Thursday, September 30, 2010

No, I am not a giantess.


"I have a long and storied history of failing amazingly at acrylamide gels. Usually it's only the sequence-length ones that do creative things; the little protein gels generally treat me pretty well. At first, the gel appears fine. However, [given perspective], you will see that I have, once again, succeeded in creatively failing. No, I am not some giantess of extremely large proportions. Yes, my PI was less than thrilled. On the plus side, this is likely the cutest thing I ever will accomplish in lab. And, if I could reliably reproduce it (but what scientist can reliably reproduce results, right?), I could probably quit my day job and make and sell them as little science-nerd pins or something. Alas, attempts to reproduce this have, of course, failed. Yay, science!"

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

What is this shit?


"I was taking a sequence of photographs of a slow reaction in several wells on a spot plate and inserted a time point by writing the time (2:45) on a piece of tape and photographing that as a part of the sequence. The camera was mounted such that the image was inverted, a fact I didn't notice until I was reviewing the sequence with my group."

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Happy pellet is happy.


"I have no idea why, but all four of my bacterial pellets spontaneously formed happy faces of some random dark material. I have no idea how this happened, but I'm taking it as a good omen!"