Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
Yes! I have allowed myself to get distracted. But don’t worry; the rabbit hole in question is scientific. The dye, fast scarlet, does curious things to my roots. A curiosity I have already written about is the dark zone; for some reason, the stain is excluded from a relevant part of the root. I have […]
Skewed roots! Development matters. The tests I ran for the time course of skewing (and described here) finished. I scanned the plates and had a look. Starting with the two lefty mutants (Fig. 1), the amount of skewing is not constant. For lefty1, the skew angle seems to get progressively more extreme (so the root forms […]
A grindy week. Certainly an exaggeration to say there were a thousand natural shocks—even a dozen is not quantitative; but that’s what it felt like. There was actual Shakespeare tho: Last night, we saw the Birmingham Conservatoire’s production of Much Ado About Nothing; hilarious from curtain to curtain. And there was Liszt. OK, a diszt-claimer–I don’t […]
Today, Birmingham was definitely a bight zone. Tremendously sunny, not even a passing shower. I seized the day-bright and took my bike north along the canal towpath. I was not dissuaded even when the towpath became a narrow muddy rut. The sun kept shining. I passed under the mighty Galton bridge (Figure 1; hopefully no […]
Last Sunday, I wrote about The case of the vanishing twist. Unless the plates are all contaminated, I’ll get clues tomorrow when I compare mutants grown at 20 and 25ºC. In the same post in passing, I mentioned another mystery: Charlie Anderson and collaborators stain arabidopsis roots nicely with fast scarlet but me and mine […]
On Tuesday this week, I sauntered into my office to find a man at the desk. The actual officeholder, Prof Maxted, had returned for tutorials, first week of school. Wishing he would have warned me so I could have tidied up the coffee grounds, I decamped to the bench. After taking care of essential lab […]
Horses have crossed the finish line. During the past week, for two of the test growth spaces, roots reached the bottom of the plate (Fig. 1). While the roots grew, once a day*, I marked the position of the root tip on the back of the square plastic plate by making a horizontal scratch with […]
Off to the races! Root races anyway. I have plates with plants growing in four locations around the Biosciences building; two sets of plates from last Friday and two more started Wednesday. Last Friday’s will cross the finish line in a day or two and Wednesday’s some days after that. But until the results are […]
Sunday September 10 A hot week in Biosciences. Hot as in the building sections where I work have minimal air conditioning and the weather decided to usher in September with a week of summer. Not cook-an-egg-on-the-pavement hot but—don’t tell the safety officer—I kept my lab coat unbuttoned. I left work Friday a little after 6 PM […]
Sunday Sept 3 Hooray! I now have a verified place to work (bench) and write (office). But before filling you on these glad events, let me call your attention to the “subscribe” button down in the lower right corner of the page. By signing up, you will get an email whenever a new Lab Fab […]