Post-something-fun-from-your-research thread?

[dopaminesurge]

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I'll go first:

1. People with an orbitofrontal cortex lesion are less affected by dirty words than the general population.

 

[SaturdayDwarf]

I'll go first:

1. People with an orbitofrontal cortex lesion are less affected by dirty words than the general population.

People with orbitofrontal cortex lesions are less affected by most things compared to general population. Almost nothing has shock value.

Uh... nothing interesting from my research. Sorry.

 

[bobob]

When multiple crystalline forms of a drug substance are present, heating and holding past the main endothermic/exothermic events but before the melt of the main form can get rid of the unwanted forms and leave you with a "pure" (relative term) drug substance for further testing.

Oh wait, so nothing interesting from my research either, unless you're a forumlator.

 

[n3ur05ur930n]

I'll go first:

1. People with an orbitofrontal cortex lesion are less affected by dirty words than the general population.

During an fMRI, if you do language testing consisting of naming pictures, the same level of brain activation is observed on the images whether the patient says the name of the object aloud or simply thinks of the name silently. Consequently, we perform the testing with the patients thinking the name silently, since speaking results in head movements which produces movement artifacts in our images (our resolution is 1.5mm x 1.5mm x 4.5mm, so we can even detect motion from breathing).

Another fun fact: my avatar is an image of my actual brain (structural spgr) overlayed onto the bone structure of my head/face using the images acquired via MRI and a program called BrainVoyager.

 

[dajimmers]

Another fun fact: my avatar is an image of my actual brain (structural spgr) overlayed onto the bone structure of my head/face using the images acquired via MRI and a program called BrainVoyager.

That is so cool. I'm jealous!

A call to action: Keep circumcising. Not because it has any health benefits, but because my lab gets fibroblasts to study from donated foreskin.

 

[Thundrstorm]

If you use electroporation to transfect Plasmodium, be prepared to splatter Malaria-infected blood everywhere.

And don't put dry ice down the sink. 👍

 

[Wertt]

During an fMRI, if you do language testing consisting of naming pictures, the same level of brain activation is observed on the images whether the patient says the name of the object aloud or simply thinks of the name silently. Consequently, we perform the testing with the patients thinking the name silently, since speaking results in head movements which produces movement artifacts in our images (our resolution is 1.5mm x 1.5mm x 4.5mm, so we can even detect motion from breathing).

Another fun fact: my avatar is an image of my actual brain (structural spgr) overlayed onto the bone structure of my head/face using the images acquired via MRI and a program called BrainVoyager.

well, we won't go into what "brain activation" really means in fMRI 😎

I find it hard to believe that speaking vs. not speaking causes similar levels of signal throughout the cortex. What about M1? Or is there a specific area of cortex you are looking at?

 

[Bernito]

This is not my work but a friends. She works in a visualization lab. Its a movie about translation made with software used for making CG in movies. (You have to fill out some info but they will not use it, they just want to know if you are a student, professor other. You can make it up if you want.)
EDIT: Click on the mpg version.

 

[LucidSplash]

Research results that are interesting? I'm not allowed to really talk about any of the really interesting stuff from work because of confidentiality with clients.

However, I can tell you this. Non-human primates get to watch movies like "The Lion King" and "The Jungle Book" as enrichment ~twice a week. They also get popcorn and they actually watch the movies.

 

[DrBowtie]

Clicking your mouse while using emacs in terminal mode = useless.

 

[dbhvt]

No fair. Neuro fun research facts will be much more fun than anything about say... the effect of lipid accumulation on ion channels in a hepatoma cell line, or algorithms to predict survival in HIV patients with end stage liver disease. Interesting, yes, extraordinarily. Fun? Poking liver cells with micropipettes or trying to figure out when people are going to die hasn't given me any fun facts yet. Oh wait, how about this. Did you know that if you have HIV you are likely to die sooner than if you don't?

 

[xraygray]

only female mosquitos bloodfeed

 

[Triggity02]

wash hands frequently after purifying oocysts from an infectious protozoan parasite that causes violent diarrheal disease.

 

[Thundrstorm]

wash hands frequently after purifying oocysts from an infectious protozoan parasite that causes violent diarrheal disease.

hahahahahaha.

 

[jebus]

One of the other techs and I were talking about me getting some clinical experience:
ME: "I'm thinking of volunteering to do hearing tests on babies, you know, so you can see if they can hear or not."
HIM: "You should volunteer in the maternity ward because you know those women do it."

Also, in our lab notes we described every mouse perfusion on a scale crunkness - ranging from "Crunk Fo' Sheez!" to "OK!!!" to "WHAT?!? Lil' Jon must rolling in his crunk lil' grave."

