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[04.08.25, monday]

having such busy weeks, doing extra hours everyday at work, the weekly classes are the only thing keeping me consistent. i'm trying to stay positive, only 3 weeks and no more work, but man they're going by slowly :')

been working on some new grammar, as well as totally stumble my way through the speaking exercises when my brain is completely dead from the day. definitely my fault for scheduling lessons this late, but it's the only free time I have. but hey, just 3 more weeks 🥲

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anyways here's the canal by my girlfriend's apt, a meal i cooked last night, my betta fish, and um. The wizard

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05.04.19

happy april and happy friday!

today, i was quite productive: i worked out, wrote an essay of 1700 words, sent two emails which i’ve been procrastinating, and made a birthday card for my dad! i still want to finish an essay of 400 words before tonight. and that wraps up my to-do list for today!

sending positive thoughts, a warm mug of your favorite beverage (spring herbal tea for me), and your favorite snack bar (nakd blueberry muffin)! ☕️

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funny thing i just found out:

planck length: the point where measuring distances between things is impossible due to forming literal black holes if you try to put anything that close together regardless of mass

planck time: a length of time which anything smaller is basically meaningless and nothing we know can describe anything that happens in a timespan shorter than it

planck temperature: the highest possible temperature before the wavelength of light is shorter than a planck length and the temperature itself forms a black hole

planck mass: "about the mass of a flea's egg". startlingly normal.

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Just collected my new glasses and omg was no one gonna tell me the world was actually this crisp????

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saturday | july 26 50/100 dop steps: 10.5k

halfway through the 100 dop challenge! i'm not sure i'll keep up these daily posts for the next 50 days – it's been fun, but i think i'm running out of things to say.

spent my saturday morning at the coffeeshop as usual – a bit of reading, but devoted most of my time to grad school application essays. it's slow going, so i'm glad there's still many months to go before the deadline.

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25.07.25

⏱️: 1h 50m

notes: had some new sources come in for me at the library so hopefully this is enough to get my paper done. once it’s done, i’m free for the summer!

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25 July 2025

Spent the day with my friends today :) We went to the botanical garden and we walked so much that even though we didn't get to see the whole thing, I was so tired when we left. There was this lovely little field with the softest grass ever and I was really glad I decided to put on black shorts this morning so I could get down and enjoy it haha. Then we went to this vegan ramen place (I'd never been there before!) where I got these spinach dim sums (is there even a plural form?) and they were absolutely amazing. The yellow dim sum is from my friend who got pumpkin ones - we swapped a dim sum each so we could try what the other one got :))) Hers were just as good.

Bad news yesterday? What bad news :3 I'm full of coffee, dumplings, and happiness 🌟

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25/07/28

It is so spectacularly hot out and usually I would hermit in with the air conditioning. But today the only other people here are francophone so we will take the full hour for lunch and it will be outside in the garden, goddamnit.

In other news, Statscan is my favourite and I have so much fun data to dig into this afternoon!

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| 30 july 2025 |

I haven't been able to concentrate well the past two weeks (my adhd has not been nice to me) so I haven't been as productive but that's okay. I'm trying to reorganize my research notes in the way that I want them to be but it always seems like just doing that can take days by itself,,, over the weekend I visited a garden that was in a giant dome which was cool

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30/07/25

Exam season is tough, ngl. I know it’s over soon. This just keeps me going. I know you can do it too!

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31|07|2025

My hopes of finishing the anthro suff I have been working on tomorrow aren't that high. Today I managed to write notes for the second and third chapter, as well as for the first subchapter of the fourth, and I also did a bit of reading of this fourth chapter. But I am left with fifty pages to read and more than fifty pages to turn into notes. At the moment I am very tired mentally so I can't continue for the day, but tomorrow I will definitely start a bit sooner both in the morning as well as in the afternoon in the hopes of finishing everything. I have to say I didn't get as much done as I wanted this morning, cause my mom brought my brother's dog to our place mid morning so I was interrupted for a bit. The good thing is that I got some dog cuddles which are way more important than this exam. Now I will put on an audiobook and continue my crochet project, which is definitely the best way to relax my body and brain.

