Any better?

We'll try a raspy voice and a slow and steady voice to see if these are any puzzles. 

Vagon

After living in Oz for a year and a half, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a car.  I won't bore you with the story of the decision making.  I can just say that it will be nice to actually have a set of wheels.  I can get out of town!  The disadvantage is that it's too short to sleep within... at least to sleep comfortably.   It's a '97 with only 56,000 km (35,000 miles) on it.  That means it only averaged 2320 miles per year.   


Victoria has oodles of beuracracy though.  The car had to be unregistered, then I had to get an unregistered permit ($70) to get a road safety certificate ($100), to then bring to the "DMV" to get a registration ($850). 

The car has a 10 disc cd changer!  ... but I have no CDS :(  

I bought some microphones, mostly because I like the occasional new toy.  I'm also working on playing/singing a bit better.  It helps to hear my own voice clearly.  I've come to realize that I'm a bit out of tune... still working on that.  Anyhow, here's a tribute to Led Zeppelin's Tangerine, just to show the mics in action.  It's not so easy to sound like Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. 

A little of what I do

Well, I figure it's time to show what I do day in and day out.  Essentially, I watch platelets attach to different substrates (surfaces).  This is typically followed by some counting... manual cuonting of the platelets.  These sorts of high tech analyses require a doctorate. 

However, it does get more interesting when I try to observe the mechanics of platelet adherence.  Here, we have a TIRF (total internal reflectance fluorescence) microscopy image of platelets attaching to Fibrinogen.  The brightness of the platelet corresponds with a region that is closest to the surface.  Essentially, the technique allows us to quantify the depth of the platelet morphology from 10-300 nm from the surface. 

I also officially became a biologist when I ran my first Western Blot of some platelet lysates.  These tell us if a certain protein exists based on the size of the protein.  On the left is the size based on kilodaltons.  The lysates are run through a gel and separate by size.  Then specific proteins can be labeled, as seen by the black spots.  I figure that's enough detail for my average reader.  These are some of the fun activities than one can perform in the laboratory, but don't try this at home ;)