Passionate N00bity

I was somewhat disappointed when I first started attending non-class seminars for my projects in the lab and my interests to find that there wasn't much rambunctious cheering or passionate cheering. Sure, everyone is very polite and asks Very Intelligent Questions and I understand that much of this is due to an inherent respect for the speaker's effort in gathering and interpreting their data and an abstract need for civility. However, if we're doing science because we love the intellectual challenge, why don't we get more worked up about it and express that excitement? I know that science is not the same thing as sports, but why can we not get up the same passionate lather as sports fans in our arenas of data and theoretical abstraction?

Part of this is due to my dream of one day delivering a data talk in the form of a power ballad, but it's also due to confusion as to when I may break down the barrier of formality and ask a douchey question within the cloak of excited admiration? I recently saw a speaker present some really awesome new biotechnology she had developed in the course of her project and its applications. The tangibility of the data (real-time fluorescent tracking of cells in a living matrice by 2-photon microscopy; which basically meant actually seeing immunotyped immune cells crawling around and interacting with each other) was surreal and exhilarating, but when she talked about her methodologies I was left wanting. I don't want to out the speaker, so I cannot say exactly what my beef was, but it had to do with the algorithms by which she chose to quantify her data. I refrained from asking this question in the Q&A session because of the very civility I mention above, it just seemed like too rude a question to ask in such a polite intellectual subculture as an academic presentation. Of course, on the other hand, there was also the possibility that my question would have revealed my ignorant n00bity, and to be honest that also played a part in me not asking.

Nonetheless, when can we whup it up and get excited about the science all around us? Can I ever high-five or fist-bump a speaker when they've shown me something awesome or would doing so break down this fifth wall academic politeness has surrounded us with?

Actin Belly

40X coronal stomach section, stained for actin. Click for high res. Scale bar = 200um.

Frozen section, wash off excess OCT in RT dH2O, 10min permeabilization in 100% acetone, 30min block in Toaster's Übermegablocking Buffer*, added primary polyclonal Ab without washing, incubate 1h @ RT, wash 3X in Washy Wash Buffer**, add labeled actin at 1:200 and secondary labeled Ab against primary at 1:10, incubate 1h @ RT, wash 3X in Washy Wash Buffer, tap off all excess wet, 2 drops Prolong Gold Antifade + DAPI (@RT), coverslip w/out bubbles, cure O/N in a dark box.

The resolution I managed to get here is so exquisite and the result so beautiful that I am very tempted to get a 5'x6' giclee print of it and hang it on my everything.

*Toaster's Megablocking Buffer: 1% BSA, 1% FBS, 1% NGS in 1X PBS; to make Toaster's Übermegablocking Buffer add 1:10 CD16/CD32 to block endogenous Fc antibody receptors in the tissue.
**Washy Wash Buffer: 2% FBS, 0.02% NaN2 in 1X PBS

Story of Toaster: Self Experimentation #2

[Neither Toaster nor Hammer endorse trying this at home.]

Looking back at this, I can fully admit how absolutely stupid it was to try. This stupidity was compounded by collaboration with my good friend, whom we shall here refer to as Hammer Fishplate, that endangered both of our lives. In our defense, it should be noted that we were 16-year-old boys with a car, so perhaps stupidity was entirely unavoidable. But at least it was stupidity in the Name of Science!

Our hometown was completely dominated by aviation, and as such we grew up well aware of the principles of Bernoulli and aerodynamics (our middle school even had a wind tunnel). So one night after having lost the competition to see who could push my car the fastest, I proposed that we try steering said car by altering its aerodynamic profile by using the car doors as ailerons*.

So we got some tacos and thought about it.

Since we couldn't come up with any good reasons not to try this, we conducted the experiment. We rolled up all the windows in my car and went to the straightest, widest stretch of local branch of the interstate highway. It was well past midnight so there was absolutely no traffic. Hammer was in the passenger seat while I drove. I floored the car and got it up to 38m/s (since we had reasoned the effects would be negligible at lower velocities). Then Hammer pushed his car door open while I held the steering wheel straight. The car veered gently left! SUCCESS! So then he let his door get slammed shut by the wind and leaned over to grab the wheel while I pushed my own door open (this is difficult to do at 38m/s). Sure enough, the car veered right! DOUBLE SUCCESS!!!

The natural extension of this was to see if we could steer the car productively by this method. There was a large bend coming up in the highway branch, so we gamely took it on and sure enough: it's manageable, if difficult. We wound up drifting across several empty lanes and coming rather close to the concrete median, but we made it nonetheless.

Later on we tried a negative control and repeated the experiment at a much lower velocity (8m/s). It didn't work at all and I'm fairly sure the gas station attendant didn't much appreciate our quest for Science.

Conclusion: yes, car doors may be used as ailerons, but only at sufficiently high velocities.

[Neither Toaster nor Hammer endorse trying this at home.]

Relevant: Story of Toaster: Self Experimentation #1

Bloggable Science-Like Paste

I did a little quasi-scientific quasi-experiment for your entertainment. I'm curious to see how quickly all of you can poke holes in it.

Informal Background:
So, the other day I found a sleeve of plates in the fridge that were rather old and on the verge of becoming trash. My boss has told us that if we need to keep our work sterile but can't fit it in the flow hood (or someone else is in the flow hood already), we can just light a Bunsen burner and it'll create an updraft that sweeps all the microbes away from our work. I don't trust my cell culture media with this, but I am willing to use this for bacteria work. However, I haven't seen this qualitatively proven with my own eyes or in the literature so I figured I should test this.

Hypothesis:
A burning Bunsen burner is sufficient to keep your work sterile within 1m.

Materials and methods:
Set up line of split TSAII/5%SB and MacConkey agar plates from BD. Lit Bunsen burner and allowed to burn freely for 5min. Then turned over plates and removed lids from closest to farthest. Plates were then left uncovered for 5min and re-covered while the Bunsen burner burned. Plates were incubated 48h at 37C, high humidity, 10% CO2 in a water-jacketed incubator. After 48h, bacterial growth was assessed.

Figure A: Toaster's benches showing experimental setup. My benches are particularly messy here because I was also running an ELISA at the same time and did this during an incubation period.

Results:
8 out of 10 plates remained sterile. The 2 plates that did not remain sterile were plates 1 and 3 (numbered going out from Bunsen burner). Growth on both of these plates was a single large colony of yellowishness on the blood agar side.

Conclusion:
Inconclusive. Growth on plates did not follow distance as one would logicaly expect if the Bunsen burner does indeed create an updraft. Growth that was observed was likely Gram positive (because it didn't grow on MacConkey agar, which contains bile salts that inhibit Gram positive organisms' growth).