Punk Rawk Scientists Unite

Chandler (a tech in the lab across the hall) and i have battles. We have eppendorf tube dry ice bomb battles, rubber band battles, and pop-ball gun battles. He's a couple up on me with the dry ice bombs, so i decided to get a little creative to get him back.

This year was apparently "Send Evan a Musical Birthday Card Year" which i thought was great, and consequently i hadn't thrown out any of the musical cards (from August). I cut the music mechanism (chip, battery, speaker, switch) out of a card and came in early today. Crawled under Chandler's desk and taped it to the underside of his desk such that when he closed his drawer, it would squeeze down the metal switch to complete the circuit and play "Car Wash."

I figured it would take him about 5-10min to figure it out. It took him more like 2 hours, during which he walked around our side of the floor complaining and looking really confused- apparently it kept cutting off at the right times so he couldn't quite locate the source of the music. It helped that i'd told a couple of his labmates and they played along. Eventually, he took a screwdriver to his desk and had it partway dismantled before finding the thing. Worked out even better than i could have hoped.

Top 10 Best Darwinian Pickup Lines!

As a sort of background, I've been working at this company for about 2 years, just doing the chemist's job. Everything revolves around numbers, acids, balances, you get the picture. Well lately, my creative side of the brain (I always forget which side it is) seems to be going in to hyper-drive. So I've been trying to get more crafty at home so that I don't go too crazy at work.

At Target I picked up a crappy $2.50 bendable tree and some balls to put on it. I brought that into work and then realized the balls weren't enough and I didn't want to spend another $2.50 on another set, plus they are really cheap and crappy looking. The other day I made a tree topper shaped in a star with paper and a highlighter. And yesterday the creativity really sparked.

How to make a Bulb pipette poinsettia:

First cut off a good portion of the pipette part, you want just a little for the "stem".
Second take a utility knife or some other sharp blade and cut an X evenly on the very edge of the bulb (so right on the dome end as I like to call it).
Third take scissors and slice down as far you want to go (I went pretty much to the end of the bulb).
Fourth heat it up in an oven but not too hot or for too long. I used an oven that's at about 110 degrees C and I stood there for a minute before taking them out.
Fifth carefully grab the "flower" and spread out the "petals" on a cold surface so to get the spread-out shape to take hold. A good trick is to flip the rounded ends on the "petals" the other way around, it'll look more like a flower petal and it will make the shape stick.
Sixth color the "petals" whatever color you want, or depending on your supplies, whatever color you can find. I had red lying around hence calling it a poinsettia.
Finally place one of the "flowers" inside another one to make an eight-petalled flower. The trick here is to place a cut up the stem of one of the "flowers" and just squeeze it inside the stem of the other one. Then color the inside near the stem to make it more realistic.
And you're done.

Unfortunately I am not allowed to have cameras inside my building so I can not really show how it looked for myself.

If you really want to see, I'll take one home and snap a pic.

Has anyone else created such things at work? Does anyone have more Christmas-like ideas? I'm trying to fill up this tree and I can only make so many of the "poinsettias".

All,

If you're interested, some of us are getting together in Boston to tinker around. We're coordinating at the Wonderment blog.

Cross posted to mad_science, punkrawkscience.

My name is lauren simone. As an artist, I often demonstrate my interest and fascination with science in my art. Of particular interest to me is dna, the act of mitosis, anatomy, and environmental concerns. If you're intersted in sciencey-geek art, see the image below.

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Found this interesting article on Boingboing.net.

Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat by V.S. Ramachandran

Researchers at UCLA found that cells in the human anterior cingulate, which normally fire when you poke the patient with a needle ("pain neurons"), will also fire when the patient watches another patient being poked. The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others...

He then goes on to characterize Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" as a key indicator of "the fifth revolution" — the "neuroscience revolution" — the first four being Copernican, Darwinian, Freudian, and the discovery of DNA and the genetic code.". "that even our loftiest thoughts and aspirations are mere byproducts of neural activity. We are nothing but a pack of neurons."

You have to skip through the whole "dangerous" question parts to get to this article but I found it really fascinating. The author, along with the help of a researcher's answer to the "dangerous" question, explores how the next revolution will influence our way of thinking about ourselves.

He kind of gets "matrix"-y and philosophical, but really an interesting read.

So which would you pick? The vat or just yourself?

sometime in late november, i passed by the organic chem lab. they were extracting some sort of pigment from spinach leaves (my lab had done it earlier in the week)

anyways, most of the class was at the fumehoods adding drying agents to the mixture. they were all in their labcoats and goggles, holding up flasks filled with what looked like neon green slime. it was awesome. it looked like there was a room filled with mad scientists :P

So I just started in the Acoustics grad program at Penn State, and I need to tell you about our classroom. I would post pictures, but it is in a secure building, so there are no cameras permitted.

It is a pretty normal classroom in terms of size and such. White boards in the front, seats about 25. Acoustic dampers along the walls, and bass traps and diffuser pannels along the celing. Why would you need so much in a normal classroom? How about a tri amped 3 foot tall Paradigm studio monitor, hand calibrated for its position in the room? Add to that a pair of NHT 3.3 monitors, a few big subs for standing mode demonstrations and a 5.1 setup for (lets be honest here) movie night.

Honestly, the best sounding room outside a recording studio I have ever heard. How can you get a more punk rawk classroom than that?

Does anyone have any Chromatogram file in .scf .abi
If you could get one of a chimera that'd be awesome! Thnax

anybody got any good ideas for pranks to pull in the lab for april fool's day? nothing that is dangerous, will cost the lab a lot of money, or will get me fired, please ;)