Rose Royce FTW
Chandler (a tech in the lab across the hall) and i have battles. We have eppendorf tube dry ice bomb battles, rubber band battles, and pop-ball gun battles. He's a couple up on me with the dry ice bombs, so i decided to get a little creative to get him back.

This year was apparently "Send Evan a Musical Birthday Card Year" which i thought was great, and consequently i hadn't thrown out any of the musical cards (from August). I cut the music mechanism (chip, battery, speaker, switch) out of a card and came in early today. Crawled under Chandler's desk and taped it to the underside of his desk such that when he closed his drawer, it would squeeze down the metal switch to complete the circuit and play "Car Wash."

I figured it would take him about 5-10min to figure it out. It took him more like 2 hours, during which he walked around our side of the floor complaining and looking really confused- apparently it kept cutting off at the right times so he couldn't quite locate the source of the music. It helped that i'd told a couple of his labmates and they played along. Eventually, he took a screwdriver to his desk and had it partway dismantled before finding the thing. Worked out even better than i could have hoped.

Current Mood: accomplished

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oooh baby!
Top 10 Best Darwinian Pickup Lines!

Current Mood: amused

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A geeky christmas in the office
As a sort of background, I've been working at this company for about 2 years, just doing the chemist's job. Everything revolves around numbers, acids, balances, you get the picture. Well lately, my creative side of the brain (I always forget which side it is) seems to be going in to hyper-drive. So I've been trying to get more crafty at home so that I don't go too crazy at work.

At Target I picked up a crappy $2.50 bendable tree and some balls to put on it. I brought that into work and then realized the balls weren't enough and I didn't want to spend another $2.50 on another set, plus they are really cheap and crappy looking. The other day I made a tree topper shaped in a star with paper and a highlighter. And yesterday the creativity really sparked.

How to make a Bulb pipette poinsettia:

First cut off a good portion of the pipette part, you want just a little for the "stem".
Second take a utility knife or some other sharp blade and cut an X evenly on the very edge of the bulb (so right on the dome end as I like to call it).
Third take scissors and slice down as far you want to go (I went pretty much to the end of the bulb).
Fourth heat it up in an oven but not too hot or for too long. I used an oven that's at about 110 degrees C and I stood there for a minute before taking them out.
Fifth carefully grab the "flower" and spread out the "petals" on a cold surface so to get the spread-out shape to take hold. A good trick is to flip the rounded ends on the "petals" the other way around, it'll look more like a flower petal and it will make the shape stick.
Sixth color the "petals" whatever color you want, or depending on your supplies, whatever color you can find. I had red lying around hence calling it a poinsettia.
Finally place one of the "flowers" inside another one to make an eight-petalled flower. The trick here is to place a cut up the stem of one of the "flowers" and just squeeze it inside the stem of the other one. Then color the inside near the stem to make it more realistic.
And you're done.

Unfortunately I am not allowed to have cameras inside my building so I can not really show how it looked for myself.

If you really want to see, I'll take one home and snap a pic.

Has anyone else created such things at work? Does anyone have more Christmas-like ideas? I'm trying to fill up this tree and I can only make so many of the "poinsettias".

Current Mood: creative

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Boston Group
All,

If you're interested, some of us are getting together in Boston to tinker around. We're coordinating at the Wonderment blog.

Cross posted to mad_science, punkrawkscience.

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My name is lauren simone. As an artist, I often demonstrate my interest and fascination with science in my art. Of particular interest to me is dna, the act of mitosis, anatomy, and environmental concerns. If you're intersted in sciencey-geek art, see the image below.

Click here for more info

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Hey, WAKE UP!!
Found this interesting article on Boingboing.net.

Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat by V.S. Ramachandran

Researchers at UCLA found that cells in the human anterior cingulate, which normally fire when you poke the patient with a needle ("pain neurons"), will also fire when the patient watches another patient being poked. The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others...

He then goes on to characterize Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" as a key indicator of "the fifth revolution" — the "neuroscience revolution" — the first four being Copernican, Darwinian, Freudian, and the discovery of DNA and the genetic code.". "that even our loftiest thoughts and aspirations are mere byproducts of neural activity. We are nothing but a pack of neurons."

You have to skip through the whole "dangerous" question parts to get to this article but I found it really fascinating. The author, along with the help of a researcher's answer to the "dangerous" question, explores how the next revolution will influence our way of thinking about ourselves.

He kind of gets "matrix"-y and philosophical, but really an interesting read.

So which would you pick? The vat or just yourself?

