FYI: Macaque testicles smell the worst!!
January 26, 2019 12:13 PM   Subscribe

Spent months grinding up spiders into powder, filling teeny tiny tin foil cups with the powder, and then rolling it all up into a perfectly smooth sphere. If the ball wasn’t perfect or the spider powder leaked we’d do the whole thing all over again.

Jason Rasgon asks Twitter "What's the weirdest thing you've done for science?"
posted by Johnny Wallflower (40 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
h/t mrbill
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:16 PM on January 26, 2019


My internship in a forensic toxicology lab included spiking beverages with GHB to test a new detection method and making crack with various cutting agents, then trying to purify them back out for analysis.
posted by Flannery Culp at 12:18 PM on January 26, 2019 [7 favorites]


Snatched frogs in the dead of night and cut out their hearts and livers.

I'm not proud of it—I'm very glad I don't do that anymore—but it sure was weird.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:00 PM on January 26, 2019 [2 favorites]


"Set the hamster on fire (it was an accident!)"
posted by zompist at 1:17 PM on January 26, 2019 [4 favorites]


drilled tiny holes into rats' skulls so we could inject alzheimer's disease into their brains.
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:46 PM on January 26, 2019


I peed into a milk jug off and on for a couple years when the drug testing lab I worked at needed clean urine to compare samples against, but that was not about any passion for the science - they paid $5 a gallon. In retrospect, I probably should have shared that money with the roommates who had to live knowing that at any given time it was a distinct possibility that there was a jug of pee sitting under the bathroom sink.

As a bench chemist I didn't travel to exotic locales or encounter animals, but I did always think the Soxhlet extractor I used in undergrad was a weird, cool piece of equipment.
posted by solotoro at 2:54 PM on January 26, 2019 [4 favorites]


The best answer I saw to this was "Pay for access to a paper I wrote." Science!
posted by sockermom at 3:45 PM on January 26, 2019 [23 favorites]


$5 a gallon? How long did it take you to fill up the container? That sounds either not worth it, or a serious incentive to start watering down urine, directly or by fluids consumption.
posted by deludingmyself at 4:41 PM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


Nobody's getting their mitts on my micturation for less than a Benjamin a bottle.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:00 PM on January 26, 2019 [4 favorites]


The urine didn’t need to be refrigerated or anything? Like, wouldn’t the bacteria growth be an issue?
posted by greermahoney at 5:09 PM on January 26, 2019


$5 a gallon? How long did it take you to fill up the container? That sounds either not worth it, or a serious incentive to start watering down urine, directly or by fluids consumption.

A bit of googling that made me faintly uncomfortable suggests one might produce one or two gallons a week depending on fluid intake. Counting times you are out of the house (and let us hope, not hauling around a sloshing jug), call it a solid week to get the fiver. Five bucks seems to be kind of lowballing the compensation for the trouble involved.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:11 PM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


It's a toss up between injecting monkeys with ketamine and electroejaculating them, annotating hours and hours of fox porn, and sneaking up on monkeys on all fours while wearing a leopard print bathrobe.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:14 PM on January 26, 2019 [26 favorites]


“Accidentally sequenced a comb jelly's gonadal parasitic anemone”

That one just cracks me up for some reason.
posted by monotreme at 5:41 PM on January 26, 2019 [3 favorites]


Ok, maybe I should explain that we lured the monkeys using the cries of a confiscated baby monkey who had been a pet, and we spent hours catching grasshoppers and katydids to feed him. Then he went back to a rehabilitation center where he reportedly bit Jack Hanna.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:42 PM on January 26, 2019 [13 favorites]


Recently? Spent a solid week watching dashcam videos scraped off youtube to find the ones that were panic-inducing, but not genuinely traumatic. That was fun. Useful, though. I built a very useful stimulus set for my hazard detection experiments.

Visual psychophysics really doesn't lend itself to too much weird, although Dr Bored for Science and I did do an experiment in grad school where we really needed to eliminate all visual references. Which meant blacking out an already-windowless room and having participants (us included) watch ~10 min segments of movies through a welder's mask. Which might be the best and highest use for The Matrix Revolutions. Yes, we got a paper out of it.

