HDR Photography
Johnson Hall of Science is an unusually green building—particularly for one filled with hoods and hazardous chemicals. It also happens to have a truly surreal geometry that messes with your head a bit, if you let it. The ceilings have been sloped to better reflect daylight, reducing the need for electric lighting. The result is this Alice-in-Wonderland-esque lab space.
Hyperbright hallways in the Energy Biosciences Building come straight from the set of a sci-fi movie. Between labs and storage space are cold room facilities like the one in the foreground of this photo, with its bank of controls on the wall outside. The research accomplished here lives up to the imposing appearance: the future of using biology to harness the Sun’s energy will be born here.
The labs of the Energy Biosciences Building (which, incidentally, looks quite pretty from the outside, as well) are brand new. Just weeks after the lab opened, the desks are already cluttered with equipment. I particularly liked the orange glass dividers running down the desks.
I am a spectroscopist, and this is my laser. It’s enormous, it’s fiendishly complicated, and it takes an enormous amount of time to keep it cooperative. Nonetheless, I can learn about the basic motions of molecules with it.
The farther along I get, the more I realize that the system basically amounts to Legos for big kids.
My lab is packed with control boxes and oscilloscopes and all manner of signal processing equipment; strung between them all, like the web of a spider on caffeine, is a truly epic array of cables and wires connecting and powering the whole rig. On an average day, when nothing is (seriously) broken, I tend to forget about the mess of electronics, but it’s worth the attention (every now and then) to stop and really appreciate the ordered chaos that facilitates ultrafast spectroscopy.
Decaseconds 
