Okay, watching some of the other movies makes me realize that I've been very negligent in not uploading ours.
Without further ado, here it is.
Can you guess the age of the person who made the movie? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't me.Read more
Dave, Maria, Grrl, and I will all be at Ozzie's in Lower Queen Anne on Saturday afternoon.
I've never met the other three bloggers but after checking out Maria's wedding pictures and the liquid nitrogen, I'm really looking forward to this. We'll be upstairs in the mezzanine and we'll have a ScienceBlogs poster.
Relevant details: ... Read more
This wasn't in the lab, but it was an accident, and it was funny later on.
Normally, I wouldn't think twice about storing bacterial cultures in a refrigerator. After all, bacteria on a petri plate, inside of a plastic bag, are kind of stuck. They can't get out of the plates, and even if they did, they certainly can't crawl out of a plastic bag.
I thought soil bacteria, on agar plates, were mostly harmless.
I was wrong.
... Read more
The Ask a Science Blogger question of the week asks if organic foods are really worth the hype. I'm afraid my answer can't fit into one blog post.
Let me start by telling you about my garden.
This year my garden has been a home to local wildlife, but during the years that I do garden, I have a semi-organic garden.
I don't use any pesticides but I do occasionally break down and ... Read more
We heard quite a bit about rainforest destruction in the 80's and 90's. Even the Grateful Dead joined the efforts to raise awareness and gather support for rain forest preservation. In the past, the Dead stayed away from political activism because (quoting Jerry Garcia):
Power is a scary thing. When you feel that you are close to it, you want to
make sure that it isn't used for misleading. So all this time we've avoided
making any statements about politics, about alignments of any sort.
But the Dead decided deforestation was too big of an issue to ... Read more
When I was in college, I had part-time jobs drawing blood from patients in the university hospital and as a phlebotomist at local plasma center. Plus, I was a volunteer EMT on an ambulance crew. Needless to say, I saw plenty of blood. And those were the days when no one wore gloves. We used to be tested every few months for hepatitis, since it was pretty common for the hospital lab techs to get that, so I did worry about hepatitis.
When I went to graduate school, and realized that the hospital where I had worked, had been ... Read more
I mean phone call. Because, if I thought he remembered me, I would call and say "thank you."
Because of the time I spent in his lab, I know that cloning started long before Dolly. The first vertebrate animal was cloned over 50 years ago.
And it wasn't a sheep.
Raising Rana pipiens
Several years ago, I had the good fortune to work as a student intern for one of the kings of cloning, Robert McKinnell, now an emeritus professor in the Cell Biology and Genetics Department at the University of Minnesota. Reminiscing on history a bit, ... Read more
Science Blogs has asked: What makes a good science teacher?
Many of the science teachers that I've met can't really be described by the adjective "good." The better fitting words are: great, marvelous, inspiring, and fantastic.
But, SBer's want to know, "what makes them so great?" Right?
I've compiled a list of characteristics that I've seen all great science teachers share. And, since this group rarely gets sufficiently rewarded beyond seeing themselves in the annual edition of the Bio-Rad Explorer catalog, I'm even going to name names and give examples. ... Read more
This year my garden has been a home to local wildlife, but during the years that I do garden, I have a semi-organic garden.
I don't use any pesticides but I do occasionally break down and ...