🎧: A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (audiobook)

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Another textbook rec from me is Spin Dynamics: Basics of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance by Malcolm H. Levitt. It's great bc not only does it explain NMR in depth, it also gives a very concise overview of magnetism in general and the quantum mechanics necessary to understand NMR and I'm having a field day today reading it 🥹💖 Although keep in mind that it's a little advanced and I wouldn't recommend it to a high schooler for example (unless you like a good challenge I guess?)

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Nuclear magnetic resonance – you are also a sample

Part 1: The Physics

AKA how does NMR even work? Hell if I know. It’s insanely complicated, I can tell you that, and the fact that someone figured it out at all keeps blowing my mind. But the fact that someone figured out how to use it in the “real world”? That’s just beyond me. Propaganda I am not falling for: that the “M” in “MRI” stands for “magnetic” and not “magical”.

Anyway. Let me try to make it simple for you.

Nuclear. The small yet mighty proton.

There’s a whole bunch of atomic nuclei that can be useful to the NMR experiment, but the most common one is the hydrogen nucleus, so let’s focus on it here as well. The good news is the hydrogen nucleus is remarkably simple: it’s just a single proton.

Among the proton’s properties two are of interest to us: electric charge and spin. That’s because together they make the proton act a bit like a teeny tiny bar magnet, which in turn means that it will interact with magnetic fields. From a physics POV spin is a vector, so you can imagine it as an arrow whose tip is pointing to the “north pole” of the proton. Spin doesn’t mean the proton is actually spinning on its axis and you don’t want to get me started on that.[1]

Magnetic. Shit gets serious.

Let’s say you take a proton like some quantum god and put it in a magnetic field. It’s homogenous because we want physicists to be happy. What happens is our proton wants to align itself with the field, but because it acts as if it was spinning, it experiences a force that keeps tilting it. As a result, it begins to precess about the field lines – its arrow draws a cone in space. (The Earth is doing the same thing, so you better enjoy the North Star while it’s still in the north!)

The really cool thing is the frequency of this precession depends on the strength of the magnetic field and the type of nucleus that’s precessing. In the magnetic fields most commonly created in NMR experiments the frequency at which protons precess falls within the range of radio frequencies. Isn’t it incredible?

Resonance. Kicking protons for fun and science.

It turns out that if you fire a radio pulse at the right angle and of the same frequency that protons precess at, you can knock them down a little. That’s resonance. You may think it’s mean to bully them like that, but they always pick themselves up afterwards – and send a precious signal in the process.

In fact, this step in particular is- Oof. Whew. Let’s say I went for some major simplifications. I’d love to talk about the whole thing in more detail, but then this post would go on forever and everyone would cry. There’ll be links below for the curious. There’s no need to torture yourselves, though! We can just move on.

Part 2: The Chemistry

If you’ve read my proton post,[2] then you may already know where I’m going with this. NMR is important in chemistry, because we’ve learnt how to utilize the fact that protons precess in external magnetic fields. How so?

I said in the previous part that the frequency of precession depends on the nucleus and on the strength of the magnetic field. Of course, we have this external magnetic field created by our apparatus, but that’s not the whole story. Let’s look at some molecule; ethanol is the classic example. You probably know what it looks like- Is the structure of ethanol common knowledge? Years of studying chemistry have irreparably skewed my perception. Don’t go to uni kids. And don’t drink ethanol. Anyway, here’s ethanol:

We have all these hydrogen atoms here, whose nuclei give us the signal we’re interested in, but their electronic surroundings are a bit different. Every atom in this molecule contains electrons – electrically charged particles – in motion around their respective nuclei. And remember: a charge in motion creates a magnetic field. Every electron in this molecule creates its own magnetic field which adds up to the machine’s magnetic field. As a result, the strength of the total magnetic field varies from point to point within the molecule and depends on the immediate environment.

