It’s that time of year again! Time for the University of Warwick Men’s Rowing Team’s naked calendar! The 2013 calendar is now available for order at £8.99 + P&P. A snip!

As has been my wont in recent years, I’ve again agreed to help the team by promoting their calender on Twitter and my blog - if you’re looking for a good Christmas present then you’ve found it. Like the last 3 years, the 2013 calendar is beautifully shot by Angus Malcolm. This year, the women’s team have also produced a calendar in aid of a cervical cancer charity - I will be posting photos from both calenders over the coming week!

Over the last few years, the team has gradually geared their calendar more towards the major share of their audience (gay and bisexual men) and this year, they have really given something wonderful back to their audience - they have produced a film of the calendar shoot (available to buy on their website shortly) as per last year (which was certainly an eye-opener!) and they are kindly donating a fraction of their proceeds from the sale of the film to Ben Cohen’s Stand Up Foundation which aims to tackle the homophobia which alas pervades the sporting world.

In a funny way, I feel really very proud of the boys for doing this and quite humbled that they’ve given something so positive back to their audience. Since the first calendar (released in late 2009 for the 2010 year), I’ve not only been a customer but I’ve also had students of mine involved and though I no longer work at the University of Warwick, I still feel very connected to the place. It makes me feel very happy to see anyone in the sports world to speak out against homophobia (usually rugby players - I count many rugby players amongst my friends and I have to say have always been supportive, kind, sensitive and very protective of me but I think some people seem surprised to see them speak out in this way). I feel doubly so with it being a team so close to my heart.

Well done, boys, and long may your amazing efforts continue!

It’s that time of year again! Time for the University of Warwick Men’s Rowing Team’s naked calendar! The 2013 calendar is now available for order at £8.99 + P&P. A snip!

As has been my wont in recent years, I’ve again agreed to help the team by promoting their calender on Twitter and my blog - if you’re looking for a good Christmas present then you’ve found it. Like the last 3 years, the 2013 calendar is beautifully shot by Angus Malcolm. This year, the women’s team have also produced a calendar in aid of a cervical cancer charity - I will be posting photos from both calenders over the coming week!

Over the last few years, the team has gradually geared their calendar more towards the major share of their audience (gay and bisexual men) and this year, they have really given something wonderful back to their audience - they have produced a film of the calendar shoot (available to buy on their website shortly) as per last year (which was certainly an eye-opener!) and they are kindly donating a fraction of their proceeds from the sale of the film to Ben Cohen’s Stand Up Foundation which aims to tackle the homophobia which alas pervades the sporting world.

In a funny way, I feel really very proud of the boys for doing this and quite humbled that they’ve given something so positive back to their audience. Since the first calendar (released in late 2009 for the 2010 year), I’ve not only been a customer but I’ve also had students of mine involved and though I no longer work at the University of Warwick, I still feel very connected to the place. It makes me feel very happy to see anyone in the sports world to speak out against homophobia (usually rugby players - I count many rugby players amongst my friends and I have to say have always been supportive, kind, sensitive and very protective of me but I think some people seem surprised to see them speak out in this way). I feel doubly so with it being a team so close to my heart.

Well done, boys, and long may your amazing efforts continue!

It’s that time of year again! Time for the University of Warwick Men’s Rowing Team’s naked calendar! The 2013 calendar is now available for order at £8.99 + P&P. A snip!

As has been my wont in recent years, I’ve again agreed to help the team by promoting their calender on Twitter and my blog - if you’re looking for a good Christmas present then you’ve found it. Like the last 3 years, the 2013 calendar is beautifully shot by Angus Malcolm. This year, the women’s team have also produced a calendar in aid of a cervical cancer charity - I will be posting photos from both calenders over the coming week!

Over the last few years, the team has gradually geared their calendar more towards the major share of their audience (gay and bisexual men) and this year, they have really given something wonderful back to their audience - they have produced a film of the calendar shoot (available to buy on their website shortly) as per last year (which was certainly an eye-opener!) and they are kindly donating a fraction of their proceeds from the sale of the film to Ben Cohen’s Stand Up Foundation which aims to tackle the homophobia which alas pervades the sporting world.

In a funny way, I feel really very proud of the boys for doing this and quite humbled that they’ve given something so positive back to their audience. Since the first calendar (released in late 2009 for the 2010 year), I’ve not only been a customer but I’ve also had students of mine involved and though I no longer work at the University of Warwick, I still feel very connected to the place. It makes me feel very happy to see anyone in the sports world to speak out against homophobia (usually rugby players - I count many rugby players amongst my friends and I have to say have always been supportive, kind, sensitive and very protective of me but I think some people seem surprised to see them speak out in this way). I feel doubly so with it being a team so close to my heart.

Well done, boys, and long may your amazing efforts continue!

