Lots of "tampon"

I found a Western blot protocol on our French postdoc's bench in which the word "tampon" appears a lot. Naturally intrigued, I looked at it for a minute and came to the conclusion that "tampon" in French must mean "buffer".

It looks like I was correct and not only does it mean "buffer" in the chemical sense, but also the computer science sense. (Babelfish is not much help because these are technical jargons. Google Translate, however, gets it right.)

I'm tempted to re-label all the bottles in the lab to make the American guys uncomfortable.

For a while we had Fetal Bovine Serum tubes labeled not only "FBS" but also "SBF" (suero bovino fetal) and "SVF" (sérum fœtal bovin)...the joys of working in a multicultural lab. It's also very cute to hear D (Colombian lab tech) and W (the French guy), who are a couple, talking to each other in broken English.

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You know, I could just go and write 胎牛血清 (tāi níu xuè qīng) on all the tubes...

I looked like this two years ago

A: Check this out, man. This is what I looked like two years ago.
me: No way.
A: I'm not kidding! I was ripped two years ago and now I'm a fat ass.
D: Because of the adenovirus?
A: Er...yeah! (a few days ago A and B found out that Ad-36 is linked to obesity.)
me: I still don't believe that's you. The face is too blurry. (NB: face cropped out in the above pic obviously.)
A: It is! Look, I'm even wearing the same shorts.
me: [types furiously] OK, this was me two years ago.
A: OOOOoooh. My penis hurts.

Blood

I have too much of a taste for gore sometimes. I spent all of this afternoon sampling blood from chickens and while I didn't enjoy the heat, the smell, or the ache in my legs, there's something very satisfying about seeing the red stuff flowing smoothly into the syringe, or in garnet drops down the white feathers...

(Somewhere in between last Tuesday's draw and today's, they crossed the line from being baby chicks to young chickens. I had no idea feathers could replace fluffy down so fast, enabling three-foot leaps out of the hands of exasperated scientists. It gives you an appreciation of the progress between Velociraptor to Archaeopteryx.)

Also, I just finished a novel by Natsuo Kirino about a bunch of Japanese housewives who find themselves cutting up a series of dead bodies, stalked by a sadistic murderer, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

And finally, last week I spent some time on eBay and acquired McFarlane Toys' seriously perverted version of Little Red Riding Hood:
Is there anything about this figurine which is not, as the Americans say, Kick Ass? (In case you can't tell, the blobby thing at the bottom of the Big Bad Wolf's entrails is Grandma.)
She occupies the place of pride on my bookshelf, above where another McFarlane figurine, my old friend the xenomorph hangs. (The Alien quadrilogy is a whole another level of gore...)

Hey, at least I don't pretend to be a vampire and write emo poetry!

Doing shots

"Angela and I are going for flu shots at two. Wanna come?"
"Two seems a little early to quit work, but...sure."
"No, we're going to come back afterwards."
"So we're going to be all wasted in lab?"
[blur momentarily]
"I said FLU SHOTS, not shots."

Psychopathic effect

(title is a horrible pun on "cytopathic effect" - basically the sick cells you see when you infect a tissue culture with virus.)

I'm listening to Jonathan Coulton and it's making me feel a lot better. He achieves that incongruity of "sad songs about happy things and happy songs about sad things" that a friend once attributed to the Barenaked Ladies.

Cause it’s gonna be the future soon
And I won’t always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
It’s gonna be the future soon
I’ve never seen it quite so clear
And when my heart is breaking I can close my eyes and it’s already here

I have a chronic nail-biting/picking problem and it's been a constant source of shame ever since my best friend said "Oh my God, your fingers are disgusting." Today I managed to chew off 7 nails due to a combination of lab meeting in the morning plus being cornered by our most annoying postdoc in the afternoon. He's the type of person who not only talks too much, but can't explain things straight and can't listen to anyone more junior than him.

I think with my hands and my eyes; I stutter when I speak and struggle to retain what other people say (really, I'm trying). I FARKING HATE meetings.

Qiu, one of the other grad students in our lab, was talking to me just before we left work (at 6pm). She's been at our uni for two years longer, but transferred to our lab after I did. She's partly funded from a different prof's project and she got scolded for spending too much time on the other thing...and for not making any progress despite the fact that she had to wait for him to get back from vacation to order some special cells.

In a way it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who feels like they're floundering a bit...as she said, "I just wanted to know how [our advisor] talks to you guys."

Oh hey, another Coulton song, this one about a giant squid (he writes a LOT about unrequited love for a guy with a family...)

So I can’t do that thing anymore
I can’t be the thing I was before
Maybe I am better off alone
Because I crush everything
And I crush everything
And I crush everything

And everything I want I take
And everything I love I break
And every night I lie awake

Primer-y user error

"So did adjusting the magnesium concentration fix your PCR?"
"Well, actually it looks like there's not much difference between the different concentrations."
"So what was your problem?"
"Er...I had the primers at the wrong concentration so I adjusted them for this second PCR and it looks okay now."
"You think it was a problem with the primer concentration?"
"Er...yeah."

Forgetting to add primers results in a primer concentration of 0 μM, which is definitely a problem, so technically I wasn't lying to cover embarrassment =D

Freeze branding II

I used the end of a bottle-brush as a strike and then decided it looked too much like a flower petal to do just one. I'm rather curious as to whether anything will be visible once the erythema goes away, since freeze branding is supposed to make white marks but the inside of my arm is pale to start with.

