Hopp til innhold

Kategori: Uncategorized

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til On this day

Today I've:
- worked on a "script" where I gather a lot of the information about what we use to analyse my data
- met up with Fabio
- tried Fabio's program for sorting data (looks like it working very well *excited*)
- made a list of what I need to do with analysis number 1 and analysis number 2
- made a HUGE pot of chili (no, it's not really related to my PhD...)
- been excited about the discovery of gravitational waves (all though I haven't really had any time to read anything about it, since I've been busy with preparing for Alexandra's birthday party)
I have not:
- made a list about the "nuclear physics year" - all anniversaries and all that (for example, today is Leó Szilard's birthday; the guy who first conceived the nuclear chain reaction, and patented the idea of a nuclear reactor - with Enrico Fermi)
- finished the "script"
- replied all those e-mails that are waiting and waiting
- gone through my receipts and stuff from yesterday's trip to Trondheim (very bad Sunniva - it should really be done the minute you get home, or it ends up just being postponed forever)
- written that blogpost about what I think about young girls in Norway today, whose biggest dream is to meat a "guy with some money"...
- finished that section in my paper that I thought I'd finish some time before christmas
- gone through the comments I got from Jon (my supervisor in Paris) on my paper
I'm going to (but not tonight :P):
- make a "nuclear physics year" list
- answer a lot of e-mails...(and maybe also become better at answering them more or less right away)
- make 5 different figures for paper number 2 
- finish the "script"
- try Fabio's program on the analysis I think I'm more or less finished with - as a double check of my results 😀
- look at all the comments I got from Jon - and probably do something about them
- try to get Sunniva (my supervisor here in Oslo) to read parts of my paper - after I've worked on Jon's comments, and finished that section that I thought would be done last year
- make more figures (from another analysis), and collect them together with similar figures from Fabio's analysis in a document and send it off to Jon and ask him what he thinks
- start working HARD on my thesis - especially the chapter that I call "the bridge" where I'm supposed to explain how the experiments we do in Oslo are connected to full scale nuclear fuel simulations
- make 14 days goals; from now and until summer (?)
- read what Gry called "the most boring paper ever" (but it's probably - or hopefully - exactly what we need) 😛

And the phdlife just goes on and on and on... Now I'm going to get me a bowl of chili - and then it's e-mail time <3

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til A new little something
So today I went to Trondheim; I started the day by getting up at just a little bit past four (Anders <3 gave me coffee, even though he was NT getting up at this time), then flying to Trondheim, talking to about 300 girls science and technology and all that. 
I have started this “tradition” to always get a little present for myself when I’ve finished a talk - a little sort of pat on the back “you did good” kind of thing - from me to me 🙂 Normally it’s something I get when I’m at the airport, and quite often it’s some kind of jewellery... This time I bought a “silver” ring with “diamonds”, from one of my favourite cheap brands - Snö of Sweden - just perfect! 
I like that by doing it this way, my things end up having a little story - they're memories from when I've gone to different places, talking about different things, to different people. I think that's nice <3
I love sparkles, and sometimes a girl needs some sparkles 😉
Hope you all had a great Wednesday!

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til AGR
Happy birthday, Alexandra Grønstad Rose! Today you're turning 6, and I just can't believe how time flies. It really feels strange that you're already the oldest one in kindergarden, and in a couple of months you're starting school... I love you to Proxima Centauri and back <3

----------------------------------------------------------------

But then there's something funny. So AGR are Alexandra's initials, but it just hit me that AGR is also a type of nuclear reactor: the Adcanced Gas cooled Reactor. So, me, Sunniva Rose, nuclear physicist, gave my daughter a name which is an acronym for the type of nuclear reactors they have in Britain.
O.
M.
G.
!

