4862. So there was a flood at work...
...the watery kind, not the parasitic alien kind.
Thankfully.
...the watery kind, not the parasitic alien kind.
Thankfully.
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4864 That sounds.......exciting? I am glad it doesn't flood here (unless your house is set below the ground). Why was it flooded?
4868
Unless it's flooded because the roof is a colander...
Maybe this is a signature, maybe it is not. Who knows?
4869. It was a burst pipe in the ceiling, but it was under some pressure, so we're talking about gallons of water. Thank goodness for wet-vacs, that's all I can say.
4874. Yep, work still got done; it was already the afternoon when the pipe went, so no work got done by me personally the rest of that day though.
Yesterday I got the first part of basic training on using our new SEM - that was interesting!
Yesterday I got the first part of basic training on using our new SEM - that was interesting!
4879.
Sorry chap, an SEM is a Scanning Electron Microscope - it uses an electron beam rather than a beam of light to image a sample, so you can get much higher magnification (the effective wavelength of an electron is much shorter); it also has advantages that heavier elements appear brighter under SEM so when looking at thin sections or polished blocks of rocks, different minerals are easier to separate, and you can spot things like tiny flecks of gold much easier. Finally, there are X-Rays emitted from the sample where the electron beam hits too, so you can derive chemical information (what elements are in the thing you're looking at) by analysing the wavelengths of X-Ray given off.
4880. I wonder if that last feature (the X-rays) were an unintended side-effect of the original invention.
4881.
So likewise, once they had x-ray detectors sensitive enough to detect the x-rays coming off the surface of a sample being examined by an SEM, they could investigate the chemistry.
Sort of; the generation of x-rays from electrons hitting a target was what lead to the original discovery of x-rays - the early versions of Crookes tube (basic electron gun) had x-rays generated by the electrons hitting the anode or the tube wall. Modern x-ray tubes, such as those found in XRF or XRD instruments use the same principle - a tungsten filament heated with a current passing through, has electrons boil off its surface - these are accelerated towards the anode (something like copper or rhodium) and that generates X-Rays.
So likewise, once they had x-ray detectors sensitive enough to detect the x-rays coming off the surface of a sample being examined by an SEM, they could investigate the chemistry.