BB's+Milestone+Map+-+Give+an+overview+of+the+PIXE+and+XRF+project

Back to BB's Milestone Map Outline =Give an Overview of the PIXE/XRF Investigation on the Elemental Makeup of the Fish in the Local Area =    Food is not always as clean and healthy as one would imagine. I found this out through a film I watched called Food Inc. This was the film that inspired the current project I am working on.
 * Contaminants in Food:

Description of Food Inc: This film is a Documentary by Robert Kenner. In it he exposes the corrupt, highly processed American food industry.

Summary of Food Inc: Most people would be shocked with what the food industry actually is. People are fed the image of the farmer and made to believe that the traditional idea of a farmer is where their food, whether it be meat, fruits, or vegetables, comes from. This is not so; the food we see comes in our supermarkets comes from factory. The food industry uses a much more "modern" methods with growing their foods and putting it on shelves in those stores. The methods tend to be an assembly line idea. These modern methods are not at all better for us. These methods were designed by the major corporations that own the food industry. The food industry is no longer controlled by the many farmers who would grow the food but the industry is controlled by just a few mega food corporations. Take the meat industry for example. There are companies like Tyson Foods Inc. who process a huge majority of all meat in American. The only competition to these companies are a few other major food corporations. In the American capitalist society, profit is encouraged. That profit is all these corporations want to point where they do not care what they are selling the American people.  ** This film, food inc, caused me to think. I started to think about what food i am buying and who I am buying my food from. The film primarily discussed the meat and produce industry. I thought about what else I eat that I am not sure what is in it. Fish and the fishing industry came to mind for me; I eat quite a lot of fish. I asked myself what is in fish. That seemed like an easy question. Fish is obviously made of fish. But the I thought maybe not. I would have said the same thing about the beef I eat. I would have said that the beef was made beef, but that is not so. The film food inc had showed me that. I eventually came to a point where I needed a project to do research on. This seemed like the perfect opportunity find out what I could on this important issue. What is in the fish that we eat that we are unaware of?   **Where PIXE and XRF come into play:**   After doing some research, I determined the PIXE and the XRF labs would be perfect ways to answer my question of what exactly is in the fish we eat. The reason I determined that PIXE and XRF would work is because they are ways to analyze the elemental makeup of objects. I could use the PIXE/XRF lab to see the elemental makeup of the fish so as to see what the fish has in it. I would know what the basic biological makeup of a fish is and I would see if there was anything extra in the fish we eat.   **The Ashing Process:**   This ashing process came about as a necessary step in simplifying the PIXE/XRF experiment. The PIXE/XRF setup is typically used to analyze inanimate objects because of precise ability to detect metals. After doing some considerable research, as far as I could tell, PIXE/XRF has not been used on organic specimens. I did not have previous experiments to model mine after, so I did not know how I should prepare my samples for the PIXE/XRF experiments. I determined that the best way to prepare the fish would be to ash the fish samples. <span style="color: red; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;"> <span style="color: red; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 169%;"> **After the experiments:** <span style="color: red; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;"> <span style="color: green; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;"> The PIXE/XRF experiments, after being run for a determined amount of time, produce a matrix of numbers. The first column is the channel number and the second column is the numbers of counts in that channel of the same row. I would then have to analyze this data myself to determine what elements were present in the samples. <span style="color: red; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">
 * <span style="color: red; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;"> The start of an idea: **