Recent news

Hi everyone.

For once I don't have to start off with an apology about forgetting to update for too long!

Last week, Sarah came to visit on her way from Holland to Czech Republic. We went for a paddle in a flatmate's canoe on the river. This is my flatmate Maraike, she came too.

We also went to my first ever football match. It was in the Olympia Stadium, with seats for 100,000 people it was a real experience. Luckily the people we went with in the end weren't supporting the home team. This was good because the guests won (3:2, all the goals in the second half). They really get into the supporting their team thing here, at least half the people were fully decked out in team colours with flags and stuff. I was totally wearing the wrong colours, though...

This weekend has been a bit more relaxed, I went to check out a big (>50,000 people) anti-nuclear protest in Berlin. 300 tractors had driven across the country for it. Lots of music and people with "Atomkraft? Nein danke!" [Nuclear power? No thanks!] stickers. I found it strange how everybody seemed to be pushing a slightly different agenda. Some people were saying it's not about the safety, it's about what you do with the waste. But then so many people had Cheronobyl (etc) signs. One guy had a very cryptic sign which said [Nuclear symbol] + CO2 = [Skull]. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't nuclear have pretty low CO2 emissions? Anyway, I'm not going to really give my opinion on the issues, because to be honest, I don't know. Both sides of the debate have so much propaganda out there I don't know who to believe.

Anyway I've gotta go, hope this finds you all well.

Adam

I'm alive!

I know it's almost been 2 months since my last update, but I am still alive! Bad friend/son/grandson/etc!

So I can't quite remember everything that's happened in those 2 months, I'll try to catch you up on the highlights. As a warm up, here are a couple of pictures from Berlin I took when Nicky and her Mum/Dave were visiting.

Cool sand sculpture competition. Really amazing.

Gedächtniskirche (memorial church - it's hard to see but it's only half a church because the other half was bombed) and its memorial thing. I think I've already posted a picture like this, but no complaining!

The next story is my knee. Most of you have already heard, probably, but just to get everyone up to speed: ~6 weeks ago I dislocated my knee cap playing volleyball at work. I've done this 2x before, so this makes number 3. After number 3, they recommend surgery to adjust the alignment of the kneecap to prevent the same thing happening a 4th time. So 3 weeks ago I had the op, spent a week in hospital, 1 week at home, and have been back at work for a week now. It's healing well, and should be running around in a month or so. Here's an MRI scan (from the side of the knee) that I think looks pretty cool.

And last weekend, after my compulsory 1 week at home, I got to go on our annual lab retreat where we all go away for the weekend and do team building stuff. Was good fun, if a little frustrating sometimes not being able to join in with all the sports. Here's the whole team (this is actually only half our lab, it was split into 2 weekends).

Hope you're all well, let me know what's up in your corner of the woods.

Adam

Hurricane Festival

Hi all,

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from the NZ embassy here in Berlin saying that I should be very careful about swine flu - I should keep my personal hygiene up, and avoid large gatherings of people. So me and 3 other people from work (Kate the Aussie, Dietrich and Christin the Germans) decided Hurricane festival sounded like the perfect place to go. Three days of camping with 60,000 other people doesn't count, does it?

The 60+ bands playing over the weekend included Kraftwerk, Faith No More, The Wombats, Moby, Lily Allen, Pixies, Kings of Leon, Franz Ferdinand. They were all very cool, Kraftwerk was definitely a highlight - and a bit bizarre, these 60 year old men standing perfectly still on stage in fluorescent lycra playing their keyboards. The Wombats were very good too, the crowd was really dancing pretty much for the whole set. Kings of Leon were good, but I dunno, they didn't have great stage presence I thought, they weren't much better than a CD. Pixies, on the other hand, were really fantastic.

The weather for the whole weekend was a pretty strange - it would be really sunny and hot 1 minute, then you would see these dark clouds roll in and it would rain and be really cold for half an hour, and repeat. But it was all good, better than being constantly too hot or too cold, I suppose!

Pixies playing in the sun.

Dark clouds rolling in...

... and then it rains! The people dressed in bear suits were in the middle of a soccer match and looked pretty soggy 10 minutes later.

Thanks for reading, let me know what's up where ever you all are now. I've finally invested 14 euros and got skype working (adam.idoine), add me if you've got skype.

