The past months

It's been song long since I've written here, that I hardly know how to do this anymore. I want to write more about things that inspire me, and make me feel excited about the world, but the first months of this year I couldn't even bring myself to write anything because I thought I was boring, which got me in a spiral of selfloathing, insecurity and even moring boringness.
In february I started my internship at the department of Zoology of my university. I studied the development of the heart in the chick embryo, so most of my days were spent around eggs, trying to inject hearts of not even a millimeter wide, or taking pictures with a scanning electron microscope. I'm actually quite proud of what I accomplished there. Even though my research doesn't mean much for the scientific community or anything, I got to research this amazing and complicated process and take these beautiful pictures.

It was wonderful to see the heart develop from a simple tube, to a four-chambered heart, which is very much like the human heart. If you're interested in understanding the pictures: the first one is made with a scanning electron microscope and shows the heart when it has just looped. You can already see the primitive atrium (A) and primitive ventricle (V) with the atrioventricular canal (AV) and the outflow trackt (OFT).
The second one is a dissected heart of an older embryo, and shows the trabeculated parts of the heart. The trabeculae are the spongy looking parts of the ventricle wall, which make the heart much more firm.
I took the last picture through a light microscope. You can see the four chambers (left and right ventricle and atrium), the outflow trackt and the interventricular septum. And this whole process takes to more than three days!

I also met someone at the zoology department who I've grown to love very much very quickly. His name is Bart, and you'll probably hear more about him from time to time. He makes me very happy.

I do realize that this is not a very coherent story (if it even qualifies as a story) but I hope I'll get used to writing again over time. Please bear with me. This is just a new beginning.