J and J

Mr J came back from Mud City and Dr J going off to 'beautiful country' so prof treats us all to lunch. More food!!! Oh yes, the two new faces are two poly students on attachemnt to our lab for 6 weeks.

moving along in the lab

Things got to change. Its inevitable. For this month, all the Fridays will be painting day. Each week, a lab will be painted and at the end of one month, all the walls on level 1 will be have a fresh new coat of stinking paint. Last week it was prof Lee and the common lab area:


Notice all the equipment moved away from the walls, and of course they arrowed the (lowly) staff to do most of the work...


notice the new paint? Well, its of the same colour as the old, only no noticable dirt marks now.


The main corridor will be last, and the lab will be pink. Yes, you heard me right, PINK! Will upload pictures once it gets painted this weekend. Muahahahah....


Besides renewing the old paint job, we got new fridges. But first got to get rid of the old. These two will be shipped to some underdeveloped third world country for resale I guess. Its still in good working order but according to the HOD, we cant have so many fridges all over the place, got to cut down on floor area per lab. So there goes the fridge and there goes the fridge space to stick all the photos...Wonder where the pics are now... btw, the red line means: doomed to die.


The new fridges came in. only -18C min and it is autodefrost, so no RNA or antibody or protein or anything important storage. And they are so short. Shorter than the old standing -20 we have. Quite useless machines IMHO.


Rip it open boys!


Got to let them stand around for one day to get used to the big -80 bullies around the heavy equipment area, then only can on. Else they freak out and die on the spot. Hahahah...okok joking. But fridges have to stand for soem time before you on them because the refrigerant in the compressor has to settle down after the transportation. If not, the lifespan of the machine is much reduced.


Oh, and remember the old shaking incubators that got thrown out? To replace them, the department bought 3 new ones!!! Exactly like the one lab has, only its for public use. They are waiting for the whole place to be painted first before unveiling the bubble wrap.

There should be more changes comming this way in the next weeks and months. Stay tuned!

Rat Race Is Bad When Alone

By Katherine Unger
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 March 2006

Can stress be good for the brain? It may depend on the social setting. A new study shows that stressed rats have an increase in brain cell generation, but only when they can hang out with other rats. Brain cell growth in isolated rats under stress, in contrast, was suppressed.

The finding emerged from a study of exercise. Given an exercise wheel, a rat will run a few kilometers each night. Previous research has shown this can boost brain cell growth. But it also elevates levels of stress hormones, which can dampen the growth of neurons. So researchers from Princeton University in New Jersey, led by neurobiologist Elizabeth Gould, wanted to see if the benefits of running could outweigh the negatives.

They first injected rats with a dye that marks new brain cells and then allowed only some of them to work out. To their surprise, they found that rats that exercised in social groups had more new brain cells than nonrunners, while rats that ran but were housed by themselves had comparatively less neuron growth. (All the couch potato rats, whether housed alone or together, had similar levels of neuron generation.)

To figure out how isolation makes a difference in brain cell growth, Gould's team measured levels of corticosterone, a stress hormone, in the blood of rats at two times. When rats were beginning to run, they had higher levels of corticosterone than did those without exercise wheels. But 4 hours later, isolated animals--both runners and nonrunners--had higher hormone levels than did their socially housed counterparts, showing that the effect of isolation overwhelmed the benefits of exercise. And when rats underwent an operation to clamp their adrenal glands so they couldn't secrete corticosterone, all runners had increased neuron growth, indicating that the stress hormone had negated the positive effects of exercise in the earlier experiments, researchers report 12 March in Nature Neuroscience.

Gould says these results don't apply directly to humans, since even people who live alone typically have some type of social interaction. Plus rats, unlike most humans, run without being prompted. So there's no evidence yet to say that joining a running club makes you smarter. But she believes the results indicate that an individual's social context can determine whether stress is harmful or helpful.

"It's a very important observation," says neuroscientist Gerd Kempermann of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany. But Kempermann emphasizes that the conditions in these experiments are rarely found in human society. "Unless you're in isolation in a prison, it is very unlikely that you are in a situation like these rats."

Brain used while doing maths...duhhh...

To be blunt: A lesson in maths

Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.

Have a read of this: "Scientists find brain function most important to maths ability". And I thought the most important body parts for counting were fingers. Who knew?

