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Fruit fly labs usually have incubators that you can set to a nice warm temperature to make the flies breed faster. Sometimes they get infested with mites, which will destroy the flies because the mites think flies are delicious. There are a couple of ways to clean an incubator that's been infested. Most have a "decontamination" setting that cranks the heat up so high that nothing can survive, and once it cools down you set things back to normal and enjoy your clean incubator. Another way is to wipe down the interior thoroughly with 70% ethanol, but this requires you to let the incubator dry out for a day so all the vapor dissipates. A lab at my school got one such infestation. No problem, thought the PI, I'll do what I used to do in my old lab: wipe the inside down with ethanol and crank up the heat. This worked just fine in his old lab because the incubator wasn't airtight so the fumes could escape. But the incubators here... The door of the incubator got embedded in a wall of sheetrock on the other side of the room. The fire wasn't terrible but since the firefighters had to hose everything down a lot of irreplacable lab notebooks were destroyed. My boss also injected himself with ethidium bromide but just squeezed the wound for a few minutes to bleed out whatever got in. He's still alive so idk
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Feb 15, 2016 00:15
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Internet Kraken posted:How do you do this by mistake? We do our maxipreps with an overnight CsCl spin, so he was pulling an EtBr-saturated DNA band out of a heat-sealed tube with a needle. The needle slipped! v  v
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Feb 15, 2016 01:59
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Sam Faust posted:Holy poo poo, that's um unsettling. You should have seen our health and safety report this year. Other stupid poo poo from my youth: we did some mock relay races as a track practice one day. I was pulling ahead pretty far but the guy I was passing the baton to didn't realize that he needed to get a running start before I handed it off. So he stood there stock still and I did my best to keep the gap between me and the next runner while braking enough to not bowl him over. I did this by veering to one side and basically falling on myself while passing the baton. I skidded a good meter or two across the track. My left hand broke the fall but in the skidding I tore up most of it, got blood blisters and jagged tears and almost puked trying to clean the wounds. I lost all use of that hand for about a week while it healed, which sucks when you're a teenage girl who cares A Lot about your hair. That kid went to all the track meets, you think he'd notice that you get a running start when you're handing off. Was also on cross country and sometimes we were hooligans. Whole lotta trespassing. The football team had these big tractor tires they used in their workouts, and we stole one. The high school is in this kind of dip in the land, so we took the tire to the highest hill, put someone in the tire, and pushed it down. We got in some poo poo for that. The guy in the tire got pretty scratched up, too. Ah, youth
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Feb 15, 2016 06:06
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