Lab tools are exciting. No really.

We recently had a lot of "lab time" - ie plenty of time to experiment in the laboratory. One thing about lab time is that there is a lot of waiting. Waiting for things to incubate, waiting for reagents to react, waiting for this and that. But that doesn't deter a budding scientist! I rather like the waiting, especially when there are other people in the lab to talk to. So lab work isn't as boring as you might think.

Figure 1. My version of important lab tools.

One thing that makes lab work very interesting of course is equipment! I especially love the names of some of the equipment that we use.Remember the tools you learned to use in science classes? We actually use those. Sometimes. Not really. I don't go around grinding things up with a mortar and pestle anymore. At least the last time I did, it was in my second year as an undergraduate grinding up muscle tissue frozen with liquid Nitrogen. Fun times. But this is probably because I'm a biologist now and not a chemist - they still get to crush little rocks into powder. At least that's what I think they do.

 There are of course, several important tools in the lab.



First of the line is the wonderful pipette. The most important tool of a sciency trade.
This bad boy is further explained in a picture you can find here:  <http://2007.igem.org/wiki/index.php/Paris/PROTOCOLS>

The pipette when you first meet him looks daunting. So many different kinds, hard to handle. But once you learn his ways he is your best friend in the lab. Everything relies on him. The pipette is not to be confused with the pasteur pipette, or the pastette as it is called. Although it is used on occasion when the measurement doesn't need to be so perfect, it still isn't as wonderful as the pipette. That and it doesn't have a shooting out mechanism for its tip ejector, that makes you feel like a child with a plastic gun.

Petrie!! (My favorite was Ducky)

Some things also have really cool or hilarious names. The Centrifuge is always a cool name to say. "Wait a minute, I need to centrifuge my samples." Or even the Nanodrop. "I need to Nanodrop this".

One interesting name is the Belly Dancer. Which is actually a tool used to move your plates with their samples on, if the samples are something that need a good shaking. Go google it if you don't believe me. The belly dancer is a well used and well known tool. The petri dish always reminds me of petrie from land before time.

Figure 1 has a bunch of self drawn lab stuff. Except for the stick with a leaf. Not like sticks with leaves are not legitimate ways to stir your stuff together. At least it is legit, if it is in the protocol. You could generally use anything! As long as its in the protocol.




References: Picture of Petrie <http://www.sodahead.com/entertainment/who-is-your-favorite-the-land-before-time-character/question-1035595/>

Work and Postering!

Hello again blogosphere!!

First of all I will have to apologize for my very very late posting! I actually had a bunch of blog posts planned up, but over the Christmas break I went back home to Malaysia, and everybody wanted to drag me around places, to do everything at the same time!! Going back home over the holidays is always a wonderful wonderful thing, but I always feel like sometimes I need my break from the break I am taking! Being a masters student of course, this actually meant that it was a working holiday. I'm not going to lie, being a masters student is a lot of work, work work. But all in all, it really does help a lot, and the feedback from the course is wonderful and helpful, especially to help in future careers.

Speaking of work, today we had a poster presentation! We each had to do a poster about a topic in ornithology (the study of birds) - mainly that of chickens (which by the way I have heard called chickenology by a man who basically described himself as a chickenologist)) on different topics surrounding the poultry industry. 

The topic in which I had done was about photoperiodicity in poultry reproduction. Photoperiodicity and circadian rhythms are a few of the topics that I am very interested in as a scientist. Photoperiodicity is essentially the reaction of plants and animals to the different lengths of day and night.
Looking through many many scientific papers (also something that scientists just tend to do a lot), I discovered that light effects poultry, mainly in two ways. One: poultry species (chicken, quail, duck, turkey) cannot become sexually mature unless they have a certain amount of daylight. Two: The birds wont lay eggs unless they have a certain amount of daylight. So essentially, day is very important if you want your birds to lay.  

Interesting is it not?