 

[dopaminesurge]

Another fun fact: my avatar is an image of my actual brain (structural spgr) overlayed onto the bone structure of my head/face using the images acquired via MRI and a program called BrainVoyager.

Holy crap, that's cool. Furthermore, your research sounds interesting. Whose lab is it?

 

[BaylorGuy]

During cardiac arrests, if IV access cannot be obtained in 60 seconds, going the intraosseous route for ACLS will save a person's life....well, a pig's life.

 

[potato51]

don't know any interesting facts, but I once suggested in jest (and was found to be correct) that one of our clinic's patients was a chimeric twin. We detected way too many alleles for a gene we were studying from the patient's blood. Happened again on a re-draw later on. Then we found the DNA was different in the skin than it was in the blood, and the children of the patient (it was a multigenerational study) had vastly different genotypes from each other.

 

[Punkinhead]

Injecting live attenuated Herpes virus into mouse brains causes implanted glioblastoma multiforme tumors to shrink and sometimes disappear!

 

[Rockhouse]

I work in a reproductive physiology lab, so this may seem a little bestial to everyone, but it is real science (nueroendocrinology) and funny as hell.

If you give a male sheep (ram) a hormone regimen that mimics estrous and turn him loose with a none treated ram, he will stand to be mounted like a ewe, and the nontreated ram will be very happy that he does.

And homosexual sheep have higher prolactin levels in the sexually dimorphic nuclei of their brain.

 

[infinite_dreams]

cool! We use brain voyager too and I am hoping to be the first 'test' once we start scanning so I can have a pic of my brain too 🙂 ; prior to this we just processed data that our PI brought with her- now we are about to do tha scanning as well... but our research is focussed on autism v. control hemodynamic response to different movies portraying emotion....

During an fMRI, if you do language testing consisting of naming pictures, the same level of brain activation is observed on the images whether the patient says the name of the object aloud or simply thinks of the name silently. Consequently, we perform the testing with the patients thinking the name silently, since speaking results in head movements which produces movement artifacts in our images (our resolution is 1.5mm x 1.5mm x 4.5mm, so we can even detect motion from breathing).

Another fun fact: my avatar is an image of my actual brain (structural spgr) overlayed onto the bone structure of my head/face using the images acquired via MRI and a program called BrainVoyager.

 

[Zymogen]

Injecting live attenuated Herpes virus into mouse brains causes implanted glioblastoma multiforme tumors to shrink and sometimes disappear!

Are you working with Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF)? We just talked about that in immunology. Pretty interesting. 👍

 

[BerkeleyMD]

Here's the motto from my lab:

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

Albert Einstein

It's in our office and it makes me wonder what our patients are thinking when they see it.

 

[2DEG]

During an fMRI, if you do language testing consisting of naming pictures, the same level of brain activation is observed on the images whether the patient says the name of the object aloud or simply thinks of the name silently. Consequently, we perform the testing with the patients thinking the name silently, since speaking results in head movements which produces movement artifacts in our images (our resolution is 1.5mm x 1.5mm x 4.5mm, so we can even detect motion from breathing).

Another fun fact: my avatar is an image of my actual brain (structural spgr) overlayed onto the bone structure of my head/face using the images acquired via MRI and a program called BrainVoyager.

Wow..this is so cool! Where would I go in order to look for similar research opportunities? My undergrad was in Electrical engineering, and I always found medical imagining to be pretty fascinating..

 

[OrganLibrarian]

If someone knocks you with a strong force (such as in an elbowing incident) in the center of your chest, at a specific point in the cardiac cycle, you could fall over and die within seconds. This is not in my research - it's called commotio cordis, and it's creepy!

 

[jebus]

If someone knocks you with a strong force (such as in an elbowing incident) in the center of your chest, at a specific point in the cardiac cycle, you could fall over and die within seconds. This is not in my research - it's called commotio cordis, and it's creepy!

This used to happen to a lot of kids who played catcher in little league baseball, right? And good pitch would come in and hit them in the chest and they would die, right? And by "a lot", I mean a handful.

 

[LadyWolverine]

Things I learned from research:

1) Rabbits smell really bad, are nearly impossible to intubate, and actually DO scream.

2) Sticking your hand into "viral lysis buffer" quickly turns it to "finger lysis buffer".

3) Eastern Europeans in general are a tempermental lot.

4) People from Kazakhstan look like Asians, but sound like Russians. (And it's fun to make them say "vodka".)

5) Don't put your hand in the -80 freezer or the liquid N2 without gloves. (Believe me on this one.)

6) Don't aerosolize wild-type adenovirus unless you want to be home sick for 3 days.

