THEY THINK IT’S ALL OVER FOR THE VIRUS – BUT IT ISN’T YET!

By 3rd August 2021Cairn News, Uncategorised

Our presentations continue to be virtual, but the virus is still very real, although at least the farm is still carrying on as normal!  And Cairn is doing just fine….

Our thoughts for this little news update were triggered by the arrival of some very impressive hardware at the farm this morning, ready to harvest our main field, which has been growing barley this year.  So far so normal, but this is being written on the second day of the supposed return to normality for the animal side of life here, following the supposed vanquishing of that puny little virus.

OH NO IT ISN’T!  It’s still a long way from normal here right now.  One of us has just come back from self-isolating, two more currently are, and one of whom now has symptoms.  And two of us still have “long Covid”, although they both seem to be making progress.  That’s not even counting the several others who have had the virus and recovered!  Meanwhile the latest wave of infection in these crazy islands continues to gather strength (further words fail us!).  So how does our little business seem to be in such good shape right now?

We are tempted to reply that we are not quite sure, but in reality a lot of hard work has been going on behind the scenes, and the difficulties in travelling to see others – and especially the lack of scientific meetings – has given us correspondingly more time to just “get on with stuff” here.  The fruits of those labours will become more widely apparent as time goes on, although here is one particular example.  But meanwhile we have been making a number of virtual presentations in recent months, so we thought it might be useful to gather the links to them all together in this little report.

Our Chairman Martin’s “Cyto Innovation Stories” presentation  has already been the subject of another recent news item, but his craving for publicity means that we have no alternative but to link to it again here,  However, that was actually the second time that he had hit the virtual airwaves, as he had already given his “Light Sources – In Theory and in Practice” presentation to the Paris Neuro virtual workshop a couple of weeks before, and where our CEO Jez had given a presentation on cameras for Live Cell Imaging.

Martin preparing for his talk about large apertures

And more recently we’ve had the MMC microscopy virtual meeting .  This included a short live presentation from Jez, plus a longer prerecorded slot from him and Roz, to show the integration of our new openFrame modular microscopy system  and another prerecorded slot from Martyn Reynolds demonstrating the openFrame working with the Crest V3 system.  Chairman Martin also made a short presentation  on our new “32mm” products , namely the correspondingly larger versions of our Optospin filter wheel, our rectangular diaphragm, and our filter cube, although here too they had already featured in a recent news item. The next scheduled presentations, from both Martin and Jez, are now only a few weeks away, at the “Plymouth” Cell Physiology Workshop, which again can only be virtual this year. Hopefully some sort of reality for all these meetings will return in 2022!

So in summary, in the real as well as the virtual world, a lot is going on here right now. Summer is a time when things for us can sometimes be a little quieter, but that certainly isn’t the case this year, so you can expect to see all sorts of further updates from us in the coming weeks and months!