Space cake, fridge scat, and cow-shouting for SCIENCE!

August 14, 2021 8:12 PM

Question: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve done in the name of science? "Administered enemas made of raspberries to mice." (Twitter thread found via Nature Index)
posted by MonkeyToes (18 comments total)

Fridge scat = cool jazz
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:33 PM on August 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

I had a guy on my scanning electron microscope who tried to measure the electron energy input to turn his sheet of graphene into diamond.

Didn't work, by the way.
posted by aggyface at 9:17 PM on August 14, 2021

I've identified the contents of 10,000 year old pack rat middens.
posted by mollweide at 9:24 PM on August 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

I have a friend who carried a frozen beaver in his back pack on a ski touring expedition up a mountain pass so they could set hair traps to collect wolverine DNA. Apparently a frozen beaver doesn’t pack very well.
posted by furtive at 9:42 PM on August 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

I do boring science on biological information. But before the lockdown, my dad helped get blood from Delawarean horseshoe crabs to help make vaccines safe, before returning them to the ocean. Horseshoe crabs are weird. They aren't even crabs.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:31 PM on August 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

I ate a quaalude and a hit of acid at a Dead show in 1982 "in the name of science". I am told it was a great show.
posted by AugustWest at 12:01 AM on August 15, 2021 [7 favorites]

Threadreader response:

"Thread can be inaccessible because:
The thread is too old (we can only retrieve 3200 tweets per user)
The thread was deleted on Twitter by the author or by Twitter
The Twitter account was deleted by the author or by Twitter
The Twitter account was banned/suspended by Twitter
The author blocked us on Twitter or it's a private account
Content on Twitter can be deleted at anytime!"

Twitter just bugs the crap out of me.
posted by bendy at 12:16 AM on August 15, 2021

Given the recent proliferation of muridaen posts, I say it's high time we re-named our esteemed forum MouseFilter.

All in favor?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:03 AM on August 15, 2021

Fun reads, though from 2019. As for me, I helped a colleague with some bio archaeology studies involving the state DOT roadkill pile, a fume hood, and some flint scrapers we also made ourselves, which weren't strictly necessary, but worked better than cheap modern knives.
posted by cobaltnine at 6:47 AM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

My biologist son spent six months on an island in the middle of the Pacific eradicating acid spitting crazy ants so as to protect the bird nesting refuge.
posted by mtrhd at 7:50 AM on August 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

I say it's high time we re-named our esteemed forum MouseFilter.

I doubt that measure will squeak through. I can already hear Disney preparing a Cease and Desist letter....
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:05 AM on August 15, 2021 [5 favorites]

I've been a scientist long enough that I can't tell what's weird or not. I used to work with an obligate pathogen of squash. so I needed to keep my isolates on detached leaves, except detached leaves only lived a couple of weeks, and I was spending every waking hour detaching new leaves and inoculating them because I always had about 40-50 isolates. So I began rooting leaves by their petioles, to create plantlets that lived, but couldn't grow. To house them, I would take two Petri plates, stack them, then displace them 75%, then use a metal cork borer heated until it was red-hot to make a hole from the bottom of the top plate through the top of the bottom plate, welding the plates together and creating a dime-sized hole. Then I made another hole in the top of the bottom plate to allow water to be squirted into the bottom plate after it had been filled with potting mix. Then I would take a squash leaf, poke the petiole though the dime-sized hole so it was buried in moist potting mix, and the leaf itself would sit flat in the top plate. I taped the whole thing so the lids were attached to the bases, and let the leaves root. You could rest the top plate of one on the bottom plate of another so they could be packed closely in a tray. You could inoculate them and they would live for about 4 weeks! Are you bored yet? Other people would give me used plates so I wasn't wasting new sterile plates to make these. And I washed and reused the chambers until they fell apart. Are you bored now? It's not just that this was weird, it was also very uninteresting! And yet a huge number of my brain cells are now and forever committed to remembering how to do this.
posted by acrasis at 10:15 AM on August 15, 2021 [7 favorites]

This seems like as good a time as any to once again trot out one of my favorite journal article titles of all time; would love to hear from the lab techs/grad students who did the work but I guess the chances that one or more are members here are vanishingly small.

Hydraulic compression of mice to 166 atmospheres
posted by TedW at 12:05 PM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

And of course there’s this.
posted by TedW at 12:32 PM on August 15, 2021

Probably the decision to evacuate a hurricane with half my frozen whole fish samples, banking that one half of the samples would survive the power outage. Conducting 55 dissections of catfish for gut content in the woods without power was weird enough. Working with fishers who joke about drowning you, also fun
posted by eustatic at 1:06 PM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

In the old days we would incorporate radioactive phosphorus ³²P into DNA so its position could be tracked as it moved under the influence of an electric current. ³²P is fizzy and requires levels of PPE to keep it away from people. In the late 80s, I was working in a Genetics Department and for six months, in an effort to become a modern molecular biologist, I was doing RFLP [don't ask] work in the lab next door. Towards the end of the summer, the pressure was on and I needed to get things squared away by the weekend, so while everyone else was at lunch I was busy in the lab pushing back the frontiers alone.

I flipped open an eppendorf test-tube and a drop of radio-active condensation flew out of the lid into the corner of my eye. Simultaneously, from the corner of the other eye, I saw the plexiglass shield, which should have been protecting me from such a misadventure, standing ineffectually 2 feet to my right.
I don’t think I shrieked, but I did clap one hand to my face and stumble over to the sink where I rinsed out my eye under the tap for a llllooonnnngg time. From the sink, I went to the Geiger-counter and heaved a sigh of relief when, as I thrust the detector up to my orbit, that didn’t shriek either.
As a scientist, ideas come to you at the weirdest moments. Several weeks later, I was walking home through the summer evening and I realised with shoulder-sagging certainty that the reason the Geiger-counter hadn’t registered was because, in my incompetent panic, I hadn’t switched it on!

Thirty years on I’m still expecting an ocular orbital tumour to appear. But, realising that I was a danger to myself and others in the lab, I switched to bioinformatics.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:35 PM on August 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

Mom was a tsetse fly researcher in her early career. One of her jobs was to coordinate the students who were paid to be "feeders", that is, put their arm into a cage of bighting flies for ten or twenty minutes. There were frequent occasions when she (and the other researchers) had to cover for no-shows.
posted by bonehead at 5:38 AM on August 16, 2021

Where is barchan, I need them to comment on this
posted by Hermione Granger at 2:48 AM on August 18, 2021