OK, lots of news organizations have been guilty of writing the odd ambiguous headline (including news@nature.com). Happily, even the lead researcher of the study, neuroscientist Brian Butterworth from University College London, UK, sees the funny side of this one. When I ask him about it he writes back, "I want to make this absolutely clear: the brain is important in doing maths. Research shows that even monkeys doing maths use their brains to do it."

What Butterworth has actually done is show that different bits of the intraparietal sulcus, a brain area known to be used for processing numbers, light up depending on whether the subject is asked to count things, or to estimate quantities.

When a subject is shown three green blocks and two blue ones, and asked which there are more of, one bit of the sulcus lights up in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. When he or she is shown a block that is partly green and partly blue and asked which colour there is more of, a different bit of the brain region is activated.

Some people have extreme difficulties with maths because they suffer from a condition known as dyscalculia, which Butterworth tells me is defined as: 'a specific impairment in arithmetical skills that is not solely explicable on the basis of general mental retardation or of inadequate schooling'. He and his colleagues think (though they haven't yet tested it) that the bit of the sulcus they have found to be involved with counting, rather than measuring, is responsible.

Fantastic stuff, I think, and oddly counterintuitive. After all, many people (including me) have a tendency to get their fewer thans (reserved for countable things) mixed up with their less thans (which should be used for quantities). How amazing that, given there's a whole bit of the brain reserved for making this distinction, the grammatical mistake is so common.

And while we're pondering the link between neural structures and grammar, maybe we could pinpoint the bit of the brain that helps to distinguish 'scientists find a brain function important to maths ability' from the more universal, and amusing, version.

Published online: 13 March 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060313-1

Medicine faculty dinner

Grand Coperthorne (did I get that wrong?). many tables, forgot how many but MicroB took 6 tables, the HOD made it compulsory for all staff to go. Almost all went.


After some blah blah, the thing started and the curtains opened at the side to reveal a not so impressive garden. Everybody else was busy chomping down on the first course.


Course 1: I just so LOVE baby octopuses!


More blah blah in the middle between dishes:


The jazz band played but no body clapped. Poor things.


Dish two:


Some old school dude gave a speech that was really on the boundaries of being seditious. But nevermind, it was quite funny watching him speak his mind in front of the uni president who was at the VIP table.


The waitress trying to come to terms with the slippery mushrooms.



Yummy fish. As usual, no one dared to eat the stomach part, which I gleefully took. Thats the best part of the fish coz the meat is so smooth and tender.


The theme of the dinner was 'retro' and they had the most 'retro' dressed guy and gal go up to do a catwalk. The winner was decided by the volume the crowd cheered for them. When microB has 6 tables there, competition sort of becomes unfair.


Mr Goh won. With OUR help:


Tehre was then the lucky draw. 15 prizes, and Josie won a juice extractor. I would heck know what to do with it if I won it. Probably use it to homogenize mouse liver specimens...


An elated Josie:


Just look at her:


Some almond thingy that some people didn't like very much. I found it ok.

Many other things happened durign the dinner, of which my memory fails to aid me at the moment. They are insignificant anyway.

Biohazard training

Esco invited the staff to go for a biohazard hood training that lasted for 2 days. So I went.


They promised not to hard sell their hoods, what they in fact did was to pull down their compeditors. There's this room with lots of other brands of hoods all disected, and they point out to you the bad points of it. Like 'when you choose a BSCII hood, make sure it has got this and this feature which...oops, this model does not have...'


The disc test, to make sure the pumps are working well. The large metal thing in the center is supposed to replicate a person's hand while working in the hood.


Laminar flow: didnt know there were two types of these cabinets: the vertical and horizontal ones. The horizontal ones blow air directly into your face, but are cleaner.


The animal unit: used for changing animal bedding and housing. Luxury.


BSC2 hoods.


Higher class BSC2 hoods. A few thousand dollars more expensive than the previous ones, but works better because of the more powerful motor.


The one at the right is called a PCR hood! If you do lots of PCR, have one so it stays RNA free. Luxury.


The guy showing us the correct way to measure airflow from the HEPA filter.


Put the anemometer and measure if the blowing strength is up to standard.


Repeat this on 12 different point in the hood. But the guy that serviced the one in the lab mearly moved the machine here and there, and then he was done. Cheated...


Measuring total air suction power. Have to be above a certain number to be accredited by EU.


Masking tape factory owners are rich.


Another tool to measure air movement. It kinda gets boring after awhile.


The training spot is near the airport, so you hear lots of planes passing overhead as they prepare to land, even the landing gear is out.