Today the group had one guest lecturer and a few lab visits. The guest lecturer talked about art conservation, all that he has done, and the different techniques used. I never knew that art conservation was such a big thing. The conservationists do all sorts of tests on pieces of art to unlock it secrets and hopefully restore any losses. The tests can find out the chemical make-up of paints and what lies under the outside layer of any piece. It thought it was interesting when he talked about how the church had altered the Sistine Chapel in an effort to eliminate all the nudity. Clothes and random blankets were added to many a figure. After all the alteration had been found artists went back and removed anything unoriginal and also cleaned the whole piece. Years of candle smoke and general pollution can really sully a painting.
After that lecture we toured some labs around campus. The first one my group went to was the SEM. We had already seen one of these but this one was special because it had a touch screen interface and was very easy to use. It was designed for educational purposes. We looked at someone’s hair and flake of skin. Both looked quite different at 10,000x. We also went to a solar cell lab. The scientists made a plastic solar panel that would be painted onto surfaces, which is very useful but it only harnesses 5% of the sun’s energy as opposed to the 10% absorbed by conventional solar panels. The scientists also tried to tackle the problem of the night. Bioluminescence is the potential key to this problem. So in the lab we were able to see algae that lit up when agitated, which was pretty cool. When I was in Catalina I went night-swimming in the ocean and saw this for the first time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_l9y24tKzWEQ/SXgJO6yCb7I/AAAAAAAADSs/ZYrE6WgUDjs/s400/Sistine_Chapel_ceiling.jpg
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19044/
http://www.chemat.com/html/solgel.html
http://www.getty.edu/conservation/science/about/