Current Mood: contemplative

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sometime in late november, i passed by the organic chem lab. they were extracting some sort of pigment from spinach leaves (my lab had done it earlier in the week)

anyways, most of the class was at the fumehoods adding drying agents to the mixture. they were all in their labcoats and goggles, holding up flasks filled with what looked like neon green slime. it was awesome. it looked like there was a room filled with mad scientists :P

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Acoustics Classroom
So I just started in the Acoustics grad program at Penn State, and I need to tell you about our classroom. I would post pictures, but it is in a secure building, so there are no cameras permitted.

It is a pretty normal classroom in terms of size and such. White boards in the front, seats about 25. Acoustic dampers along the walls, and bass traps and diffuser pannels along the celing. Why would you need so much in a normal classroom? How about a tri amped 3 foot tall Paradigm studio monitor, hand calibrated for its position in the room? Add to that a pair of NHT 3.3 monitors, a few big subs for standing mode demonstrations and a 5.1 setup for (lets be honest here) movie night.

Honestly, the best sounding room outside a recording studio I have ever heard. How can you get a more punk rawk classroom than that?

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New and I need help w/ FinchTV
Does anyone have any Chromatogram file in .scf .abi
If you could get one of a chimera that'd be awesome! Thnax

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april fool's day...
anybody got any good ideas for pranks to pull in the lab for april fool's day? nothing that is dangerous, will cost the lab a lot of money, or will get me fired, please ;)

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Sometimes it is so cool to be a HistoTech. Last week we got two very interesting specimens in the lab. We got a pair of pliers that some 12 year old kid had swallowed and had to have a laryngoscopy to remove. We also got a sewing pin that had somehow made it's way into an 8 years old boy's rectum. You just never know what you will see...

Current Mood: shocked

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the internet-at-large should make fun of me
I looked at the whiteboard, read what it said, and wondered what sort of enzyme "ERase" was. As in "DO NOT ERASE". Oh Gods.

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dinosaurs are good for learning
I just found this.. I'm working on a B.S. in Nutrition & Dietetics and I think we would learn a lot better if our lectures were in this format.

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Evan, do you measure up? ...
( Have they found a 'big penis' gene yet?Collapse )

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I LOVE the smell of Xylene and Formalin in the morning!! It's good to be back to work after my bed rest and maternity leave for my twins!!

Current Mood: hyper

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don't you love how all your food tastes *different* after you've spent all day wrist-deep in a feline dissection trying to clean all the mesentary off the thoraxic veins/arteries?

mmm that smell. given up trying to remove it from my clothing; I figure I'll fumigate my room once I'm done with anat./phys.

Current Mood: aldehyde

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Profile article
(x-posted)

Hi all,

I'm a double major in biology and journalism, and I'm taking my last journalism class right now. I've been asked to write a profile article, and as usual, I want to write about something science-oriented. I'm interested in doing a profile on someone who works in a high security/high health risk lab or is doing work that carries a lot of political weight (stem cells, etc.)

I was wondering if any of you would be interested in being my subject.

Here's the formal description:

The final product will be at least 1,000 words. It will provide a detailed description of the subject of
the interview, and should also include interviews with associates of the subject.
The article should give the reader a window into the subject's world, whether through
their life experiences or what they are currently experiencing.

What I would be asking is things along of the lines of what got you interested in science, the challenges of working in the lab you work in, etc. I would also have to speak to close friends, lab directors, coworkers, anyone who knows you well, and would probably do a short follow-up interview with you after I talk to them.

Please leave a message here or email me at muskeduk@usc.edu if you're interested.

Thanks in advance.

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If making mini dry ice bombs in 1.5mL microfuge tubes and chucking them across the hall into the lab office is wrong, i don't want to be right.

Current Mood: amused

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i heart medical research
Man oh man. Today i isolated RNA from a sample of pleural effusion. It was huuuuge cell pellet (like filled the whole conical part of a 50mL conical tube, and then some), with some supernatant on top that had been chillin' at -80C for who knows how long. I mostly thawed it out and went digging around with a 10mL glass pipet, trying to get a nice clump of cells to work with.

Did i mention that the sample had been stored in Tri-Reagent? If you've ever smelled Tri, you'll know why this is important. Also, it was bloody. It hadn't completely thawed, so it was the consistency of maybe soft italian ice, or one of those old-school freeze pops on a wooden stick.

In sum, it was pretty fucking vile. Which meant that i had to talk about it constantly and show it to everyone. One of the post-docs in the lab (a chemical engineer by education) started to dry heave and ran out of the room. It was totally sweet.

Current Mood: accomplished

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Voted biggest asshole, and role model of the year.
yesterday i had indian food for lunch and thai for supper. today for lunch i had meatloaf from the hospital cafeteria. i hope nobody else had to use the cold room today, because damn, it was hot-boxed.

Current Mood: accomplished

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