- my beautiful girl -

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Fuel on a Friday – 10 Facts
I can’t believe it’s Friday already. 
This week has just gone by so fast. It started with Alexandra still being sick on Monday, and then on Tuesday I went to Stavanger, and spent around 50 hours there - giving two talks, and talking to so many interesting people. (I think I’ll have to write about some of my thoughts about the Norwegian oil industry - just not right now.) Yesterday I got home, and the evening was spent with Anders; we shared a bottle of wine, he worked on his code and I scanned all my receipts from the trip, and sorted them into the right folders (not fun doing, but it feels GREAT when you’re done, especially when you realise you’ve spent roughly 9000NOK on travelling, that you of course want, and will get, back ;)). Then we made the working your ass off thai chili, and around that time I got a migraine…:/ 
However, today is Friday, and luckily I woke up this morning feeling great again - hopefully there'll be many months before I get another migraine attack!
So Friday is luckily NOT equal to migraine, but it IS equal to FACTS! It's finally time for ten Friday Facts about Fuel - nuclear fuel, of course:
  1. the fuel in a nuclear power plant is placed inside the reactor core. Mostly all the fuel soaked in water because water is great for cooling the fuel, which is the same as removing the heat - which is exactly what we want; we want water to be heated so that we can produce steam and thus generate electricity with a turbine <3
  2. we often call it "burning" the fuel, but it's no real burning going on - the fuel is the place where the fission chain reaction happens (the energy from nuclear power comes from fission of nuclei inside the fuel 🙂 ), so when I talk about (nuclear) fuel I mean material where there’s a chain reaction going on.
  3. nuclear fuel is made out of slightly radioactive elements; it can either be uranium, plutonium, or thorium
  4. a small part of the fuel has to be fissile; meaning it has to have a really big chance of splitting if it's hit by a neutron. The fissile material can be either uranium-233, uranium-235, or plutonium-239
  5. thorium is NOT fissile, so thorium must be mixed with something that is. This means that in thorium based fuels it is actually not the nuclei of the thorium atoms itself that fissions - thorium is first transformed into uranium-233, and then this uranium nucleus is the one that fissions and releases energy 😀
  6. the fissile part of the fuel is typically just 5% of the total of the fuel. The rest of the fuel (so, the majority of the fuel, really) is either thorium-232 or uranium-238.
  7. the "flame" in nuclear fuel is the neutron. There is of course no real flame, and there is also no burning (see point number 2.), but I think that calling the neutron "the flame" is a nice analogy, since the neutron is what makes the nucleus fission and then release all the energy <3
  8. the most common nuclear fuel is called UOX, which is for uranium oxide, meaning that it’s not pure metallic uranium (uranium as an element is a metal), but uranium and oxygen ( the oxides are used rather than the metals themselves because the oxide melting point is much higher than that of the metal and because it cannot actually burn, since it's already in the oxidized state.)
  9. used fuel can (and should, in my opinion!) be recycled, since it has a lot of material that is really useful (actually: typically only half a percent of all the fuel fissions during the years it's in the reactor, so if you throw away all that's left after a couple of years, you throw away A LOT of resources). If you recycle these materials - which can be uranium-235 that just hasn't fissioned yet, or plutonium-239 that has been made during the time the fuel was in the reactor - you have to mix them with fresh fissile material, and when you do this the fuel is called MOX. MOX is short for Mixed Oxides 😀
  10. if you get really got at recycling, and you have the kind of reactors that are optimized for this type of MOX fuel (see point number 9.), you can actually end up getting 200 times more energy from the fuel than you normally get today!
- my fuel when I got to Stavanger airport yesterday: Chablis and Cæsar salad - as I started going through all the receipts (a lot!) rom just two days travelling -

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Looking back – part 2

Finally - here's part 2 of the looking back at 2015 blogpost. This has taken too long, I know, but I guess my excuse is I'm trying to fix my PhD thingy (that's my excuse for everything this year :D).

July

Anders went with the guys to Asia. I missed him sooo much it's close to embarrassing 😛 These were pictures he sent me as he was looking through his phone - you see, I'm pretty sure he missed me to...<3

I went to Spain and Toledo, to David and Lucia's wedding...

 ...looking like this 🙂

And I worked on the same f*****g paper I'm trying to finish now...

August

I was honoured to give the main speech for all the new students at the University of Stavanger. OMG! It felt great.

I was a guest at the radio show "Salongen".

Anders and I (and Ann-Cecilie) went to Berkeley. We had a fantastic trip, and I don't think I have ever seen Anders as happy as he was when he rented this car...
(I still haven't got to do all the stuff I was supposed to do just before, and during the week we spent in Berkeley, and that does of course not feel especially good...why does everything take so much time?)