7) When 10 half-liter bottles of halothane break and spill all over the floor, you have exactly 4 seconds to vacate the premises before you pass out and have to be unceremoniously dragged out by your pant legs.

8) Mitochondrial DNA is really not all that interesting.

9) Stephen Jay Gould is my hero. And he's dead.

10) Something about the use of recombinant adenovirus as a gene therapy vector in cardiovascular medicine, but I've forgotten all that by now.

😀

 

[OrganLibrarian]

This used to happen to a lot of kids who played catcher in little league baseball, right? And good pitch would come in and hit them in the chest and they would die, right? And by "a lot", I mean a handful.

I suppose it could happen that way. A recent incident I've heard of involved moshing. I guess I've gotta stop letting my hubby Cletus punch me when he's drunk.

 

[jebus]

I suppose it could happen that way. A recent incident I've heard of involved moshing. I guess I've gotta stop letting my hubby Cletus punch me when he's drunk.

No, no, no! You don't have to stop having fun! You just need a protective padding like a vest or... no, I'm not going to say it. It would be poor taste even by my (low) standards.

 

[OrganLibrarian]

.

 

[noonday]

That is so cool. I'm jealous!

A call to action: Keep circumcising. Not because it has any health benefits, but because my lab gets fibroblasts to study from donated foreskin.

not to mention that uncut is just so unfun, imho...

me:

undergrad: yellow algae split from the tree about 200my earlier than once thought. (yellow algae are rad...three-walled chloroplasts mean the endosymbiosis of a red alga instead of a photosynthetic bacterium)

grad: the earth was once entirely covered with glaciers. repeatedly. (snowball earth)

job: many, but i think the coolest is that bacteria can be our slaves in the lab. finding new ways to make them metabolize compounds of interest into compounds from which the stable isotopes can be measured on the CF-IRMS.

 

[BaylorGuy]

If someone knocks you with a strong force (such as in an elbowing incident) in the center of your chest, at a specific point in the cardiac cycle, you could fall over and die within seconds. This is not in my research - it's called commotio cordis, and it's creepy!

Its also present in the dark side of the martial arts....more than likely though, they're are very few, if any, who know how to do this....if it even exists.

 

[Depakote]

I love getting Material Safety Data Sheets about things that really don't need them.

I got some for Empty Vials...

I just got an Emergency Response Guideline Sheet for Empty Shipping containers.

What to do in case the empty container explodes, leaks, causes bodily injury, etc. The best part. The sheet was inside the container.

 

[diosa428]

And don't put dry ice down the sink. 👍

I like to put it in the sink and pour water on it. I also like to put little pieces of it in eppendorf tubes and watch them explode. Yes, I am 5.

Interesting? For those of you who have never seen a mouse uterus, when a mouse is pregnant it looks like a sausage roll, with each bump being a separate embryo.

 

[LT2]

I love getting Material Safety Data Sheets about things that really don't need them.

ie. water!


to answer the question posed by this thread: we have a collection of baby poop in our -20 C. frozen baby poop.

fun or interesting, maybe. weird, yes.

 

[Thundrstorm]

I like to put it in the sink and pour water on it. I also like to put little pieces of it in eppendorf tubes and watch them explode. Yes, I am 5.

Interesting? For those of you who have never seen a mouse uterus, when a mouse is pregnant it looks like a sausage roll, with each bump being a separate embryo.

I used to disect mouse uterine horns b/c I was working with embryonic cells.

Did you know that the morning after breeding mice, you can tell who successfully got it on because the female mice will have a vaginal protein plug in the morning? Interesting and disgusting all at once. I spent many a Saturday morning probing mouse vaginas (Friday night was date night in the mouse room).

Thundr "mouse gynecologist" storm.

 

[diosa428]

I used to disect mouse uterine horns b/c I was working with embryonic cells.

Did you know that the morning after breeding mice, you can tell who successfully got it on because the female mice will have a vaginal protein plug in the morning? Interesting and disgusting all at once. I spent many a Saturday morning probing mouse vaginas (Friday night was date night in the mouse room).

Thundr "mouse gynecologist" storm.

Yup, been there, done that (still am, actually - it's thesis time!)

 

[SuzieQ3417]

5) Don't put your hand in the -80 freezer or the liquid N2 without gloves. (Believe me on this one.)

Everytime I go into the lab I have to root around in the -80 freezer for a sample, and everytime I forget to put on gloves beforehand. If our freezer was organized it would be easy, because I would know where to look right away and not freeze my hand off, but this is not the case. Oh no - instead people just throw things in there, and I have to wipe ice off of tubes to figure out if I have the right one. I can only last about 30 seconds before my hands start to hurt and I have to run for gloves. 🙂 It's a dangerous game.