Adam

Olympia Stadion, Teufelsberg and Karneval der Kulturen

Every time I catch a train to Berlin, at one stop they say "XXX stop, please exit here for Olympia Stadion". I always think it sounds interesting, but always have somewhere else to be. Last weekend I took the chance to check out what this stadium is all about. As is becoming a theme, I forgot my camera, but it would've been pretty hard to capture the place in photos. It was built for the 1936 olympics, and was intended to rival the colosseum. I haven't seen the colosseum, but I imagine this stadium doesn't fall far short of its goal. It was also really interesting to see the approach that was taken to the whole olympic thing - it seems like it was much more war-like, with statues of warriors and that kind of stuff everywhere. Heaps of links to Roman gladiator kind of culture. Quite a contrast to the "fair play" kind of ideas associated with the olympics these days.

From the stadium, I set out to find a hill called Teufelsberg. Teufelsberg is the biggest hill in Berlin (115m). On top there is a old US spy station used in the cold war to monitor, um..., something. Now it's all abandoned with broken windows and holes in the fence surrounding it. There's also a pretty exciting looking dirt bike track going down the mountain, and in winter there's a small skiing area. You have to be careful of wild pigs apparently, too. But none of that is what makes this hill interesting. What I found fascinating was that there's a nazi military school underneath this mountain. And on top of the school is 12 million cubic meters of rubble from the second WW. That's right, the highest hill in Berlin is completely man-made. There are trees and dirt and stuff now, but there are still bricks and concrete sticking up out of the dirt everywhere. Apparently, most cities in Germany have hills like this, Berlin has several.

This weekend, I went to the Karneval der Kulturen (Carnival of Cultures) in Berlin. This is a big (~2 million visitors) parade and party all weekend celebrating the diversity of different cultures in Berlin. Berlin is definitely very diverse - the parade yesterday went for 9 hours! Here are some (quite poor) pictures from there:

Can't remember what culture these people were, maybe from Peru I think.

Actually representing a culture was kind of optional, most floats were just people having fun playing music, beating drums, dancing, or whatever.

Yes, and here you have the culture of assorted animals.

Just to make you feel a little better about the horrible weather I hear you've been having in NZ lately,  just after the parade, it started pissing down like a tropical monsoon. We managed to find a spot under a bridge, and wait it out, then it was all on again.

Huddled under the bridge.

And I happened to be standing in this torrent of water. At least only my feet got wet.

That's all the news I've got at the moment, hope you are all well, looking forward to hearing from you.

An update

Oh dear, I see that it's been three weeks since my last post. I've gotta get better at this!

Firstly, due to popular demand, I'll tell you something about what I do at work. OK, so I'm working (doing my PhD studies, with a "scholarship" thing) at the Max Planck (pronounced plunk) Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology. This is one of nearly 80 MPIs in the world (mostly Germany). In ours there are ~400 people, including me. The annual budget of these places all together is ~3.2 billion NZ$, and they are the place to do research (not just science) in Germany.

I'm working on a project involving an algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This is a model organism for plants. Like people use mice to research human diseases, people also use this algae to research plant stuff, because an algae is easier to work with.

DNA is the information carried in an organism. It is the "blue print" that tells the cell if it's a dog, oak tree or worm. The information in DNA is written in a 4 letter "alphabet". In the DNA, there are sequences which describe a protein. Proteins are the things that actually do stuff in a cell, the DNA just carries the information. Proteins are not made from DNA, they are made from an intermediate thing, called RNA, which is pretty much a disposable copy of DNA. Now we get to my project, I am measuring how much RNA for every protein is produced under different conditions (like, dark, light, really light, starving, hot, cold, etc). Phew that was actually really hard to write, I hope some of it makes sense.

The annual Baumbluetenfest (blossum festival) has been on here for the last 2 weeks. You wouldn't guess it from the name, but it's the second biggest Volksfest in Germany, second only to the infamous Oktoberfest! The difference is, Oktoberfest is all about beer, Baumbluetenfest is all about wine, specifically fruit wine. It can get very roudy at night, but the 2 times I was there, the hoards of cops kept everything pretty civilised.

Here are some pictures I took in Berlin today.

Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedaechtniskirche - half was destroyed in the war, this half has been preserved as a memorial.

This angry looking baby was on a statue of Alexander van Humboldt, I think.

Berliner Dom, lamppost and Fernsehturm.

Berliner Dom again.

And that's all I've got for ya, thanks for reading, I hope everything is good back home.

Adam