Then again, about a month after Dr Bored for Science and I started dating, she ran me as an EEG subject in an experiment where another participant had declared that the stimulus (flashing black and white bars) was The Wrath of God. It wasn't that bad.

Never did anything too weird in my fMRI days. Did make one postdoc hide under a table in response to the terrible jokes the imaging tech and I were cracking at each other.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 6:05 PM on January 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


sneaking up on monkeys on all fours while wearing a leopard print bathrobe

You could monetize that on YouTube.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:12 PM on January 26, 2019 [2 favorites]


Lots of weird stuff; but the stuff that takes the top prize was when (early in my career) I was forced to um.. rob sequester... my neighbours trash. Daily for ten days. For science.
posted by dhruva at 6:20 PM on January 26, 2019


Came for a Churachura anecdote involving primates, was not disappointed.
posted by ninazer0 at 6:36 PM on January 26, 2019 [7 favorites]


Scraped out the gut contents of a bunch of dead rats, then warmed them to 37°C (using an anal temp probe to verify) in a hybridization oven, so that I could scan them in a nondestructive MRI system used to measure body composition - just before they got thrown in a blender to compare results with a DESTRUCTIVE body comp analysis method.

It stunk. Literally. On the plus side, the resulting paper gets a decent number of citations.
posted by caution live frogs at 8:08 PM on January 26, 2019 [3 favorites]


just before they got thrown in a blender to compare results with a DESTRUCTIVE body comp analysis method

There's the applied science, then there's the puree science.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:11 PM on January 26, 2019 [26 favorites]


There's the applied science, then there's the puree science.

That's enough. Go to your room right now.
posted by medusa at 9:46 PM on January 26, 2019 [3 favorites]


Not me, but: "gone on a field trip with a vegan."

In a lot of places where she does field work, veganism is not a known diet, so sharing meals with a vegan has all the problems of getting vegan food anywhere, plus the issue of first explaining veganism through an interpreter. The veganism was probably literally the biggest obstacle in her colleague's career, as she was apparently intelligent and diligent and personable. Just, nobody wanted to go into the field with her.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 11:35 PM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


I summed series in a nonstandard metric on the rationals... this isn't really a mathematicians' game, I guess.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:02 AM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]


sneaking up on monkeys on all fours while wearing a leopard print bathrobe.

So, was this an "Oh shit we have to sneak up on these monkeys right now no time to get dressed" situation, or more of a "Let's see if these monkeys can tell the difference between a real predator and a distant relative dressed funny" kinda thing?
posted by soundguy99 at 5:08 AM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]


Smooshed up fish fingers and other frozen seafood products in a special machine to test for lurking bacteria. Squeezed out the juice from manure to test for other nasty stuff (that made me popular on the bus home). The windows of the office didn't fit and it was snowing inside the lab while I was smooshing. Really enjoyed it too until the lab manager realised I was under 16, freaked out, and then I was only allowed to label things. Ah, work experience!

Now, as a geologist, I mostly dig holes or stand around looking at cliffs and colouring in while wearing a hard hat. I feel like chemists and biologists get all the fun...
posted by sedimentary_deer at 5:31 AM on January 27, 2019


Uh, let's see.

-spent many many hours watching flies ignore each other
-squirt singing mice in the face with oobleck to find out whether there's a difference in how well they get it off
-attempt to get a truck through a DMV inspection using a language I do not, technically, speak
-desperately try to explain to skeptical customs officials that the mice I'm trying to ship are, technically, worthless

I'll see if I can think of more, possibly.
posted by sciatrix at 6:39 AM on January 27, 2019 [4 favorites]


TIL sciatrix is the go-to MeFite for any mouse smuggling needs I might have.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:14 AM on January 27, 2019 [3 favorites]


excuse you, I was being perfectly honest with customs! To my knowledge, singing mice really don't have any commercial biomedical value, and I was not intending to go make mad stacks of cash off the twelve breeding pairs I was trying to ship to the US. I just wanted to breed them in the US so I could study their descendents without having to hike out and trap them at ass o' clock in the morning.

I would love to try to selectively breed singing mice to domesticate, of course, which is the only real commercial value I can see from them; but I'd need to have gone through a lot more paperwork than I did to pull that sort of thing off.

