Old-fashioned model

... and now for something completely different!

The real reason I was in Grenoble was not to wonder at views of the Alps, eat spectacular food, or even (not) faire l'amour in the park. Instead, I was working (some of the time) on a scientific project.

This old-fashioned stick-and-ball model will provide the template for drawing a two-dimensional diagram in our proposed joint paper. The balls represent oxygen atoms and the sticks are hydrogen bonds between them: together, the balls and (shared) sticks say "water". Thus, what you see is a representation of a cubic ice structure. We have studied the addition of water to hydrogen ions (H+) to form clusters containing many water molecules (up to hundreds). The diagram to be derived from this photograph will aim to show how certain of the ion structures possess unusual stability.

I bet no-one expected to read this kind of stuff on Blipfoto (and, I fear, probably didn't want to, either).