This furry little chap is Billy and he’s a 6 month old white rat with a brown hood and a stripe down his back. As you can see, he loves his Daddy and enjoys hugging my fingers quite a lot. Billy and his brother Harry (who’s a bit scared of the camera still but is a beautiful platinum rat with a white tummy) joined my household 3 weeks ago.

I’ve been thinking about getting some rats for a while now and was recommended a good shop that buys in from local breeders. I instead went to Awful Chain Store Petshop to look at cages though as I figured they would be cheaper there - and they were, by about 25 percent. In their adoption section filled with ferocious guinea pigs and rabbits with ADHD I met Phil and Thomas, a pair of 6-month-old male rats that were obviously from a breeder and weren’t the usual ugly albino chain store rats from a farm. Phil and Thomas had been there a month and no one seemed to want them. Their original owner moved house and her new landlord would not let her keep them and so she had put them up for adoption. I didn’t really want male rats as they’re a bit docile, I wanted females - mainly because it’s easier to add an extra rat to a colony of females than it is males. I wanted a group of three too, not a pair really but I could not leave these boys there, unwanted and unloved in an awful stinking cage with strong lighting and no toys or anything to do with their time and terrifyingly close to the smell of the piss of unfamiliar aminals and barking dogs wandering the store (yes, Pets At Home, Plymouth, I’m looking at you!). So, I filled in the adoption papers and hurried home with a cage to get their new home set up for them. They have a lovely big cage that could take three rats really but it’s nice for two of them. I then went back and picked them up and brought them home in a cab - much to the chagrin of the Czech driver who told me that he hated rats! Alas, rats do get bad press but I love them. Intelligent, clean, friendly, interactive and a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, I know so many “Phil”s of human format that most of them have nicknames to distinguish them, so Phil had to be re-named and “Billy” was chosen. I like diminutives anyway and I used to own a 35 year old Coenobita violascens called Billy who was part of a colony of eight Coenobita specimens I used to keep as pets. Alas, Billy died not long after I got him and the rest of the colony followed soon after - an infection I think. So, now we have Billy the rat instead and if Phil had to be renamed then so did Thomas who was Charlie for about 1h then it became clear he was a Harry and that stuck.

Their cage now has a wooden air-raid-shelter style house made of twigs, coloured chinchilla wooden chew-sticks attached to the bars as tiny platforms to climb on, a hammock, a rope bridge, a wooden puzzle of sticks to hide food inside, a metal wire ball to hide food inside, a rope ball and various puzzle-based sources of food and exercise. Their favourite toy is bogroll which they use to make their nest with and to play tug-o-war with.

They’re both very handsome boys (and know it) and once they’re used to posing for the camera I’m sure they’ll be Twitter celebrities as they’re so damn cute (and insane).

electrikthunder:

High-Speed photographs of colour ink on water by Alberto Emiliano Seveso.

A pyranha appeared in my colleague’s pint yesterday.

This week we took some of our first year Animal Behaviour and Conservation Biology students to watch a Dartmoor Pony (Equus ferus Boddaert) dissection at Dartmoor Zoo, which is a relatively short drive from the University and is just on the south tip of Dartmoor, surrounded by beautiful countryside. Dartmoor ponies are an essential part of the moor’s ecosystem and are semi-feral at present. In order to conserve the moor’s ecosystem, it is vital that the ponies are preserved in a viable and healthy state. Because of the small gene pool getting even smaller, there is a scheme under way to cull individual female ponies that consistently deliver deformed or ill foals. This sounds quite an extreme means to deal with the problem but it’s really the only way.

To ensure this is a waste-free process, once the animals have been slaughtered, the zoo butchers the meat for use as feed for zoo animals such as tigers and lions. They also enjoy the occasional horse’s head but the public tends not to like to have to see that, so it’s kept to an occasional treat! The skin is used for leather or to make toys for the big cats to train with - as are the tails. The bones and offal are sent to be rendered into tallow and gelatine for non-human use, such as in laboratories.

In this photo, the underside of the horse has been opened and the digestive tract is spilling out. The bright yellow matter is adipose (fat) tissue under the skin of the pony. The large structure hanging to the floor is the cecum - in humans this is a small pouch at the junction of the small and large intestines, but in some animals like this pony that eat a lot of cellulose (in plant material), the cecum is much larger. This is because it is the location in which hind-gut fermentation takes place, where anaerobic Bacteria ferment cellulose to enable it to be digested. 

Simply put, without its cecal Bacteria, this horse would not be able to survive on its diet of grass and plant matter since it would not be able to digest the cellulose present at all. 

This is where the magic happens. This is my lab bench. It’s been my bench since 2009. Before that, I worked in the lab next door. Before that, I worked in the lab I’m in now but on the bench to the right of this one (the other side of a freezer and a door). Before that, I was on the end of a tiny bench, making do with not much space, but only for a few months.

