trip flying by

Yesterday a few of us, which included myself along with Kelly, Zhaleh, Spencer, Alisa, and Donna decided to go see the Peking Man site in Zhoukoudian, which is about 50km southwest of Beijing. I’ve wanted to see this site for awhile since we first arrived, but had trouble figuring out exactly how to get there by bus. Fortunately, Julia from the Joint Institute was able to help me with this last Friday by supplying me with directions and a map. It was quite an excursion, since the whole trip required three buses and some careful monitoring of the Chinese characters for the stops that we wanted to get off at, but we made it there with little difficulty. If future participants in this program want to go here from Wan Liu next year simply take bus 394 to Liu Li Qiao Dong, where you’ll take bus 917 to Fang Shan Dong Da Qiao and then board transfer bus 38 to Zhoukoudian. We knew when we got off at the Zhoukoudian stop that we had arrived at the right place, since we saw a giant-sized brass head of Peking Man outside the exhibit’s entrance about 200m from our stop.

I found Zhoukoudian to be a very tourist friendly place. We were allowed to go into all of the caves that the H. erectus fossils of Peking Man had been found in; however, most of the Peking Man specimens have been recovered from the caves so the current excavation of the site has all but stopped. The peak time of excavation occurred during the 1920’s to the 1940’s, which began with the discovery of a couple of human molars here by Swedish geologist Johan Andersson. My favorite Anthropologist that worked on the site, though, was Fanz Weidenreich, because it was his casts of the original Peking Man skulls (about 40 altogether) that allow us to still know what they looked like, since the original skulls were lost during WWII (now, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean) as they were shipped from China in a US freight to keep them from harm. Since I’m a dual Chemistry and Anthropology major I found the museum to be my favorite part of the exhibit, but I think the others enjoyed lunch the best. When we went to the restaurant for lunch, we had just missed the last serving time of 12:30pm so we were first bummed out since we were both hungry from the long bus ride and because I told everyone that it was supposed to be a four-star restaurant (info I got from an online source). However, even though we were late the chef insisted we stay and instantly made us a delicious vegetable dish from two heads of cabbage and some tomatoes he brought in from an outdoor garden. It was probably some of the best, inexpensive dishes I’ve eaten while here. After the museum and lunch we visited the scientists’ memorial where some of the old anthropologists who worked at the site were buried and also some more of the caves (also called localities) before we headed back to the bus.

To switch gears to research, my work in the lab continues to keep me busy for most of the week, where I run experiments pretty much autonomously now. I am still working on Multi-walled nanotube synthesis and believe I have found the growth conditions (temp, flow-rate) that give me the best aligned nanotube array so now I plan this week to attempt the photo-oxidizing step. One problem I’ve had in lab, though, is finding time to get use on the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), since everyone in our lab needs this machine to look at their samples. There was a communication mix-up between my grad student and myself last Sunday where I thought I had been scheduled time to use the machine from midnight to 1am, when he actually meant 12pm to 1pm…so when I got there at midnight the person using the machine was very confused why I insisted on taking his time away from him. However, I’ve made friends with those who are scheduled to use the SEM for long durations, which has given me more accessibility to the machine since they let me view my samples at the same time they look at theirs by putting both of our samples on the same stage in the SEM. I hope this week I can get a lot accomplished so I can begin to prepare my PowerPoint presentation in our lab on my work; it seems many of the lab’s members are eager to hear me speak as I am continually told by others in lab “I hear you will be giving a presentation”. If nothing else it reminds me that I need to move quickly to put my ppt. slides together before my presentation date of July 22. Just writing this date is a shocker, I really can’t believe how fast this study-aboard trip has gone this summer…in 3 weeks I probably won’t want to leave.