Week 5 July 14-19...possibly promising?

It was a short week for me last week, as I took a trip up to seattle with my family on Thursday--I have relatives from China over, so we were definitely busy entertaining. I also got to see some of my best friends in Seattle, so that was a great weekend.

As for the rest of the week at work, that was great too, because it looks like I might have finally reached some sort of breakthrough! My MNO2 electrodes with a cavity connected to gold ended up being quite problematic because H2O2 caused a significant peak with the gold electrode in addition to reacting with the MnO2. However, I'm now trying a new method and using carbon instead of gold, and it's working much more nicely! So now this is week I'm working on refining my method to get consistent results, as well as observing the signals in other electrolytes like seawater.

Honestly, the first couple of weeks of this internship left me pretty discouraged, because it seemed like I would continue (as Paul eloquently put it) "chasing ghosts" until some random finding led me to some possibly useful data. It seemed I could easily spend 10 weeks gathering a massive amount of actually useless data that would help me reach no other conclusion than that my procedures didn't work.

I'm crossing my fingers things run smoothly from here on out! =)