The longest day of the year, with the longest hours of light—the midsummer solstice is always a special time. For us as part of the ENIGMA project, this turned into a very special midsummer day and night, as we were given one final imaging slot at the SYRMEP beamline before its shutdown. We used the last ‘light’ to shine on an archaeological sample to unravel stories of the past. During this beamtime, with the help of my colleague Marko Prasek, we did detailed imaging of a late Pleistocene human molar to explore aspects of the individual’s life history. It was also a methodological novelty: for the first time, we were able to use the new high-resolution 0.33 µm setup for paleohistology. The imaging at this resolution gave excellent results.
So.. that’s it.. —no more (raw) Synchrotron data collection at Elettra us for a while. That said, we now have a mountain of data to process, so we won’t be bored anytime soon! Big thanks to Marko for the imaging support, and to my colleagues Prof. Alessia Nava, Luca Bondioli, and Federico Luglio, with whom I’ll be working on the sample analysis, and together with our colleague Elena longo, we’re also going to explore some Machine Learning approaches for denoising to make the images even more crisp. Stay tuned!
