Check Out The Colors On This One!

As a chemist, this entire conversation is triggering my lab safety nerves. Have you geologists heard of PPE?

we do need to lick the rocks to identify them though. i appreciate your concern but...we actually do need to lick the rocks.

Sounds fake but okay

Not everyone is Scrooge McDuck.

CERN Scientist David Lunney outlines the incredible journey of gold from space to Earth in Where does gold come from?

Animation by @rewfoe

Sometimes I get lucky on the rotovap and end up with beautiful crystals.

(I am now realizing that all of my coolest chem lab pictures are related to crystallization...)

Since October, northeastern Brazil has been devastated by a wave of microcephaly, a condition where babies are born with abnormally small heads and damaged brains. At this moment, all signs point to the mosquito-borne Zika, a little-studied virus normally associated only with rashes, fever, and other mild symptoms. In the months since Brazil sounded the alarm, Zika cases have been popped up in a dozen other countries, and health authorities predict the virus will spread across the Americas. Infectious disease specialist Michael Osterolm explains what’s known about Zika, and what we can expect as this outbreak unfolds.

THE VERGE REVIEW OF ANIMALS, STARRING: TRILOBITES

They were survivors, up until they went extinct. 

fun things to do in lab

accidentally crushing a pcr tube when opening it with one hand

dropping… anything. especially an entire box of frozen samples. 

slightly too large gloves and getting them caught as you close tubes

when the magnetic spin bar spins too fast and does the thing

listening to someone else’s forgotten timer go off

“uh… what’s that smell..”

going in for a pipette tip and then overturning the entire box

16 hour time-points

srsly who invented 16 hr time-points

they’re inhumane

labelling rows and rows of 600 ul microcentrifuge tubes by hand

“we’re sorry but this reagent has been back-ordered for 3 months”

listening to the scraping noise of plastic culture flasks on metal shelves

getting your samples stuck in any sort of machine

“i need you to go and catalog every chemical we have”

cleaning cell culture incubators with aerosolized 70% ethanol 

having the fire alarms go off when you’re literally in the middle of something that can not be put down no i will perish in this fire before i forgo this damn experiment!

that sense of pure panic when you realize you miscalculated how much reagent you need

“one of your mice died and its cage mates ate half the body”

Video games are art and now art are video games

Home is coming... Cob makes a deal.