Cue the obligatory background music from Sgt Peppers... Welcome my dear readers (both of you) to what is going to be a new regular column. It is my honour to write something amounting to 'A day in the life of a postdoc'. It was a day spent at the Australian Synchrotron and my first visit as a user. It was planned that I would be using protein single-crystal X-ray crystallography beam-line 2 (or 'PX2') as one of their first 'small-molecule' users. I flew into Tullamarine from another large capital city to discover that at 1 pm it was 9°C. As I'm originally from Melbourne, the visit was also a chance to catch up with family and friends and the latter s alarmingly increasing sets of children. I arrived at the synchrotron in the afternoon as the sun was casting long shadows and, as it transpired, not long after the Premier of Victoria had been there for a photo-op. He was announcing some more cash for the medical-imaging beamline, which I understand has some formidable technical challenges before it. Apparently, medical X-ray resolution will be increased by orders of magnitude.
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