But because protons precess in proportion to the magnetic field they “feel”, groups of protons in this molecule will precess at different frequencies and therefore send different signals after being “knocked down”. These signals give us information on the molecular structure of whatever sample we pop into the NMR spectrometer. NMR is thus an organic chemist’s best friend, along with chloroform or whatever these guys like to sniff when students aren’t around, and its importance in organic chemistry can’t be overstated.

Part 3: The Biology

“But, Lena,” you might say, “you hate ochem. Why are you so excited about NMR?” Well, first of all, NMR spectroscopy is still spectroscopy, and spectroscopy is cool as fuck. The physics behind its various types is mindblowing, no matter what kind of sample gets zapped with electromagnetic radiation in the end.

But before I move on to my second point, it’s time to explain the title of this post at last: yes, you are also a sample. See, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) are actually the same thing (the latter rightly used to be called NMRI – nuclear magnetic resonance imaging – but doctors had to drop the nuclear part because Americans got scared).

Look: the doctor puts you in the tube of the MRI scanner. The scanner creates the magnetic field that almost makes your protons align (because in fact, they begin to precess). Then, a radio frequency pulse is emitted which kicks down your poor protons. They bravely get back up and emit signals that a computer turns into something we can analyze (an image of your internal organs in the case of MRI). It’s exactly the same thing that happens when a chemist puts their sample in an NMR spectrometer (only in the end they get a spectrum instead of an image). MRI works the same way as NMR – it’s just that during an MRI procedure you are the sample.

Which brings me directly to the aforementioned second argument for why I’m into NMR.

If you’ve ever had an MRI scan, you most likely got an injection right before the procedure. You might remember that injection was a contrast agent. Contrast agents are substances, chemical compounds, that alter the time it takes your protons to pick themselves up after the radio pulse knocks them over. We use them to get better images of the examined organs.

There are different types of contrast agents, but a very common group is lanthanide coordination compounds, primarily gadolinium compounds. This is shamelessly self-indulgent, but lanthanide coordination chemistry is what I do… My thesis supervisor’s team – and, by extension, I as well – study this kind of compounds. Not their biological function (that’s for biologists to play with) but their chemical properties, but nevertheless NMR/MRI is always in the back of my mind. And who knows, maybe one day one of the molecules we study and describe will turn out to be an amazing new contrast agent :) (she said, like a delusional moron).

[1] Here's my post on the electron where you can see what happens when I do get started on this topic.

[2] And here's the proton post!

Links and further reading

You're free to hmu and ask me anything that might've come up while you were reading this post, but also here are some great (and detailed) resources:

physicshigh.com: amazing videos, probably the easiest, clearest explanation I've ever seen that actually covers all the details

How MRI Works - Part 1 - NMR Basics: great animations, skips some details but includes a tad more math

if you're very ambitious: Spin Dynamics: Basics of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance by Malcolm H. Levitt. Proceed at your own risk though. Shit's crazy

for Polish speakers: Podstawy spektroskopii molekularnej Z. Kęckiego. Miejscami bywa wymagający ale jest bez porównania prostszy od Levitta

This is kind of random but have you ever heard the sounds an MRI makes while it's running? There are those coils that produce the magnetic field and they're to blame. The sounds can be so distressing to some patients that sometimes they start to panic and the procedure has to be stopped. I've had two MRI scans in my life and found those bizarre sounds oddly fascinating. Google them if you're interested and don't get anxiety over strange noises :)

Also: tagging my beloved sibling in STEM @studyblr-perhaps . Misa, you asked me to tag you when I write another post of this kind and I remembered :)

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TBR Diaries - Day 7

More reading and also had some time to go to the International Book Fair here in Lima and got some new books (not gonna add them to the current tbr since those are usually ones I buy for when Im a mood reader or just for the next batch of physical tbr)

Pages read: 42

TBR: 1/18

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I am hurt in places I didn't know could hurt

what you learn from hobbies:

consistent practice opens up whole worlds of skill that you couldn't imagine

making mistakes in the process of learning is not only natural, it is also essential

activities that you enjoy can give you more energy back than you spent on them

wow everything is so expensive