Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
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 […]
Sunday August 27 Well, I had hopes higher than Everest (well Snowdon, aka yr wyddfa) of getting started in the lab. Happily on Monday afternoon, after checking in at HR in the School of Mathematics and the IT crew in the main library, I met Florian Busch. He had agreed to provide me with bench […]
Sunday August 20, 2023 Welcome to a new season of Lab-Fab! I hope you enjoy the show. This season is brought to you by the UK’s Royal Society, in the form of a Wolfson Visiting Fellowship, and by the University of Birmingham’s School of Mathematics, who are hosting me, ably abetted by the same Uni’s […]
Last time, I regaled you with a story of cutting sections of roots embedded in paraffin. Cutting sections is the kind of obsessive handiwork that made me happy to become a scientist and still makes me happy to be one. I enjoyed getting roots into molten wax and I enjoyed blogging about doing that and […]
Trumpets? I don’t even hear bagpipes. Can I conjure up a kazoo to herald the return of Lab Fab? My last post was nearly two years ago, not long after the covid curtains closed. I stopped lab-fabbing because I stopped doing experiments. Over the long interval, I had writing projects. I wrote a paper that presented […]
In which the respite of keeping cells alive is described
In which the usual account of experiments is suspended for an account of how we account experiments…
An account of scrubbing the sections, and of sputtering.