don't let anyone convince you we have dignity

A blog for sharing ridiculous things scientists say (funny ones, not upsetting ones), as curated by an actual scientist. I'm Hylian and my main blog is @hylianengineer. Please feel free to submit quotes!

[foxbirdy]

I miss being a single father of my hooligans with chainsaws 🚬

[hylianengineer]

The fish samples keep making me nauseous but they didn't the first time and I think the reason is that I do them by myself now, without C's comedy routine to distract me from the grossness.

[hylianengineer]

I just got halfway through a 90 minute distillation before realizing I forgot to add the tritium spike.

#labworkfails

[plaguedocboi]

Mad scientists are great and I adore the lab aesthetic but where is the love for unhinged field work scientists. You drive down a backroad in the middle of the night and your headlights illuminate someone crouched down in the woods completely covered in mud holding five toads in a net. You’re hiking in the remote mountains and there’s some guy perched on a cliff that should be impossible to get to ranting about rocks, they’re gone when you glance back. You’re hanging out by the river one day and see a fully clothed person walk out of the water like Godzilla and they immediately start recording something on a clipboard while muttering to themselves about salamander populations. Feral Science. Degree in being a cryptid

[hylianengineer]

Look. There is no such thing as hinged fieldwork. It's just permanently Like This.

[fossilprep]

We are a very serious institution.

Photos from the 2025 Badlands Dinosaur Museum fieldwork season.

COB jacket art by D. Barrera Guevara

[neat-deadandlive-things]

This came up in my memories from about 6 years ago. Never let being short get in the way of your fieldwork dreams 🤣

[all-about-that-grayce]

There are so many reasons to be a biologist, and one of them is there are at least 150 different species of deep-sea carnivorous sponges that use microscopic hooks to capture their prey and then GROW A NEW STOMACH that MIGRATES to where the prey is hooked in order to digest it, which they do over the course of days until the animal’s (usually a crustacean) soft tissue is entirely broken down for nutrients and all that is left is the shell.

May I say one more time that they GROW AND MIGRATE A NEW STOMACH

Studying biology is an acid trip of WAIT IS THAT REAL and OMG IT IS REAL THAT IS SO FUCKING COOL

[stochastic-shieldmaiden]

[tinyravenfeathers]

Exactly.

[hylianengineer]

"I should hit more frozen veg with a hammer; that was fun!"

- my senior scientist, during a conversation about bribing ourselves with fun science to survive this exhausting week.

[fluorescentbrains]

this lab safety training module is sending me

[fluorescentbrains]

I feel like whoever wrote these questions was speaking from experience

[inki-drop]

"And he gave it to me for free, Bob!"

I saw this on bsky last night and had to draw the guy

[hylianengineer]

I just saw a post about a character named Alara and I dunno who that is but I genuinely thought we we talking about keeping radiation exposure As Low As Reasonably Achievable.

[hylianengineer]

"You need reliable equipment. Stuff that's been in use for years with millions of man-hours of commerical use. Every imaginable kink has been worked out if those systems."

🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣

Tell me you've never done lab work without telling me you've never done lab work. Those things are full of bugs! And you're gonna launch them across the local cluster and expect them to work perfectly afterwards? Hilarious. They don't even like being moved between buildings!

[hylianengineer]

And you just took them from 1.5g to 0g and are heading back to 1g. Fairly abruptly. Yeah, trust me, your instruments are pissed. They probably don't like ammonia fumes either.

[hylianengineer]

I've not personally worked with centrifuges, but one of my coworkers used to be a biologist, and he described them as one of the scariest pieces of lab equipment he's worked with. The thing is, the balance has to be right, and if you fuck it up, I've heard horror stories about the damn things getting launched through walls.

Now imagine what that kind of uncontrolled force does if you're inside the centrifuge.

[hylianengineer]

Sulfur hexafluoride - enemy from my environmental science degree. Opposite of blorbo. Hate hate hate.

Anyways it got mentioned in Project Hail Mary.

[hylianengineer]

I know a lot of people on this site have a thing about exam gloves, but have you ever put on gloves and had them SQUEAK?!

Anyways guess what I noticed in the lab today.

[hylianengineer]

If there's one thing laboratories love it's having ten zillion kinds of fancy water

[hylianengineer]

Just encountered a lab-themed variation on Dead Dove Do Not Eat. It's a note my coworker left that says "LN2 do not open."