September

We went to Konserhuset to celebrate research and the Norwegian Research Council, and I'm quite sure we got much less food and wine than we've got there before... Was still a fun night, though 🙂

I wrote about what goes on inside our CACTUS. CACTUS is the name of the detector system you see here - it has that name because it looks like a cactus 😀

And I gave a talk at the book launch of Kathrine Aspaas' "Rosa er den nye pønken" - I feel very honoured to be mentioned in the book <3

October

Maybe the busiest month of last fall?

Since Anders was gone all of July, I promised Alexandra we would go someplace warm and nice, where they had lots of ice cream, a pool, and sea. Alexandra, Anders and I ended up going to Fuerteventura and Las Playitas - we were soooo satisfied with that place, and really want to go back to that exact hotel 🙂
I got glasses.
Anders and I were guests at "Abels Tårn".

I gave a talk at "Radiologisk Høstmøte", and annoyed some people by writing about How to dress as a female scientist.
I gave my third TEDx talk at TEDxBergen: "Could nuclear weapons save the planet?", and was so happy Anders could join me in Bergen <3 

November

Focus, focus, focus! I started the #teamsunnivarose tag, and focused hard on working hard 🙂

December

I worked on my analysis and my paper on uranium, prepared for Christmas, and wrote about the anniversary of the Chicago Pile no 1 - the very first nuclear reactor.
Part 1 of the looking back at 2015 is HERE.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm still at home, waiting for a delivery from IKEA that will arrive some time between now and one o'clock. Boring, but luckily I can do quite a bit of working from home. There will be focus on my paper (oh yes, it takes forever - that's life in academia for you), and later today there will of course be Friday Facts here on the blog 😉

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Stavanger next
Hi everyone...
Alexandra's still sick. Yesterday I was so sure that today would be the last day with no kindergarden, but then she has actually been a little bit worse today, so it looks like tomorrow will also be spent at home. It's never a good time when kids get sick, and especially when it happens when you have deadlines and are going away...which is the case for me now :/ Tomorrow I'm going to Stavanger and I'm staying there until Thursday. I'll be giving two talks; one at THIS conference, on Wednesday, and one at a school - about nuclear physics and research and stuff, on Thursday. So I'll be heading for Stavanger tomorrow morning, and fortunately I have the best Anders <3 who's staying to take care of Alexandra.
// memories from another trip to Stavanger - unfortunately Toril's not there this time :/ //
Now it's time to finish booking my flights and my hotel room, and to look over my talks. Then Anders I will start season two of West Wing. We just started watching it, and oh my, the season finally of season one is the biggest cliffhanger I have ever seen...!
Kisses!

3

Publisert 3 kommentarer til 10 facts about neutrons
Hi sweeties <3 Alexandra's been sick since Wednesday, poor girl, so I've spent most of the time taking care of her and comfort her. Therefore, again (!), this week's Friday Facts blogpost comes on a Sunday. Hope you understand...
This time I feel the need of giving you ten facts about my favourite particle - the neutron:

  1. neutrons are radioactive if they are "free" (alone, and not part of the nucleus of an atom)
  2. neutrons have no charge - they are neutral, and can therefore "sneak" into another nucleus, and for example make it fission 😀
  3. the recipe for a neutron is: 2 down quarks and 1 up quark (opposite to the proton that is made up of 2 ups and 1 down)
  4. the half-life of a (free) neutron is about 10.2 minutes, and then it turns into a proton, and electron, and an anti neutrino. Meaning it beta decays 😀
  5. the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932
  6. neutrons have a mass, which is almost equal to the proton, but the neutron is a little bit heavier. Actually the mass of the neutron is 1.674927471×10−27 kg (or 0.00000000000000000000000000164927471 kg), and that's the same as 2.5 electron masses (electrons weigh really little) more than a proton
  7. neutrons can make stuff radioactive - which is called neutron activation; so a normal, stable gold nucleus can for example be activated by a neutron and go from gold-197 (stable) into gold-198 (un stable) and then decay into mercury-198, which is stable
  8. you can't make a nucleus entirely out of neutrons - you have to have at least one proton too, and then you have deuteron, or heavy hydrogen
  9. number 8 is actually just sort of true; you can go to an extreme, and calculate how many neutrons you need to make a "nucleus" entirely out of neutrons (since neutrons have no charge, they don't repel each other, like protons do, but they don't stick together either - a little bit like two pieces of paper; if you put them together they will just fall apart), and since they do have a mass they will attract each other because of gravity between them. This means that if you have enough neutrons, you will make something that won't just fall apart; and that number is . Not exactly nuclear size...:P (Read more about that HERE)
  10. when neutrons hit you, they will give you a dose that is dependant on their energy. The highest dose from a neutron comes when it has an energy of 1 million electron volts. If the neutron has lower or higher energy, the dose from it will be lower. 

