn’t go here, I didn’t see this! etc. It’s hard to believe I’m leaving this Wednesday. It took me some time to get used to it here, but, just like Cuiabá, by the end I settled into a routine and was feeling like I already lived here. Now back to Vancouver to get used to the next few months there.

Before I leave though, I’ll share some photos of the last few places I visited outside and within Barcelona.

Figueres, Cadaques, and Port Lligat

These places are famously associated with Catalan artist, Salvador Dalí. Figueres, about 2 hours north of Barcelona and close to the French border, was his hometown and is where he set up a museum for his work in what was formerly the town theatre. Cadaques is a town on the Costa Brava also associated with Dalí as well as other famous artists and writers that would vacation there in the summers. It’s a lovely little town, with whitewashed buildings and a beautiful beach. Near Cadaques is the small town of Port Lligat where Dalí lived later in life and whose home is now the Casa-Museo Dalí. Near Cadaques and Port Lligat is the Cap de Creus cape, Spain’s easternmost point. It is now a nature reserve and you can also visit the old lighthouse for some spectacular views. It had rained the day before and it was pretty windy when we were there, but I’m sure in the summer the area must be amazing and packed with people.

In Barcelona

This last weekend, with my mom and my sister, we visited the Parc del Laberint d’Horta, a park, as the name suggests, with a labyrinth located in the district of Horta in northern Barcelona. The park used to be the summer home of a wealthy Catalan who apparently enjoyed garden landscaping and statues of Roman mythological characters. The labyrinth was easy, but it did take us a few, fun tries to get through. From Horta, we headed to the Bunkers del Carmel, a former bunker used during the Spanish Civil War and from which you can now see amazing, 360 degree views of Barcelona.

On Sunday we went to a calçotada in Poble Sec, the Barcelona neighborhood where my sister lives. Calçotadas are festivals involving calçots, a type of fat green onion that is wrapped in newspaper and roasted on a fire. There are often castellers building castells followed by a messy feast of calçots with a special roasted tomato sauce, where your hands and mouth inevitably end up black from pulling apart the charcoaled newspaper. All in all it was a good weekend and a nice way to end my stay here.

Well, the last full week of my internship has come and gone. Time has definitely flown by. I’m happy to say though that I finished everything I had to do for the incubation experiment. These last few weeks I completed the fractionation of the post-incubation soils and, thanks to Ana, an undergraduate student that started a work-study position at the lab this month, my samples are now almost all finely ground. Soon they will be ready to be weighed for the 13C isotope analysis, which in the end will be carried out right here at UB. I’m still waiting for confirmation from the isotope lab technician to be able to weigh out the samples. Once that’s done, she just runs them on the machine and we’re done! Although then I’ll have a whole bunch more data to analyze and write-up, so really just one part done.

Soil fractions

Besides finishing up lab work and cleaning up, I had a chance to make a long-weekend trip a couple weeks ago when a holiday fell on a Friday. It was a new holiday (Santa Eulalia, another patroness of the city) that just started this year so it was a pleasant surprise to find out we had a day off in February. So my friend, Luisa, flew down from Germany and joined us for a quick trip to tiny Andorra. Andorra is just over two hours away from Barcelona and although there wasn’t much snow this year, seeing the Pyrenees for the first time was amazing. We spent two mornings snowshoeing in the Naturlandia park followed by some shopping in Andorra la vella, which is basically a one street town. Saturday night we relaxed our sore muscles in the thermal baths of Caldea. This place is a huge thermal baths/spa complex which honestly I didn’t enjoy so much because it was so crowded and felt so commercial. The Valentine’s Day weekend probably didn’t help. Still, the sauna-freezing water combo worked great to put us right to bed after (and practically even during) dinner. We couldn’t complain, it was a pretty fun weekend!

The New Year began full of Spanish culture and with the end of my lab experiment. I can’t believe how fast the weeks have gone by, especially the last couple weeks of holidays. My visit to Galicia was amazing, mostly because it was incredibly rain-free and with temperatures around 20 degrees (a couple days after returning to Madrid it started raining in Galicia non-stop, as is more typical in the winter). The Galician countryside reminded me a lot of the east coast of Canada: very green, with farmhouses here and there and grazing cattle. Stark contrast to Cataluña’s dry, rocky landscape. We visited some great places along the way and around: the Episcopal Palace in Astorga, designed by celebrated Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudí; the beach, Playa de las Catedrales, known for its rock formations that you can visit when the tide is low; Las Medulas, the remains of the largest gold mine in the Roman empire which they exploited for 250 years; the Templar castle in Ponferrada; and of course, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the final destination of the Way of Santiago. Combined with visits to the Museo del Prado and the National Archaelogy Museum in Madrid, as well as art exhibits at two different cultural centres, I can certainly say I learned a lot of Spanish history and culture during my holidays!

