SelkieLab

I turn into a Scientist when I put on my coat. 28 She/Her

[molecularselkie]

Welcome to the Lab!

Hi, I go by Selkie and I'm a molecular biologist and cell biologist from a lab full of neurodivergent people, going for my PhD.

I post mostly about our antics in the lab, weirdly specific facts about my work, fun stuff about science in general, but hopefully at some point also about life in between, and maybe one day about my crafting if I ever find time for it again. Everything purely SFW.

I don't have time to romanticize science academia through aesthetics. This blog is about staying afloat in a cutthroat environment with a couple of allies, clueless interns, and a supervisor with chronic illness who is ride-or-die for all his students, all while hiding the communal ice creme drawer from the lab safety inspectors.

Are you ready?

To the laboratory!

[raccoonmilf]

using R is like "haha i am a fucking wizard, I am the smartest person on the planet. look at me. Quantifying alcohol use in raccoons. I am peak brilliance" instantly to "I am going to do another 9/11"

[molecularselkie]

R - the programming language that's built by so many different people that some packages are written in american and some in british english. Always fun to find out that your code is not running because that one function only recognizes 'colour' but not 'color' as a parameter...

[ionthevoid]

In the lab, chemicals are either treated with the care of a tiny baby or with the utmost violence.

Stir together your solvents and carefully pour them into a seperatory funnel. Gently shake it like a little baby and vent out the gas. Precisely remove the bottom layer and give it a sweet blanket of anhydrous sodium sulfate to dry. Pour it into a round flask and decant the sulfate. :)

Then, attach the flask to the Spinning DEATH Machine™. Fill the machine with DRY ICE from WINTER HELL. Turn up the HEAT and DUNK IT into the S O U P. Make it spin! Slowly deprive it of OXYGEN. IT DOESN'T NEED TO BREATHE WHERE IT'S GOING! Release it from its prison when the liquid solution has been CAST TO HELL!!

[molecularselkie]

Reviewer 3 reads like he woke up at 3 am in the morning and rage-typed a wall of text hitpiece against our paper that is so riddled with typos and grammatical errors that I can only imagine them foaming at the mouth while bashing their head against the keyboard, and their tone just bleeds #offended - like, dude, who hurt you?

[molecularselkie]

Reading a scientific review by a guy called Frederick Sachs:

Source

[erbiumspectrum]

Prayer circle for the osmometer. I was trying to take a measurement for like an hour and the asshole just kept saying error. I strutted to my professor's class (terrified first-years all look up and stare at me come up to the desk as I try not to laugh at their reaction) and he said to just leave it for half an hour and try again. Currently sipping coffee in the cafeteria, giving the damn osmometer its half an hour to rethink its life choices. It better stops clowning when I come back

[erbiumspectrum]

FUCK MY ENTIRE LIFE

[erbiumspectrum]

My professor came back from class and started trying to take a measurement himself and IT STARTED WORKING

[erbiumspectrum]

@doppelgangerleaverite that sounds like a hypothesis I'd love to test... I even have the perfect little figurine at home... But I'm afraid if I bring a tiny porcelain cow with me and say it's to appease the osmometer, my infinitely patient professor might actually lose it completely at last

[doppelgangerleaverite]

i dunno, it's a time honored tradition in every chemistry lab I've ever worked in, i would be surprised if your prof has never run into similar behavior. anyone who frequently works with very sensitive instruments eventually develops various superstitions and beliefs about how to get them to function the best 😂

whenever ive mentioned having a Little Guy for the instrument ive gotten sympathetic nods of understanding from senior chemists

[molecularselkie]

Our instruments don't have tiny toys but we all swear that they work better when the buttons are pressed gently and they are kindly talked through the procedure... also, pH-meters are divas.

[randomnotesposts]

Getting unexpected/poor results from a lab assay really crushes one's heart. But I'm down to try again tomorrow, smiling but dying inwards

[molecularselkie]

I feel this... nothing worked out this week and I also had an intern following me around who got to see my failure in realtime 4K HD and Dolby surround sound.

[molecularselkie]

So I had a major fuck up today - when trying to set up an experiment I got tangled in the leads of my measuring device and pulled the entire petridish of differentiated muscle tissues off the table. Luckily, the device is okay... but two weeks of differentiation protocol for nothing. I'm not sure if it's because I haven't been sleeping well or if the universe is just punishing me for something, but at the moment, stuff like that just keeps happening....

[galileosballs]

The 'ingredients you can pronounce means it's healthy' line implies a world in which the kind of nutrition a person requires scales with their biology education and grasp of phonics. Which isn't true, of course, but sure would imply some interesting worldbuilding if it were

[molecularselkie]

Acrylamid is relatively easy to pronounce but carcinogenic as fuck, and then there's my favourite biochemistry compound, 5-formamidoimidazole-4-carboxamideribonucleotide, which is essential for making DNA and can therefore be found in every cell of your body. Choose wisely here!

[doctospongiae]

[molecularselkie]

Anyone ever have a plastic dish break during the night, leaking growth media everywhere and leaving your cells desiccated and dead for you to find the next morning?

I know the dish was fine when I took it from the bag, the cells were also fine yesterday...

[molecularselkie]

One thing about not being a native english speaker but having to speak lots of english at work is that I'll never know what kind of accent I'm going to have when I start speaking. I catch accents like infectious diseases. Watch too many Tom Scott videos? Congrats, you're british for the next week. Binged a season of Outlander? You're scottish now, I don't make the rules. On a work trip to france, I caught a french accent so bad that it overtook my inner monologue.

[nathanielthecurious]

academic writing these days is always like “be/longing” “re-membering” “(under)standing”

[662607015]

STEM academic writing is like "we present the results of the ACRONYM project (A ContRived mnemOnic is NecessarY Material)"

[incandescent-crypt]

^real paper I read last year

[molecularselkie]

There's this former phd candidate that was so terrible (not just as a scientist but also as a person) that I was there for the fallout two years ago and still I hear new terrible details about him everytime my PI talks about him.

[myriapoda-1306]

One time I came home from uni very upset and my younger siblings asked what's wrong. I said that mutated flies in our lab escaped because someone broke their jar. I didn't even realise how scary it sounded to them until I saw their faces lmao. I was upset because we were short on said flies (they don't reproduce very well) and my siblings thought that some crazy radioactive fly monsters escaped and we are all fucked now. Love being a mad scientist in their eyes lowkey

[molecularselkie]

Kudos to the guy who uses a unicycle as his main means of transportation and goes by my appartment window every morning, with headphones and backpack and everything on. I aspire to be this extra so casually.

[beardedmrbean]

Science is amazing