Kimwipes are Great

For those of you that don't know, Kimwipes are "delicate task wipers" designed for lab use. Sure you can use them to clean your glasses, do too-lazy-to-take-out-paper math, or wipe away tears, but they're made for science. Cleaning up media messes and wiping off cell scrapers and wiping the lens of something that you probably don't want to scratch.

Today was the last day of one of my labbies. I've only been in the lab for a year, so it hasn't been as hard for me as it has been for the others, but I'm definitely going to miss him. Yeah he's going on to bigger and better things, but it really doesn't make it any easier to not see someone that you've seen almost every day for the past 345 days. My grad student has always told me that one of the greatest things about science is the fact that we get to meet all of these smart, charming, and amazingly unique people, and from what I've seen in my short career, that is ABSOLUTELY true. Over the past year, my labmates have served as examples of how I want to live my life; they've become a second family to me. They've been the friends I wish I could be, the parents I one day want to be, and they have the kind of deep and meaningful relationships with those around them that I can only hope for when I'm older. They're kind and smart and cool and funny and I honestly don't think I could have stumbled into a more amazing group of misfits.

Today my grad student told me that one of the worst parts of science is getting to spend time with and bond with all of these smart, charming, and amazingly unique people only to have them leave. We understand that every experience is just a stage in our careers and in our lives, but wow, it's sad. Since this is just a part of science, does that make it okay to use Kimwipes to wipe away the tears? Who cares? We'll do it anyways.

If you have 'Myco', 'Myces', or 'Mycena' in your scientific name, I HATE you.

We have recently ended the war on gels. We've undoubtedly won. I made 6 Western-gels the other day and not a single one leaked. Mission Accomplished (hopefully I won't regret saying this).

With the end of the war on gels, a new enemy has, again, reared its ugly mycelium. Of course, like any scientist that works with tissue culture, I hate having my cultures contaminated, but it stings slightly more when it's fungal for me just because we have history. My first experience with fungal contamination was a few years ago while culturing C. elegans. I'm not going to get into GREAT detail, but this fungus was a...um... jerk. Long story short it entered the nematodes through any available orifice and ate them from the inside out. It also messed up their eggs and prevented them from hatching. Needless to say, any experiments I had going on were no longer going on.

Experience number 2 was in my first real lab work as an intern. We did tumor and stem cell work and it was fun and used actual sterile technique. Did that help? It definitely helped select for a fungus that was an absolute nightmare. You could go through the lab with a black light at one point and you could see it growing on things. By the end of it everything had been autoclaved, the hallways leading to our labs smelled like hospital, and all experiments were forced to cease because of the wide spread contamination. It took a month to deal with it, but it was dealt with.

 < Not mine

Experience number 3 and the last experience was very very recent. Right after the lab outing, actually. I came back and 1 of my cultures was definitely filled with fungus and the others were sketchy. What did I do? I bleached the bitches and ethanoled the incubator. Problem solved.

And yes, I know you're not a fungus Mycobacterium, but come on, one of your species cause TB. And yes, I also plan to post about the lab outing soon... a little at a time.

Pokemon Master!

Do you see this? That is right! It's the badge from my second conference. I feel like I'm Ash Ketchum... Without the intense awesome battles or the really cool creatures to fight for me or the team of loyal and awesome friends and.... whatever. The point is... I went to another conference and this on was way more high profile and the talks were way more interesting than the last, which was expected. It was 3 days of intense talks and I learned more in those 3 days than I probably would've reading 50 papers on the various topics presented on. I don't really do cancer research and not much epigenetics, so this was a great learning experience for me.

 I also met a few people, including a man who worked for Genetech as a researcher and we chatted for a while. It was interesting and it pushed me a little bit more towards the idea of going into industry after Grad School. It's not like I'm in a rush though... I have a lot of time to decide.

 I also have to condense all of those talks into a mini-presentation for my lab mates. Woo hoo. It's weird that spell check still doesn't recognize the word epigenetics. Get with it, spell check.

Oh, since I've been lazy in posting and we're talking about it, I became a member of the AACR. Also, I took a picture of my breakfast for the first day of the conference because I'm cool and hipster and that's how I role.

Random spoiler for next post,"Things That Should Have Something in Them, but Don't".

You're welcome. 

Post-Game (Finals) and Start of Summer

So I did well on all of my finals (woo!). Another semester of all A's and the sleep deprivation was totally worth the feeling I got when I saw my grades at the end. Although my microbiology class was completely and utterly ridiculously hard, I really appreciate what I learned and having a super-difficult class and doing well is definitely more rewarding than a super easy one. Well, starting this coming semester, every last one of my classes will be math or science and I'll be stacking on the lab classes so in addition to the not-life that I already have, I'll have a ton of extra not-life to go around.

