So to business…..what is like to be here and what makes us so excited.

A serious point to start, even an instrument as sophisticated and expensive as the Diamond Synchrotron provides information which is only as good as the samples with which it is feed….you know the expression ‘rubbish in rubbish out’…so we go to extreme lengths to make sure that what we bring is of the highest quality, and for this we have much to thank (our secret weapon) Kate (Powell) and her extraordinary skills in sample preparation and microscopy. Also in this case we have had the support of Peter Fisher (SEM Unit, Earth Sciences, Cardiff) who help John considerably to pre-define some of the structures and there chemistries before we came…..yes SEM are expensive but much less so than the toys we are currently playing with !!

So I could bore you with the details of our safety training, planning and issues getting started because of ‘dropped beam’ but I am too tired and to be totally honest, that’s not why you are reading the blog! I know what you guys want…its beautiful images and some exciting science so for now, I will close this post with some quite awesome images and leave it to John to describe what you are seeing later:

Figure 1: Light microscopy image and elemental overlay of Snail digestive gland. The light microscope images are ‘unstained’, ethanol fixed methacrylate embedded (that’s plastic to you and me) tissue. The colour images are the elemental maps of manganese (red), calcium (yellow) and potassium (Blue). The yellow square is the element that was mapped. Numbers are technical keys.

Figure 2: Light microscopy image and elemental overlay of Slug ‘foot’ – Epidermal, connective tissue and pedal Gland. The light microscope images are ‘unstained’, ethanol fixed methacrylate embedded (that’s plastic to you and me) tissue. The colour images are the elemental maps of manganese (red), calcium (yellow) and potassium (Blue). The yellow square is the element that was mapped. Numbers are technical keys.