labness

[labness]

First ever PostDoc interview today. I may die of cardiac arrest first

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sometimes I wanna reply “bitch me too” to my mutuals posts but I’ve never talked 2 them so they might not see it as friendly joking so i just dont

[labness]

When some cells in the blood go bad they make a lot more junk than good cells. We try to make a drug that will not let the bad cells dump their junk so they die. We hope that the bad cells will die more than the good cells so that we can use the drug to help folks who are sick with bad cells in the blood. We give the drug to cells and mice and sick folk to see if it works. The mice are okay, the folks are not.

The tests are a mess. We are sad. We fight with labs who are not us. We do more tests. It’s hard to make sense of all this. I write a lot and then I leave to not do this no more.

The challenge was to try and describe my research using words of only one syllable!

[labness]

This is legit. Every group I’ve worked with would at some point start talking about needing to pray/perform a ritual/minor sacrifices to Science to please PLEASE make things work.

sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it

[labness]

It do be like that

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Molecular embroidery!

Protein motif

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Solar System by Jian Guo on inprnt

See more illustration

So Super Awesome is also on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram

[labness]

#mood

[labness]

Nuclear power is the only viable solution to the growing global demand for energy that doesn’t employ fossil fuels.

[labness]

I mean....who doesn’t?

# dceu power couple 

[labness]

Legit

top 10 most frustrating moments in the lab

stretching parafilm and it BREAKS

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[labness]

PhD PROGRAM ALIGNMENT CHART

tag urself I'm in the terrible hinterlands between lawful weird and chaotic normie

[labness]

ok this did more for me than an entire year of pharmacology

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[labness]

so an unexpected thing i learned last week (from a DNA extraction kit protocol, of all places) was that while mammalian red blood cells lack nuclei and are disc-shaped, reptile and avian red blood cells in contrast are nucleated, larger, and more oblong.

mammalian RBC:

avian RBC:

here they are next to each other for size comparison:

i was curious as to why this difference exists and did some digging. it’s still not 100% clear what the reasons are, but it’s hypothesized that mammals evolved in an era with lower oxygen content than birds/reptiles, and thus had the evolutionary pressure to adapt with different circulatory systems (ie. capillaries) that required smaller and bendier RBCs. basically it was the pressure to get rid of the nucleus in RBCs, not the other way around. 

(if anyone has any more insight to add please do! i love learning more about biology)