Bad Science Day

After a fairly good week in Houston for LPSC, I've been having really shitty science luck this week. While I was away, my colleague prepared a sample for me to microtome. It took him a full day to do his part, and it only took me ten minutes to ruin the sample. And I didn't just ruin the sample, I burned it to a crisp! You see, I was supposed to microtome the sample in epoxy, but I put it in sulfur instead. No worries, though, because sulfur can be sublimated away. So I cranked up the hot plate and waited for the sulfur to melt and disappear. However, I did not realize that at high enough temperatures (but below the sulfur boiling point), liquid sulfur goes through an extremely exothermic reshuffling of atom positions. When this happened to me, the sulfur quickly turned from yellow to red, and then spontaneously combusted! Then I was left with an ugly black mess, with a tiny sample hidden somewhere in the middle (pristine of course because the sample is made of materials with very high melting temperatures). So then the rest of my Monday was spent frantically trying to prepare another sample. My colleague and I managed to get a sample, and I embedded it in epoxy like I was supposed to the first time.

Then yesterday my job was to create microtome sections--about fifty 100nm sections, which will cut about halfway through the sample. That took a looooong time! But once I was done, I looked at the sample in the microscope and discovered that it was still uncut! Turns out I had wasted my time sectioning a gas bubble just above the real sample! I was pissed and it was late in the day, but I had to get this done, so I kept microtoming. Finally I got to the real sample. I cut a few 200 nm sections just as a reference point and went to look at the sample again to confirm I had really reached it. This ended up screwing me up, because once I put the sample back in the microtome, it wouldn't cut right and the sections came out crappy. So I looked again at the sample, and lo and behold, it was gone! I had wasted almost the entire day just for three measly sections that were a bit too thick.

Luckily, I found out today that one of those sections was just thin enough for TEM. And it had the interesting material we were looking for. So I guess there is a silver lining, but it's probably the worst possible silver lining.