Science Break and a Little Update

I know that this blog is mostly about crafting, but as the school year starts back up I will probably be commenting more on school etc. This is one of those times :) If you want to skip the science type stuff, just scroll down to the next paragraph. Without getting in to much details, my research is on land snails and slugs, specifically how carnivores and herbivores smell the world differently (at least that is what I think I will find). I am examining the olfaction equipment on a whole mess of snails and slugs in a bunch of different ways. Right now I am mainly using transmission electron microscopy (using electrons instead of light in a microscope to see really tiny things). Anyway, I have found a structure that I have no idea what it is. I expected to see one thing, but now I see this. The task at hand now is to search (more) in the literature out there and see if anything I can find looks remotely like what I have found. These unknown structures are about 1 to 2 micrometers in diameter and, in my sections so far, are nearly always perfectly circular with alternating light and dark rings. All of the structures inside these things are aligned radially to the center of the circles. They are not artifacts, but part of the labial palp structure (the area around the mouth) in groups or lines. There isnt a lot of work in the ultrastructure of snail skin/chemoreception so I dont know if I will find anything out there...or even in different organisms. My best guess is that it is some kind of mechanoreceptor, but I need to find something to back that up. I really wish I would have found some definite chemoreceptors though...oh well!
As for crafts, I banged out a neat bracelet last night. It is a bangle type bracelet on a cha-cha steel "frame", and I think it looks nice. Not my favorite colors, but very neat combo, if I may say so myself. I think I am going to call it something along the lines of "Iced Honeysuckle" or "Ice and Honeydew". It took a while to make, used a lot of beads and my hands cramped up pretty bad while I was making it. I will try to get pictures of it tonight, but my wonderful kitty finally broke my light box, so I need to fix it up before I can take decent enough pictures of it.