August 2026
Well, here we are into August and things have moved on. Of course, being Canberra, we are all feeling the cold. So I was all too glad to make another trip to Cairns, this time to head into the dry interior of Queensland with a group from Murcia, in Spain. The idea was to collect xylem water samples and soils from the inland edge of the Atherton Tablelands to the area of Winton. The transect is about 1000 km long and we drove both ways, so about 2000 km in all. We used to JCU pickups and took turns driving. The team was a lot of fun and I enjoyed most of it. Perhaps the exception was the first night at Undara when it was flipping cold and I couldn’t find a loo in the dark. This mostly resulted from arriving in the dark and being mystified by the microscopic map provided. Having said that, in the light of day and upon our return trip, I thought that the site was well-managed and the toilet and shower facilities excellent š I was somewhat mystified by the whole railway motif but that probably my fault for pursuing my usual philosophy and arriving everywhere totally ignorant. The weather was very kind to us, with chilly mornings and a light wind most of the time. So my shorts returned home completely unused. The trip did raise a question that has struck me before: why would anybody become a grey nomad? My experience of Australian camping and caravanning parks is that they leave a LOT to be desired. Frankly, I’d rather fester in Kaleen than in most of those place. The bush was very interesting to visit and study in detail, but driving by it … There WERE some interesting spots, such as craters, Porcupine Gorge and Undara lava tubes, but between those spots is mostly a big blur. Sometimes it seems like a dream: I’ve been driving forever – how come it still looks the same? I rather liked the towns. Winton had a charm and the people were very friendly. Real Australia, unlike, for example, Canberra or Sydney suburbs. Please don’t slash my tyres.
I started and ended the trip in Cairns. I still haven’t made it to the aquarium. And now that the mangroves in front of town have gone, so have the giant mud-skippers which I enjoyed so much before. I guess that life can go on.
Life at the lab continues with its ups and downs. Nicole is back from maternity leave and is reactivated as an employee. To offset this, one of the mass specs has taken to blowing filaments. But we are nearly at the end of our big chick pea project so perhaps we can take a breath and give the equipment the service that it requires.
May 2026
Winter is coming and I find myself more dedicated to updating this site. I need a collar that gives me electric shocks every week or so until I’ve added something to the blog.
It’s been a fairly busy period. We (my wife and I) took a holiday on South Island, New Zealand for a couple of weeks and then I was barely back before Xingyu and I headed out to JCU in Cairns. Lucas Cernusak and the eponymous Graham Farquhar have a grant to examine mesophyll conductance in tropical angiosperms and gymnosperms. Lucas and Alex at JCU had grown suitable plants, so Xingyu was despatched to perform gas exchange experiments on them. I was sent along to help her get established and set up a supply of air with 2% O2.
This was done and the plants duly abused until they had yielded their gas exchange secrets. I stayed there a week (my work here is done) and Xingyu a further 3 weeks. I do enjoy the verdancy of Cairns after the near-death dryness of Canberra. Some machine problems had appeared back here at ANU whilst I was away but they were fairly quickly dealt with and productivity resumed.
I don’t remember what this purple-flowered weed is. Probably a pernicious import. I used to grow it in my little garden in Liberia, about 60 years ago. My parents referred to it unfairly as my weed patch, but it survived when their fussy garden flowers succombed to drought. Hmmm. ChatGPT tells me that it is blue porterweed from central America, so not native to West Africa or Queensland.
However returning to ANU to fix equipment does bring me to a painful point. We are no longer supplied with a budget by ANU that would contribute toward our maintaining our laboratory. The money therefore comes almost entirely from selling analyses. Things like broken turbo pumps become a major obstacle to our financial existence. An existential threat to employ that much over-used modern word. We are consequently bumping up our prices from the beginning of June. The new prices can be found from the home page.
I thought that I might maintain so that people will know what I’m doing and where I’m doing it!
10th September 2020
I’m working on a program to simulation vapour diffusion inside the mesophyll space of a leaf. It’s now lunchtime and I have a cubic leaf with cubic mesophyll. Note the cute stomata through the impermeable barrier to the air at the right! The image mirrors a 1 million unit array that underlies it.
17th September 2020
Well, work continues. The diffusion program has progressed to the point where it diffuses. Now I need to add in temperature dependence on diffusion and vapour pressure etc. I have also been working on improvements to the laser program running in Michigan. It has become a high priority to get the new system going for the extraction of water from soil and wood etc, to feed the Picarro. The old Picarro has come back to life! We cleaned the pre-laser filter and put new pumps on. For the moment it is producing good numbers.
Stomata at the right diffuse 99% humidity inside the leaf into 40% outside. In effect the green band is a boundary layer. Several bugs jump out at me! For example the lowest stoma (bottom-right) is blocked by a thin permeability barrier which my diffusion algorithm is jumping over. There are over a million cells to compute on each pass so this simulation took about 15 hours on an older workstation. Despite my code optimisation …