Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
But I didn’t put them away. The tweezers, along with the box’s worth of other gear I shipped back, are just sitting on top of my lab bench. I decided this would be a good moment to clean out the drawers below the bench where these things belong, drawers that currently are crammed with crap. […]
I am writing this in the Dublin airport, waiting for a flight to take me and Laura back across the ocean. The day is one day short of 365 since the first entry for Lab Fab season three. What a year! In the past 43 posts, I have regaled you with the twists (yes! twists) […]
Last week, with a sufficiently large—I hope—collection of root images cached, I indulges in a few extras. I entertained a visit from a friend (Mike Blatt) and his wife (Jane), washed out reagent bottles, and fitted in two experiments. Well, not really experiments, more like explorations. One afternoon, I imaged celery xylem stained either with […]
To be fair, the word gallop overestimates my speed last week; more accurate, if dull, is steady trot. I trotted for lap after lap, day after day, putting roots thru their imaging paces and getting things ready for a few supplemental experiments next week, the last week in the lab. Going around in circles like this, I have […]
A short post today because I spent last week teaching and holidaymaking. On the first three days of the week, I gave a workshop on writing clearly, Increasing the signal, decreasing the noise, to a dozen (well two didn’t show) post-graduate students. Four ! lectures on Monday (with coffee and biscuits and lunch strewn among them), homework […]
On four days last week, here is my day. I get to the lab a little after 8 AM. I unshroud the microscope, flick on the infrared light, and arrange bits and pieces on the lab bench, an operation that includes filling three small dishes with 3 mL of 1% congo red and making sure […]
I am living the cliché: it comes together at the very end. I hope that I don’t come apart. On Monday I caught up on a few things because the roots were too short. When the plate with seedlings is placed on the horizontal microscope, I can move the stage down only so far. With […]
I have about a month remaining on the board here. Today, rather than look forward to the trade-offs and pressures of the coming weeks, I’ll do the usual and look backward, telling the tale of the past week, which certainly included trade-offs and pressures. I was busy. For my plants, I think I have sorted […]
Please enjoy a slice of pineapple upside-down cake on my behalf (Fig. 1). I solved my calibration issues by inserting the liquid crystal slider upside down. For months, I have been washing up against the rocks of calibration. I need to calibrate the liquid crystal unit before I can measure anything on the confocal fluorescence […]
Today’s title isn’t as catchy as War and Peace despite the alliteration. Oh well. Thanks to our finding a stable power meter, Dean and I were able to calibrate the liquid crystals on the multiphoton microscope. We made a little sculpture surrounding the detector and the rotatable polarizer (Fig. 1). The detector of the power-meter is a […]