The last week has been quite hectic. I spent most of last week trying to figure out an obscure problem with one of th experiments I did on frogs about two years ago. We were looking to see how good a burowing frog species is at sucking water out of dry soils. Dealing with real soil is a pain, so we used water with some stuff dissolved in it to make a solution that acts like soil of various dryness. Normally this works just fine, but we used a weird molecule that does weird stuff - PEG.
For most molecules, it's easy to calculate their effect when they dissolve in water - if you double the concentration, you double the effect. Not so with PEG. Not only that, but it turns out that the effect it has depends on the temperature of the solution. Originally, we tried calculating the water potential (sort of like dryness) of the solutions we used. That gave weird numbers, but they weren't totally unbelievable, so we put them in a manuscript that was sent to several journals and eventually got accepted.
Recently, we got two different machines that measure water potential. I won't bore you with the details, but one looks at the freezing point of the solution, and one measures the temperature of dew point in the air at equilibrium over the sample. So, we decided to measure the PEG solutions we'd used before because we are about to start a new series of experiments. Of course, we got different numbers - ones that made more sense than the original ones we calculated. Unfortunately, when we measured in both machines, we got different numbers, which, because PEG is so weird, are probably both correct. What a pain.
So, over the weekend, I sent a letter to the editor of the journal where our manuscript was accepted, explaining all of this, and explaining that the numbers we'd used in the accepted manuscript were all wrong, and begging to change the manuscript before they sent it off to the printer. Well, turns out that they were just working on typesetting the paper this week, so I just got the changes in to them on time by a couple of days. So, no worries on getting the paper fixed. This could be one of the few times that I'll ever be happy with having a very long delay between having a paper accepted and having it actually printed.
That was the big, frustration of the week. The big news is that yesterday we found out that one of the big grant proposals we submitted in July has been accepted and will most likely be funded (the parliament still has to approve the budget, but they almost never change anything - they're too busy worrying about wars, health care, jobs, and getting re-elected to bother with individual science grants). So, looks like I will actually have an income after the 1st of the year. That's a huge relief!