This summer I'm still working at the lab and I'm commuting the 30 minutes(no traffic) to the city every morning. To avoid the traffic debacle, I leave at around 6:20am because if I leave that early, it's a 30-minute drive. Otherwise it turns into around an hour long drive that sucks up my lovely gas. This summer I'll be working on my own project (woohoo again) and the first week was stressful just because it's a totally different dynamic working on my own. There were points where I walk away from one thing and then totally forget about it or realize I had more to do than I had thought and just driving me crazy. One morning, every alarm and its mother thought that it would be a great idea to harass me and beep and be annoying and just AHHHH!


I also got this amazing water bottle. The only problem I have with it is explained by the meme below.

I also feel as though it's important to mention that despite a few mistakes (like using ladder instead of loading dye in my samples), the war on rebellious gels is going well. I haven't had a leaky gel in well over 2 months and it's not because I'm not making gels. I'm totally making gels they're just the well behaved gels that all people who run westerns aspire to raise. I'm so proud to say that most of my gels fit into society and do their job well. Good job guys. We've won.

The post felt kind of wrong without a third picture so I'll throw this in here. This was from a time my grad student discovered the debit card-taking soda machine. It's also a great time to show-case the table that we now have outside the lab for our drinks and food and drugs. Not drugs. We don't do drugs.

To end this post, I have to say that things are going as well as they could be. Haven't set anything on fire (yet), doing good science, and learning (the usual).

It's That Time of the Semester Again

I'll give you 5.9 internets if you can guess why there are so many Mtn Dew bottles on my desk. If you need a  few hints, it's oft associated with conditions such as sleep deprivation, intense stress, and lots of head-desk interaction. If you guessed finals, then you're right!

You might be wondering why, if I'm so busy, am I sitting here writing a blog.  It's over several days and at this point, I have no idea what else I was going to write about. So I'm just going to post a shiny picture from the conference I just went to.

I also have Chinese food.

Who knew they had tofu chicken at random places? Not me.

I swear I'm in a "Final Destination Movie"

Today was one of those days where I almost died like 23 times... okay... maybe not 23. Like 3. FINE! If you're going to pressure me into it, I'll say like once. Geeze.

First thing that happened was during a routine titration. I had to kneel on a stool to see the top of the burette and I slipped a little bit, causing the beaker full of ethanol and my O. Acid to fall all over me and the floor, shattering my beaker in the process. Barring the fact that I was covered in an extremely flammable liquid and there was glass on the floor I was pretty fine. Later on, I burned myself on my hotplate! You might argue, "Ron, that's not almost dying!", but I say otherwise. Whose to say that I won't later die of... something related to that burn, hm? The final freak accident that almost killed me was when I later slipped on the not-quite-dry remains of my first mess. I could've easily hit my head to any number of dangerous things! If it weren't for my exceptional and cat-like reflexes, I might not have been here to type this! Also almost got hit by a car going like 40 miles per hour, but that's like whatever. I live in a city.

Now in the Final Destination movies, some freak accidents that the victims are to be victimized in are avoided through some miraculous miracle, usually a premonition. After avoiding this extremely deadly tragedy, they go about their lives and die in freak accidents just as unlikely as them surviving the initial intended disaster. I tried to narrow down the events that might have triggered my unfortunate circumstances and I have come down to 2 or 3 depending on how you count them. The first would be the 4 tests that I've had in the last 7 days, which I finished alive and intact earlier today. The second may be considered part of the first I guess. The second would be the should-be toxic amounts of caffeine that I consumed on Tuesday and Wednesday to study for my Thursday test. 3-5 hour energies, coffee, and a Mountain-dew in 15 hours. The third, or again, the second depending on how you count it would be this ridiculous escalator that I went down to go to the train station. There was a point where I felt as though I was going horizontal, it was that steep.


It's also pretty long. It's definitely scarier going down. I didn't get a picture going down the first tie because I didn't want the people infront of me thinking I was a crazy-creepy-stalker guy. And then I was too afraid to go back down again. Thinking about it... it was most definitely the escalator

Hot!

So after my 5:30am lab fun, I went over to the Undergraduate Research Conference and met some pretty cool people. Had some arts, some sciences, and some other random stuffs. Talked to some older more experienced peeps got some good advice and good ideas about what I want to do for my poster/presentation in October. Oh, I also got the summer position thing where I get paid to do summer science. Yay me!

So after the conference, we went to a Mexican restaurant that shall remain unnamed. The lady who served us was absolutely and quite unarguably crazy. She was also very mean with fun snide remarks and also yelling that our plates were hot when I was sliding mine closer. The plate was not even mildly hot. Irish pub is next on the lab-list. 

Also... apparently a crossed out penguin means don't freeze but refrigerate.