For some reason I imagine neutrons to be white 😛 How do you imagine the neutron to look?

5

Publisert 5 kommentarer til I fear…
...a world without antibiotics. 
Just before the weekend, Anders started feeling some pain around one of his wisdom teeth. It wasn't too bad to begin with, but it gradually became more painful, and on Friday he was popping painkillers continuously. On Saturday morning, it was still bearable with the painkillers, but he realised he  had gotten an infection around this stupid wisdom tooth that didn't seem to go away by itself, and that he had to make an appointment with the dentist - so he did, but it still didn't feel that urgent, and he got an appointment on Monday morning. By Saturday night it was starting to be really bad, and during the night he called an emergency dentist, that would take him in on Sunday morning.
The dentist found that the infection was starting to go down Anders' throat, and that the he needed antibiotics immediately, and the tooth had to be removed. 
After this episode, which hasn't been any dramatic (except, of course, for Anders' pain, and I feel very bad for him and all that), I have been thinking about what could have happened if this was 150 years ago; where maybe the infection would have continued to grow down his throat, and a stupid wisdom tooth would have ended up killing a 28 year old, completely healthy man...
Thank goodness for modern medicine and dentists and antibiotics!
But, oh, how I fear a world where we don't have antibiotics anymore; or, more precisely, a world where we don't have any effective antibiotics left. A world where all bacteria are immune to all kinds of antibiotics. What if that's where we're heading, and that we don't manage to change the  direction we're going? What if one of the biggest achievements in the history of medicine will be lost?
I'm not an expert on the issue, but one thing I do know we can do as patients is to follow the doctor's orders on how to take our antibiotics: especially when it comes to the issue of NEVER stopping the treatment just because you feel fine, and also we need to respect those times when the doctor isn't giving us antibiotics, because it isn't 100% necessary 🙂
PS: I think Anders would also have said thank goodness for real painkillers, if I'd asked him before posting this 😉

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til First talk of 2016
Good morning fantastic people!
I just found my seat at the train towards Trondheim. I'm not going all the way, but getting off at Hamar - where I'm going to visit Hamar Katedralskole, which happen to be Anders' old high school 🙂 There I'll be giving my first talk this year, to a bunch of 16/17 year olds, about "nuclear physics and research and stuff - the story about a pink nerd". As you might guess, it will be a personal talk about ups and downs from when I switched from ballet in high school until now, when I'm about to start wrapping up my PhD work... Hopefully some of them will be inspired, and maybe some of them will change their view on science and the scientist.

It's been exactly one year since I visited Hamar Katedralskole and gave the same kind of talk I'm giving today - so I guess I can take it as a compliment that they've asked me to come again this year ❤️❤️❤️

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Submission successful!
Monday again! I've started this week by sending away an abstract for a conference i Belgium in the middle of September (if all goes according to my plan, this conference will be just the week after I have submitted my PhD thesis, and if I actually get to give a talk at there I will probably hate myself for submitting this abstract today 😛 ). The title of what I want to present ended up as:
Prompt fission gamma ray emission from the (d,p)-induced fission of 233U 

----------------------------------------------------------------


After I had successfully submitted my abstract, the rest of the day was spent on working on my data analysis program, and looking at different plots, and try to understand details of the experiments we do, and stuff.
Then I got home, prepared for a talk I'll be giving in Hamar tomorrow, and then I made dinner for Anders and me - an easy, Indian thing this time. I'm working on another Working your ass off dinner, and when I have perfected the recipe I will share it with you guys - if you want me to, of course 😉
Now it's time to go to bed, since I'm getting up super early tomorrow... Kiss and hugs, and sleep tight <3