Well, at least it's dry...

"My friend learned that there was a reason why she was instructed to only place glass in the dryer. She only needed one example to learn by!"

No Smurfs allowed!

"When I first joined my lab, I saw the 'No Smurfs!' sign on the lab microwave (the microwave used for experiments, not food). I thought it was kind of lame, in a hipster-kitsch kind of way. But then I opened it for the first time a few weeks later, and I understood:


(BTW, the blue is coomassie stain, for staining protein gels)."

Are they mocking me?

"After watching me kill 100 billion E. coli by micro-fluidization, the surviving bacteria said, 'we love you.' Are they mocking me?"

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!"

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."

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!"

"Rotor incident"

"This is the current state of an ultracentrifuge down the hall. I have no idea how it happened, but I guess it's a reminder to always balance your tubes. I also like how the tape says "do not use," as if otherwise someone would just brush aside the debris, put in their rotor, and proceed. "