To the left of my bench is a Ph.D student and behind me is our technician. To my right is a freezer - a normal, domestic one - containing all my frozen samples for storage and the lab’s general supply of chemicals that need to be kept frozen, like enzymes. Next to that is the door to the teaching block and then the place we hang out coats.

Top Shelf (from left)

First we have two Windogradsky Columns, made in Feb 2006 using sediment from the Colne Estuary, Essex mixed with seawater from the L4 Sampling Station off the coast of Plymouth and spiked with powdered chalk, potassium sulfate, a piece of scrap A4 paper torn into shreds and some crab chitin. It’s been going for over 5 years now and is a beautiful example of Cyanobacteria, Purple sulfur Bacteria, Purple non-sulfur Bacteria and Green sulfur Bacteria. They get dragged out once a year for the Second Year Microbiology lab class to have a look at - they used to make their own but now time is against them so they do other things instead.

Next are lots of boxes containing filtration apparatus, generously given to us by a friend who was closing down her lab. They’re not in the boxes any more - they’re all in use!

Second Shelf (from left)

First there are two boxes containing 25-mL volumetric flasks. There are about 200 of them in total and they are used when assaying thiosulfate or polythionates by the cyanolytic method. You need lots and lots of these flasks for those assays and I have lots and lots of them, which is good!

Then there are trays of scintillation vials for liquid scintillation counting - some have fluid in them already, waiting for use, but most are empty. There is foil on the ones that are full because the fluid degrades in sunlight, turning brown, which makes it give weird results in the counter. The fluid is a mixture of organic solvents and a fluorescent purple dye. When radiation his the big solvent molecules, it excites their electrons, which are passed on to the dye, which, becomes excited for a tiny, tiny period of time before the excited electron drops to ground state, emitting the excess energy as a photon of light. This allows us to convert radiation to light - one beta particle or alpha particle should, theoretically convert to one photon and these can easily be measured with a light detector, allowing us to count how radioactive samples are.

Third Shelf (from left)

First there are filters for harvesting Bacteria from cultures then my solutions and equipment for scanning electron microscopy, which includes red sticks of sealing wax, which you can just about see. Next are trace elements, microscopy stains and bottles of sterile culture media and metal stock solutions. In real labs, we just write on the glass with a marker - we don’t print nice neat labels like they do on TV - there just isn’t time to make things pretty.

Fourth Shelf (from left)

Sodium thiosulfate in two big white jars - this is the main energy source I use to grow my bugs and I also use it as a starting material to synthesise polythionates - which are in the jars next to these. Amongst these jars are auric chloride - one of few gold compounds and it’s used to kill my bugs in controls. Normally folk use mercuric chloride but some of my bugs resist it and give strange results but gold kills all of them very effectively. The little plastic bottles with green lids are water for molecular biology (ultraclean!) and then there’s the business card of a Romanian collaborator then trace element solutions in dark glass with green lids, then more polythionates, protein stains and an indium standard solution. In a lot of work I have metal analyses done by an external contractor. To ensure the data are accurate, I add a known amount of indium (not found in huge amounts in nature) and then when I get the results back, if only 50% of the indium could be found, I know I need to double all the other results because 50% of everything else was lost in the sample preparation too. Above this are the switches for the air conditioning and a network socket to the right, which doesn’t work.

Front of the yellow shelf, from left.

Stopclock on a magnet holding up a bit of paper with a medium recipe on it; another stopclock; my Gilson pipettes; my Biochemical Society membership card; a newspaper clipping and accompanying note from a friend to tell me about a new brand of gin and then the plug for the freezer to my right! Hanging underneath are rolls of yellow insulation tape (for labelling), masking and autoclave tape (has a dye in it that turns black when heated to the same temperature/pressure that things need to be in the autoclave to render them sterile). These are hanging from gas taps and water-fed vacuum pumps.

On the bench, from left

Just visible are metal cans in which glass pipettes are sterilised by baking in the oven repeatedly. Next to these are rows and rows of Universal bottles with 10× stock solutions of different substrates to grow my bugs on. Then there are some conical flasks with cultures in them, topped with foam bungs covered in aluminium foil or with a red rubber vaccine stopper, which you can inject through. I use these when working with gases or toxins that I wouldn’t want to escape. In front of these are my blue notebooks and adjacent are boxes with very accurate glass syringes for small volumes like 0.01mL and suchlike. At the back are some Petri dishes containing bright yellow agar - probably had thiosulfate and a pH indicator and turned yellow after the bugs made acid. The bench has a glass plate on it to give a flat, wipe-clean surface. It’s a piece of window-glass, nowt special. Behind it are a beaker for waste like tips and filters and a beaker with pens, loops, spatulas etc and two bottles of agar that can be remelted and poured when needed. Big bottle is trace elements solution (such a chore to make, this one, I do 2L at a time, which makes about 200L of culture medium). In front of that is a tray of respirometry flasks, needles and bungs, ready to take to the radioisotope lab.