Lab Notes

Science can be everywhere. Scientific questions, and, hopefully, scientific answers. Regularly at the university’s cantine, the salad bar offers nice options, but – in my opinion – ruins them with raisins. When I shared this taste of mine with my colleagues, only a few people answered that they like them. We therefore questioned the abundance of raisins. It started as a joke, but as practical scientists, we now want evidence.

Scientists definitely are multi-talented people. While we’re required to practice critical thinking on both our own and colleagues works, we also have to master many other skills. Apart from the acquisition of data, we need to properly store a numerical version of them, eventually to compute statistics on them. We need knowledge of graphical processing software to represent our results nicely, and write valuable scientific papers out of them. We sometime teach to students, that requires synthesis, pedagogic, and oral capabilities. We have to deal with paper work, which sadly tends to increase. We need to write applications for positions and/or for grants (and, ironically, so that we can do our job – are you going to the office and think “let’s first find the money to do my job”? – ). The list is endless, and there is no doubt I forgot important examples. Icing on the cake, we’re in an arena of competition, struggling for visibility and high impact factor (I should write about this guy, one day).

Few days ago, I found a strange pollen grain that I couldn’t identify. All candidates I had in mind did not perfectly match what I could see at the microscope. Is it a strange Fabaceae, a strange Gentianaceae, a strange Helianthemum? No idea. Even with the rescue of my colleagues Burgi and Daniela, we couldn’t come to a convincing decision.

In the last years, it has been acknowledged that an important and significant proportion of valuable data produced by scientific institutions remains unpublished, or, worse, unmanaged. Such data aren’t visible at all, neither to the public audience—which often happened to have paid for them—, nor to the scientific community that could benefit from them.

I’m back at the University of Innsbruck to go on with the palynological analyses from the Lake Mondsee, as part of the Beyond Lake Villages project. I’m currently learning how to operate an Itrax XRF Core Scanner.

Since a few decades, palynologists not only consider pollen grains and bryophytes and pteridophytes spores in palynological samples, but also any other kind of micro-fossil preserved. Such rests – called non-pollen palynomorphs – come from various origin. Most of them are fungal remains or algae, but there are also plant and animal remains, dinoflagellates, etc.

Recently, I gave a talk about the ecological significance about some fungal spores found in peat bogs of the Central Alps, in Switzerland. I suggested these spores of coprophilous and pyrophilous fungal taxa can be used for assessing past land-use. However, things are not so simple, as we discussed during the following question time 🙂