Yin-Yang

“You know you’ve been in Japan too long when you turn on the TV, see a mountain erupting, think “Oh, it’s a volcanic eruption” and change the channel.” I guess I almost qualify, even though the biggest reason for not following the coverage was the poor quality of images; bit like the news agency was streaming live from a webcam that happened to point more or less in correct direction. Nevertheless, the 3-mm layer of ash on cars did not make the site very pleasant.
Yesterday, worked with Javi to take some confocal images of the DCN of the double-fluorescent mice – good news: the quality of the images was almost artificially good, and got some pictures that are good enough for publishing. Bad news: the good resolution left no space for speculation about the population of cells I am supposed to be working on right now – there are two completly different subtypes, and they are not distinguishable by size or any other feature available in single-fluorescent mice. Meaning that there is absolutely no point in continuing what I was doing for the last few weeks. Good news: I can concentrate on starting the Real Morphological Analysis, using a fancy recycled Leica microscope and all the fixed, stained and mounted cells I’ve collected so far. Maybe I’ll find something that distinguishes the cells from each other. Maybe I’ll have time and strength to go for a training today – don’t know if that’s good or not.
Good, bad, good, bad. Not surprisingly, I found the ancient symbol of balance in the cerebellum of the aforementioned double-fluorescent mouse.