On my first day back to the lab in Barcelona, I took the last CO2 readings. Then it was time to do K2SO4 extractions and analyze carbon, nitrate, ammonium, and total nitrogen from the extracts. As I had done these analyses with the initial, non-incubated soils, the second time around was easier and more efficient. I now have a bunch of data to analyze.

Next month I’ll start fractionation of the final, incubated soils which, having done fractionation in November, shouldn’t take me too long either. Then what is left is the isotope analysis of the fractions. Joan is working on seeing if we can get the samples analysed here at UB rather than shipping them to UBC, as there is quite a bit of paperwork involved to import soils to Canada. It’s looking good so far though, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed till the end!

It’s December and the holidays are almost here. Can’t wait, just a few more days to finish things up in the lab. The last couple of weeks were taken up with more fractionation until all the samples were done and are now drying in the oven. After drying and grinding more than half of them, I was able to weigh them back at the elemental analysis lab in the Parc Cientific. The last few samples I’ll have to leave for after the holidays, but at least I have three quarters done. Since I will be doing fractionations again with the final samples next year, I didn’t want to leave too many of the initial samples to pile up. All in all I think things are going on track and finishing the final analyses next year shouldn’t be too overwhelming (especially if Joan gets an undergraduate student to help out which he said might happen, so we’ll see)!

Last weekend we made another little afternoon trip to the Roman city of Tarragona. I really liked it, it wasn’t too busy and the downtown is small and open enough that it doesn’t feel claustrophobic. We walked through the old city with its lovely cathedral and then down towards the waterfront to see the ancient Roman circus and amphitheatre. Past the amphitheatre is a nice waterfront walk called the balcony to the Mediterranean which leads to the New Rambla (the old Rambla being in the old city). Here, there are several restaurants, but we ended up heading back into the old part of the city to have lunch on one of the many outdoor patios. Just an hour away from Barcelona, Tarragona was a nice escape from the big city.

A few other activities in the last couple of weeks were a visit to the Christmas market in front of the Catedral de Barcelona…

and seeing displays by university clubs of castellers, castell (castle) builders, in front of the UB’s Faculty of Biology. The first group did well, building quickly and keeping balance before safely coming down among cheers and applause. The second group started well, but just before reaching the very top, the girl trying to climb onto the others’ shoulders started to wobble and suddenly lost her balance, causing the whole castell to come tumbling down. People crashing down on a mass of other people looked pretty painful, let me tell you. I only saw one injury, but there might have been others. It’s definitely a dangerous art, but when everything turns out well, the castells look pretty amazing.

Next week we’ll be heading to Madrid for Christmas and New Year’s, with a trip to Galicia in between. The weather there will probably be a lot like Vancouver: humid and rainy! But I’m excited to visit the region and see the North Atlantic. Until then, happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year!

November has started with intense lab work. I started analyzing the initial soils (not incubated) for organic carbon and nitrogen and nitrate and ammonia. In the past, I did the soil extractions and then handed the extractions to our lab technician to run it in the auto-analyzer and then she would email me the numbers. Easy. Now I’m learning all the steps the auto-analyzer does and, boy, does it take much longer! One thing I can say is that I definitely feel more lab trained. Knowing what I know now in preparing samples, standards, and making dilutions, I feel I could go back to a certain analysis I tried to do in Brazil and could do it a lot better. I’m pretty sure all that data is crap and if I went back now with what I learned, I could probably get some better results. It really makes a difference having someone walk you through the steps, follow-up on what you’re doing, and of course, know a ton of chemistry! Joan is an excellent teacher and will always explain to me why we are doing what, as in why we are adding this reagent and what happens when you add it to the other, etc. I may not follow everything, but you can tell he thinks it’s important to explain and make sure that I’m learning.

Anyway, theses analyses required lots of pipetting, diluting, preparing standards and reagents, and running samples on the spectrophotometer. After 5 days of pipetting, my right forearm was hurting so now I’m trying to balance with my left hand. Gotta keep those pipetting muscles even. Some of the extra pipetting had to do with high readings not fitting in the standard curve, so I had to repeat some samples, diluting a few times until getting better readings. All in all, it’s been a tiring few days, but I’m learning a ton. And now I have data!

Thank goodness for the weekends. Friday nights I usually accompany Luis to the local indoor bouldering gym, Deu Dits. I first started bouldering in Vancouver when some IRES colleagues invited me to try it and since it seemed it was the thing to do on Vancouver rainy days, I did. I really enjoyed it and climbed (indoors) quite a bit for a year, but stopped once I went to Brazil. Now that I’m here I still don’t go as much as Luis does, but once a week it’s fun to climb up walls until my arms get sore, then sit back and watch the pros train.

On Sunday we left Barcelona for a bit to visit the nearby town of Sitges. This town has visitors year-round, more even during its film festival. On our afternoon there, we walked along the waterfront boardwalk and checked out a few shops. Its a really nice little town, great for a short trip out of Barcelona.