Background: Sometimes, making slides requires nail polish. To secure a cover slip over your sample and seal in anything that might evaporate, you need something watertight, fast drying, and transparent. Nail polish is the cheapest thing I know that fits these requirements, and that is why I have a bottle of it sitting on my bench. I also have q- ( Read more... )

Just found out that my best-bet lab didn't get funded. Damn. It's great how NIH just got a bunch of money, but it doesn't help me because it won't actually get distributed to any labs for quite a while (peer-reviewed grant applications take fricken forever). And I need to start my PhD in about two and a half months. Yeah. I blame the republicans. ( Read more... )

6. Always medically/cardiologically clear people before giving them exercise tests, or else you might have a heavy person fall on top of you and your colleagues might want to try to shock him while he's still on top of you.

One of our cardio profs told us this today. There is a fun story to go with it, of course.

I finished a lab experiment today, ( Read more... )

 4. Studying really really hard and being fairly bright are no guarantee that you'll actually pass an exam ( Read more... )

 3. The actors on medical shows all wear their stethoscopes backwards. They can't here a damned thing ( Read more... )

I started a new rotation last week--a virology lab! Tomorrow I do an experiment where I use fluorescent virus! It's pretty cool. The PI is really enthusiastic and nice and has many cool projects going on. However, he does not have guaranteed funding. Funding in biomed research is really tight right now in general, and he's a fairly new PI, so that ( Read more... )

Someone need to call the UN or Amnesty International or some similar organization right now. Cuz today I walked into the lab and found a box with bubble-wrap--strange bubble-wrap. All the bubbles are connected through little passages, so when you push on them, the air just flows into another bubble. You can't pop them! Un-poppable bubble-wrap! It's ( Read more... )

I'm sitting in the lab, being bored. The postdoc who is training me is meeting with the PI, and that could take a while. I like the PI, but she talks a lot. We had a five hour lab meeting the week before last. Really. My dad says you should never let a meeting you run last longer than an hour, and if you're in one that goes much past that you ( Read more... )