The last two days of the year were our most intense sampling of the project so far, and I worked through both nights, mostly alone, in the wet lab, filtering and filtering and … filtering. I’ve now been doing this sort of thing (lab work, research, filtering) for about half my life, and it goes hand in hand with music, because once the ideas are in place and the plans are laid, most of the actual doing of research is made up of long hours of repetitive tasks, usually more or less alone, and often indoors next to machines that produce annoying noises. So, headphones and music. Since graduate school,  David Bowie has gotten me through many a long night of labwork, so it seemed fitting to spend the end of 2016 having my own private Bowie all-night lab dance-a-thon retrospective. Between rounds of lab work, I would nip up to the ice tower and look out at the monochromatic, quiet, magical part of the world that we’re in, exhale,  and enjoy the quiet. So much of the reason I do research is because it never ceases to trigger my sense of wonder, in much the same way that music and wide open spaces do. The combination of the three was a delicious way to start the new year. Posted by: Sinead