100 Days of Corbyn

So a lot of (most Conservative) people keep saying that Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable and ridiculous and he should step down.

May I ask, if he's unelectable, then why are you worrying? Why bother with a smear campaign if he won't win in any case? Unless you view the British electorate with such contempt as to think they are not capable of making decisions by themselves.

In fact if anything, the continuous rhetoric of how unelectable he is, the constant smears, surely show how much of a threat he actually is.

I like short blog posts...

"This Government makes me happier and happier." Said No Ordinary Man.

So the government is forcing more benefits changes on people. A new budget that will cut billions from those who are most needy in society. This naturally filled me with a lot of vitriol, so be prepared for a tl:dr.
Well I'm so glad that this government is going to put countless disabled and ill people through needless stress, heartache and suffering just to save a few quid. And all because, as a culture, we have decided that being disabled is a swindle to cheat the state after money.
Nobody asks to be disabled. Nobody wants to have to claim disability living allowance. It's not "for fun" or a swindle. Stop the rhetoric that it is. Just accept that people need to claim it.
You can't incentivise people into not being disabled like you can with people who are out of work through choice.
Somehow we voted for a government that actively discriminates against the disabled because it knows that they won't fight back or that if they do they won't be listened to.
I'm disabled. Like many people it is a cause of great shame and not a badge that I wear with honour - more a cross that I have to carry in a culture that kicks me to the floor more often than it helps me up. And changing the benefits that make life bearable; by putting people through unfair hoops and forcing them through bureaucratic targets, making then into statistics instead of people, this government is kicking disabled people to the floor once again.
And to add insult to injury, the Home Secretary has decided that questioning government policies is tantamount to treason. Disagreement makes one a "terrorist sympathiser".
I suppose this is hardly surprising when one considers the bed fellows but do we want to fall foul of a Saudi-Chinese system of state control and interference?
I am opposed to military action in the middle East AND to sweeping welfare reforms.
I am pro funding education, healthcare and the police.

Lab work, or what I did with my summer (2013)

This summer proved to be an interesting experience. For the first time, I was permitted to work in a research laboratory, doing experimental science. Not the stifled, predictable, has a correct answer work done in undergraduate laboratories but the open ended field of research science. I had agreed with Professor Andy Ellis of the University of Leicester to work in his laboratory over the summer, and the experiment was much more chemical physics, than physical chemistry. We were synthesising nanoparticles in helium nanodroplets. The first time I'd ever been able to do any such work and certainly an interesting experience. 

The door to the "office"

The helium nanodroplet experiment is an interesting area of research. The droplets themselves are cooled to a temperature of 0.37K, and hence the helium is superfluid. This means two things, the first being that molecules are free to move about inside of the droplets and also that due to the low reactivity of helium they don't form interactions with the helium nanodroplet and thus provides a fantastic way of capturing and holding particles to perform tasks like spectroscopy. This is aided by helium's transparency to most forms of radiation. An off shoot of this is the fact that the size of the droplets can be controlled and thus the size of particles within these meaning that the helium nanodroplet systems provide a novel and interesting method of synthesising nanoparticles with very tight size control.

One of the first tasks we had to do was test the oven we were using to introduce metal into the helium beam. This was done on an ultra high vacuum rig to simulate the conditions that the oven would be operating under. This also ensured that most of the water that had built up on the metal surface would be dissipated by evaporation. 

The oven in operation

The rig it was operating inside of

Eventually this was moved to the main rig. Normally, at this point I would show a picture of the main rig that was being worked on but unfortunately I couldn't find a good enough picture to show it off. It's a big piece of kit - kind of 2.5-3m long apparatus.

We produced nanoparticles fairly quickly containing aluminium. It was especially interesting to see these under a TEM however I cannot post them here as they are publication pending. Eventually we turned our attention to what we were seeing in our mass spectrum.

Now, a few years ago, some German scientists published a paper saying that aluminium atoms trapped in helium nanodroplets were separated by layers of helium and hence would not cluster together. Now, I know of work done that shows that excited electronic states of aluminium tend to the surface of the droplet and I also know of work done that shows that ground state aluminium does not. They had very limited evidence for their claim that these layers of helium existed. But one thing is certain, clusters would not be seen in the mass spectrum.

Yet, this is exactly what we saw!!!  Imagine our surprise. Even more interestingly was that these followed a near magic number progression! Even more interesting. The findings were published then in the Int. J. Mass Spectr. in 2014 and my name was on the paper!! Hopefully the first of many scientific papers in my name!!

It was a great summer and I was keen to repeat the experience again! Even if there were some ups and downs.