#science life

[thefloralmenace]

I was at a bar this week with friends, and this guy comes up to me and asks me if I'm alright because he saw me typing a wall of text, and he thought I was like upset at a boyfriend or something. I then had to explain to him that I had just opened Google Drive on my phone and was designing amino acid assays.

[bigblissandlove1]

This will NOT end well

[desolatesandwich]

2021 hourly comics day!

highlight of the day: Dragon Age II with @canalsobemoe

low point of the day: my inadvisable sleep schedule

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Scientists’ brains shrank after a long stay in Antarctica

The isolation of a long-term mission at an Antarctic research station shrunk part of crew members’ brains, a small study suggests.

A portion of the brains of people living at an Antarctic research station shrank during a long stay, a small study finds. Social isolation and the unchanging white landscape may be to blame.

“It’s very exciting to see the white desert at the beginning,” says Alexander Stahn. A physiologist, he began the research while working in Berlin, Germany. “But then it’s always the same.”

A crew of eight scientists and a cook lived and worked at the German research station Neumayer III for 14 months. Although joined by other scientists during the summer, the crew alone endured the long darkness of polar winter. Temperatures can plummet as low as –50° Celsius (–58° Fahrenheit). Such harsh conditions make it impossible for people to leave.

This creates a lot of isolation. That and the static environment create the closest thing on Earth to what a space explorer might experience, says Stahn. He now works at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Stahn wants to understand how long-term travel in space might affect the brain.

The German Neumayer III research station in Antarctica has adjustable supports that help it adapt to shifting snow cover. 

CREDIT: ALEXANDER STAHN/UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, CHARITÉ-UNIVERSITÄTSMEDIZIN BERLIN

Animal studies suggest similar conditions can harm the hippocampus (Hip-oh-KAMP-us). This brain area plays a big role in memory and navigation. For example, rats housed alone or in bare cages are worse at learning than rats housed with other rats or in enhanced cages, Stahn says. But whether this is true for people is unknown.

Stahn and his colleagues imaged each team member’s brain before and after their polar stay. Over that stay, part of the hippocampus in the crew’s brains shrunk by an average of 7 percent. That’s compared to healthy people who didn’t live at the station. Stahn’s team reported its findings online December 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Stahn says there are good reasons to think these changes can be reversed. Stress, such as isolation, can affect the hippocampus. But the brain area also responds to stimulation. That might include interacting with new people and exploring new sites.

[tulefel18]

so I work in a lab that uses mice and rats for really cool research and today we were learning how to tattoo tiny baby rat toes for identification and all I could think about the whole time was,,,rat-tattoo-ie

[hilaerials]

Drank coffee so I could be awake for late night science and now I’m wired. I have to be back at work in a few hourrrrrssss uuugh, I need at least a few hours of sleep

[barbellsandbetasheets]

Okay, here’s another #PhDThing that’s soul-crushing. 

I had a report and conference paper due today and I have not really been sleeping at all this week so that I could get both things done. I was stressing hard and put a lot of other stuff on hold because of the amount of work involved for both things. This morning  I got an email from one of my committee members that he’s not available for my meeting, so the report doesn’t need to be done for today, and I found out that I can’t go to the conference anyway because I have another trip booked for the same time. So my week was incredibly futile. Nothing I produced was immediately useful to me and I feel like my time was totally wasted because I have other important things on the go that I neglected -- like experiments. 

This is normal. Sometimes it will be your fault (why didn’t I check the conference date before rushing to write a paper to submit??) and sometimes it will be other people’s fault (why didn’t my committee member tell me earlier that he’s not available?). Despite your best efforts, you will have weeks -- and things like this usually happen in units of weeks -- that feel like wasted time. In the short term, they certainly are, but in the long term, it is valuable to lose time this way because you learn something, even if you think you don’t, and they will prepare you to work smarter in the future.