Wormathon

Today has been pretty eventful. We started the day with nematode extractions as the Prime Minister of New Zealand toured the lab. He and his wife checked out our samples under the scope and were incredibly friendly. They had a whole posse surrounding them so the lab was pretty crowded. We have a postdoc here who is from New Zealand so he got his picture taken and was able to answer a few questions, and now has a permanent smile glued to his face. Pretty exciting! They also ate the last of the frosty boy ice cream, but I won't get into that.

A few soil samples and nematodes later, we were interviewed by a journalist following scientists on the WISSARD project. The WISSARD project is this amazing attempt to collect water samples from a glacial lake that is buried under the glacier.

WISSARD

We have a poster in the hallway outside our office that shows our total counts (kindly created by Kevin, Eric, and Ruth) that has sparked a competitive wormathon among the wormherders (thats us). This poster has also been getting a lot of publicity by others in the building. It has given me reason to talk to the hot boy down the hall, but it also caught the eye of that reporter looking for some extra stories in his spare time. I'm not sure if he will actually publish an article on us, but it's fun answering questions and talking about what we are doing!

A few nights ago we had the opportunity to attend a talk given by a guy who was in our class for snow school. He is a surgeon, mountaineer, and former astronaut. Currently, he is in charge of the polar medical program. As an astronaut he went to space 5 times and has been on 7 space walks. Holy cow! I knew nothing of this while we were out camping and now I'm over analyzing any stupid comments I made... His life is truly inspiring and his talk was amazing. This place has so many colorful people with great stories.

Dr. Scott Parazynski

In other news, I've counted 5 tardigrades today! These are the first I've seen since I've been here. It has been an excellent day!