Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Pull The Lever! Wrong Lever!

I've always wanted to be a scientist with a super cool secret laboratory, kind of like Dexter's lab or Yzma's lab from The Emperors New Groove but with less levers. Unfortunately I don't really have the funds for that sort of thing so I've had to make do with my universities moderately cool and not-so-secret laboratory.

You can imagine how excited I was when I heard that we'd be having a biochemistry lab this semester. The highly anticipated first lab was a bit of a letdown, we pretty much just made some solutions and then put them in bottles that we had to empty out at the end of the lab. 

My bottle hadn't been washed out very well and there were little green pieces floating around in it. Looking to seize the opportunity I tried to convince the lady in charge of the lab that we should continue to grow the mold that was already in my bottle. She seemed unimpressed by my proposal and said no. 

The second lab was a lot more interesting. We put some bacteria into petri dishes and then dropped different antibiotics on them to see how the bacteria would react to them. We also stained some bacteria and then looked at them under a microscope. I somehow managed not to set anything on fire and our bacteria looked pretty cool under the microscope.

Bacillus subtilis
E. Coli

This week we're doing something involving blood so it should be pretty interesting!