Angela: "Did you try to kill yourself?

Freeze branding I

I think I've just done something pretty darn silly. I was reading up about freeze branding last night (I really need to get my late-night surfing habit under control). The first time I read about it was in the National Geographic in the context of branding dolphins - obviously putting a third degree burn into an aquatic animal is a poor way of marking it. Apparently it's a pretty straightforward process - cool metal implements in liquid nitrogen or alcohol + dry ice until the coolant stops boiling, press into skin (20s for horses and cows, 8s for dogs). It's also supposedly painless - calves that were branded while nursing just went on sucking on mama cow's teats through the process.

Well, we have a canister of LN₂ in lab, but I certainly don't want to potentially mess up our frozen cultures and viruses...but when we got a shipment of reagents in dry ice just now the temptation was too great. I now have a loop-shaped red mark on my inner left elbow surrounded by a white and red halo. Photo and details later.

Yeah, I'm crazy.

Cranky Friday

I did my first mutagenesis and transformation ever yesterday. Looked at my plates just now...no colonies. *cry* The mutagenesis protocol was from a kit, so we have to order more before I can try again.

(Transformation is the process of introducing foreign DNA into cells. This can occur spontaneously, or you can make cells take up DNA by shocking them with electricity (electroporation) or heat-shock. The plasmid I was supposed to put in yesterday contained, aside from the gene of interest, an ampicillin-resistance gene as a "marker" to separate transformed from non-transformed cells. Then I spread the cells on agar plates containing ampicillin. Since they're all dead, I don't know whether the transformation was unsuccessful or I just killed all of them -_-;; )

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Also, the weather is shockingly cold today. It's the depth of cold that makes breathing - normal breathing, not even panting or hyperventilation - painful, and makes your fingers hurt within seconds of exposure. I'm truly glad for my Seirus balaclava. When you have it over your mouth and nose, it gather condensation from your breath, so the air you inhale is humidified and warmed. It's basically an artificial extracorporeal heat-exchange membrane.

Steve has a really awful sore throat and fever though - he's gone to the doctor twice in two days, and despite this had to teach three physics classes yesterday. I feel almost guilty for having such a good immune system...you'd think kissing would transmit anything infectious but so far it hasn't. Plus, I registered to go on the Grad Christian Fellowship's women's retreat to New Glarus tonight. We're going to stay in a nice lodge with a hot tub, which is a nice place to be with the coldest temperatures of the decade rolling into town, but I still feel guilty for leaving.

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On the bright side, two funny things: For my cell biology course, we had to read a paper about a protein called XBP-1. Did I mention that I hate cell biology's sense of naming conventions or lack thereof? They make acronyms upon acronyms, and they're all unpronounceable, so people will insert random vowels in order to say them. Well, what does XBP-1 stand for?

X box binding protein, that's what. Someone sue Microsoft.

The X box is actually a DNA sequence that's involved in the expression of certain immune-system related (MHC) genes, but now XBP-1 gives me a mental image of a gaming console covered in green slime or something. Or fanboys.

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The other thing is, my boss gave Keith (our lab's "old guy who knows everything") a Spanish-English calendar for Christmas. Today's sentence:

Hace un tiempo horrible.
The weather is horrible.

I couldn't agree more.

Transidiotory

After nearly a month of going to lab every working day, I finally discovered that there's a bus that goes directly past my house AND lab. Groannnnn.

Today is one of those great days where if the -20°C freezer dies, we can just take all the stuff and put it outdoors =P

This is where I work now

FEAR ME, MORTALS!!!

Off topic, this sign was on the kakilima outside and I just thought the word "sod" was funny. Too much Pratchett.

Cute DNA ladder picture

Just arrived in lab at 10:49am and nobody else is here...wow. At least I don't feel like a twit for oversleeping today.

Got a flyer for some company selling ladders for electrophoresis and was about to throw it away, then I noticed this:

ROTFLOL that is cute.

(Quick explanation of DNA electrophoresis for non-biologists: you take a flat slab of agarose - aka purified agar-agar - with a row of holes along one end. You put DNA in the holes. You run an electrical current through the agar. Since DNA has a negative charge (it's deoxyribonucleic ACID mah), it goes toward the positive side. Since small bits can move faster than big bits (except in the anime universe, where giant mecha robots are the fastest known objects), you get a column of bits of DNA in order of size. A "ladder" is basically a mixture of DNA bits of known size that you run alongside your sample so you can tell what size your bits are (that sounded vaguely dirty...).)

Bloody chickens!

I have to write an IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use) protocol for our future animal studies. The mouse part is okay, me having had extensive experience

me: Hey, Angela, have you ever worked with chickens?
Angela: What?
me: Chickens?
Angela: No, I just eat chickens.
[Angela goes back to lab and I can hear her asking Keith about it. I asked him yesterday and he said he wasn't an animal guy. ]
[I saunter into lab]
Keith: Nope, I don't know anything about chickens.
me: I think I'm just going to email the bird flu guy at the vet school.
Keith: You could just Google "bleed chickens".
me: I couldn't find anything on the Internet about it.
[Keith sits down at one of the computers and types "bleed chickens". At first glance at least a few of the top hits are relevant.]
me [paiseh]: I think I was trying to be too fancy. I was searching "phlebotomy".
Keith (who has spent about twenty years in Africa): You have to understand, these are Americans. They don't know big words.

I love white mice. Really. When you look into a cageful of young, healthy, perky mice, their sweet faces are like a bouquet of little flowers.