Saturday, April 4, 2009

Electron Microscopy

The electron microscope at the University of Graz.

Here I am with Dr. Devetak and Dr. Pabst, with one of her photographs on the wall behind us (it is a pollen grain).

This week I traveled to the University of Graz with ant lion larvae from Yemen to be prepared for electron microscopy. I traveled with two of my colleagues from the University of Maribor. It is a quick trip to Austria from Maribor (about 15 km). We whizzed through the border and on to Graz, the second largest city in Austria. The trip was approximately an hour drive through a flat agricultural plain. We parked on a side street and made our way to a very modern building that houses much of the cell and molecular biology departments. We went to the 7th floor to meet Dr. Marianne Pabst and her technicians. The building was immaculately clean. Everything was white and the labs were very impressive with beautiful equipment. Marianne is an expert with electron microscopy and has worked on the famous frozen “ice man” of the Austrian Alps and is currently working on mummies from Peru. Her first love though is to take pictures of insects. She also enlarges her electron microscope pictures and paints them. Some are incredibly beautiful and surreal. We also visited DuĊĦan’s friend, Karl, in the Zoology Department. Zoology is housed in an interesting old building (probably 300 years old), with high ceilings and marble columns. Karl studies the “peering” behavior of the praying mantis (basically the behavior of looking around). It was fun to learn about his studies and we made plans to go collecting for mole crickets in May.

1 comment:

  1. Wow, nice information about Maribor. Thanks

    Try it:
    http://www.maribor-on.net

    That is portal for city of Maribor from Slovenia.
    You can find news, events, ads and many more for city of Maribor.

    ReplyDelete