 

[diosa428]

Everytime I go into the lab I have to root around in the -80 freezer for a sample, and everytime I forget to put on gloves beforehand. If our freezer was organized it would be easy, because I would know where to look right away and not freeze my hand off, but this is not the case. Oh no - instead people just throw things in there, and I have to wipe ice off of tubes to figure out if I have the right one. I can only last about 30 seconds before my hands start to hurt and I have to run for gloves. 🙂 It's a dangerous game.

Have you ever had to touch something metal in the -80? It's the worst. We have these metal racks with boxes in them and you have to pull them out to get at the boxes - I always think I can do it without the gloves but I'm always sorry.

 

[Dov]

i set my hands on fire once...

 

[omgwtfbbq?]

1.) you can use a pulse laser to kill bacteria laced with green fluorescent protein and make it spell your name. hehe , fun.

2.) if you're sitting, babysitting plates of bacteria, and you realize you've made one too many plates... and you're bored, and you spit on one... and incubate it for two days.... its SCARY!!!!!!

 

[bobob]

Here's the motto from my lab:

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

Albert Einstein

It's in our office and it makes me wonder what our patients are thinking when they see it.

Now that's funny.

 

[DrZee]

dude! you guys/gals make me wanna go back to doing bench work HEHE 😀

Yea, the dry ice in the sink and the -80 freezer being completely disorganized brings back many boring memories, like procuring the dry ice itself..they used to lock the fridge that had only dry ice and nothing else. I dunno why, maybe they thought undergrads would get carried away with wacky science fair projects in their sinks.

Even better, if you put a glove in liquid nitrogen and take it out, you can crush it to pieces by stepping on it (your finger should not be in the mentioned glove 😛 ).

Beta mercaptoethanol stinks!

Somehow, some people (like post docs) will occasionally touch/handle EtBr stained gels without gloves then proceed to wash their hands with soap and towel dry like nothing serious happened.

 

[southpaux]

8) Mitochondrial DNA is really not all that interesting.

Not true, its faster mutation rate makes it useful for "molecular clocking" evolutionary events .

2 cents. =)

 

[browniegirl86]

Not fun, but a little scary:

72% of samples from Texas Bay Waters received by the Texas Department of Health (for routine fecal coliform testing) contain at least one medically significant species of Vibrio, and 55% contain a major pathogen (V. cholera, V. parahemolyticus, V. alginolyticus).

Oh, and if you incubate a vacuum-filtered bay water sample in alkaline peptone water to enrich for Vibrio, your entire lab will need to be wearing masks in order to avoid passing out from the heinous smell. There's some pretty raunchy stuff growing in there. It smelled even worse than Clostridium.

Yum.



/microbiology nerdery

 

[browniegirl86]

Its also present in the dark side of the martial arts....more than likely though, they're are very few, if any, who know how to do this....if it even exists.

Kill Bill 2: Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique


Ok, I know it's not the same, but it was the first thing I thought about when I read this.

 

[QofQuimica]

You get a bigger, better high from sniffing diethylether than you do from drinking ethanol, but the hangover is proportionately worse....

Don't put dichloromethane in a plastic container.

If you pour liquid nitrogen on your outstretched palm, it will vaporize instantaneously without harming you. Close your fist around it, and you may need to go to the hospital.

Wash your hands after handling cyanide salts.

Biologists are dangerous with chemicals and should be watched like a hawk. The only people more dangerous than biologists in a chemistry lab are pre-meds and engineers.

Heating a sealed test tube really will make it explode.

Running a diethyl ether column next to a rotovap will cause your column to go up in flames. Pretty, but messy to put out, and difficult to explain to the boss.

The better a student does on his or her exams in class, the more incompetent this person will be in the lab.

Some students can't figure out that the crystals need to go in the open end of the melting point tube.

You can laugh as hard as you want at said students without anyone seeing or hearing you if you stick your head all the way up into the fume hood.

 

[BaylorGuy]

Kill Bill 2: Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique


Ok, I know it's not the same, but it was the first thing I thought about when I read this.

I dont know if the five point palm thingy is a real technique, but things along that line....its just very rare that people know them at all. It would be interesting to do some research on things like this and medicine...just how all the internal chi/chakras and how it relates to internal physical/emtional health.

 

[Punkinhead]

Are you working with Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF)? We just talked about that in immunology. Pretty interesting. 👍

We are not really looking at TNFa but we do screen for other immune cells, mono/mac. T cells, BCells, NK Cells etc. interesting...ish in retrospect I suppose

 

[justskipee]

Rhesus monkeys stink (peyew) and they have Herpes B which is lethal to humans.