Monday, July 14, 2008

Zhoukoudian

A couple of us decided to go on an adventure and visit the Peking Man exhibit on Sunday. Peking Man is one example of Homo erectus, the remains were first discovered in the mountains of Zhoukoudian in the 1920s. The trip there took three hours and consisted of three buses and a lot of confusion. We were able to walk around outside and see a few of the past excavation sites and also look at a lot of fossils inside the museum. There were a lot of Peking Man remains, and also remains from animals that existed during the same time period.
The weather on Saturday was beautiful, so six of us took a trip to the Hou Hai District. We ended up renting a six person paddle boat, and took turns paddling around the Hou Hai Lake. We had a really great time even though we had a few boating collisions and had to navigate around the men swimming around the lake.
My research has been progressing over the last couple weeks. My original goal was to bind copper nanoparticles to copper nanotubes. My first couple attempts were pretty unsuccessful, but over the last few weeks the results have been slowly improving. Last week the TEM images showed many small copper nanoparticles bound to carbon nanotubes with hardly any copper aggregation, which was pretty exciting. For the rest of my time in Beijing I'm going to work on optimizing the conditions for monodisperse copper nanoparticle deposition.