I have known researchers who stole the odd giant domestic pigeon or white rat for pets when their research was done, of course, and the dog lab I visited acquired study subjects by volunteering to be doggy daycare for the nice people of Lexington. But my IACUC has occasionally insisted that the singing mice are so biologically dangerous that we should probably wear n95 masks to check live traps in, in high-altitude cloud forest conditions--in defiance of all known evidence to date, of course--and we live in fear of being yelled at for health and safety. This is probably the only reason that several of my colleagues and I haven't stolen a few mice to live out their lives in big terrariums somewhere they can be observed day-to-day--they're diurnal and they're super busy, active little critters, so they're a ton of fun to watch. I think they'd be pretty cool pocket pets if you could breed them to be okay with people.
posted by sciatrix at 12:17 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]


$5 a gallon? How long did it take you to fill up the container? That sounds either not worth it, or a serious incentive to start watering down urine, directly or by fluids consumption. [and others...]

Wow sorry, I did not really think there might be follow up questions, or I'd have checked back in sooner.

A week per gallon seems about right, several days certainly. I didn't go out of my way to drink extra, but this WAS my first job out of college and a lot of my friends were still students, so drinking, sometimes to excess, was indeed a common social activity. Also being my first job out of college goes some way toward explaining why I didn't consider my time to be all THAT valuable - I was not getting paid a ton... And it was not really that much trouble - I was already peeing anyway, ya know? It's not like I took the jug with me out to dinner to get every drop. Also this was long enough ago that adjusting for PPP is not quite trivial - looks like it'd be about $7.50 in today's money.

No, it does not have to be refrigerated right away. The old chestnut about urine being sterile is not at all true, but nor is it a super popular place for bacteria to bloom, at least not if you are otherwise pretty healthy. Once it was brought to the lab they refrigerated it for long term storage, but a week sitting in the dark in a closed container didn't do much to it.

Diluting would have caused it to not pass the pre-tests they put samples through; one of the first things that they check for before running a drug screen is to make sure the sample has not been diluted, and part of the point of having negatives is running them through all the same procedures as the samples to guard against false positives. I would not have got my $5. Maybe that would have been the $5 that bought my MeFi account! The horror....
posted by solotoro at 1:38 PM on January 27, 2019 [3 favorites]


A postdoc at my field site was doing experiments using recordings of alarm calls for one predator (say, a crowned hawk eagle) and showing a model of another predator (say, a Leopard) to see which cues monkeys were relying on in order to decide how they should respond to predators. The monkeys were unimpressed by her leopard model, so she had me try on the bathrobe she brought just in case. Fortunately, Diana monkeys don't mob leopards, because they were VERY displeased by my presence, and ignored the contradictory alarm calls.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:45 PM on January 27, 2019 [6 favorites]


Weird things I've done for science, hmm...

I'll refrain from including anything that was part of collecting insects for my entomology course, because they're too easy. Things I've had to do for *actually* doing science for publication:

- Learned how to draw blood from 5 mm long insects (that are not fruit flies so there's no published protocol) (fruit fly protocols don't work)
- counted out exactly 12 dissected eyes to make sure that I was only supposed to have 6 dissected ovipositors
- figured out how to balance dead milkweed bugs exactly perfectly on the sharp tip of a pin for pictures
- taking videos of partially paralyzed insects to document behavioral phenotypes (we didn't intend to paralyze them actually)

sigh. I don't think it's been all that weird. It's mostly been a lot of code. Sciatrix's mice are way more weird inducing than silly bugs are.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 5:31 PM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]


Oh actually now that I think about it, I actually did more weird stuff with the fruit flies. For one thing, I have never spent a meditative afternoon carefully dabbing metallic sharpie in a variety of lovely colors onto the eyes of singing mice, which is not the case for my undergrad fly work.

(They ate the Sharpie. In the morning I checked my vial to make sure they survived, only to see a flurry of flies, each with a different rainbow hue of metallic Sharpie.)

At one point I was trying to make a little mouse treadmill in a box, because the house mouse rotarods that are sold to test fine motor skills would induce hysterical laughter in the singing mice and I need a way to assay fine motor variation that didn't result in immediate escape.

For context, a rotarod is a rubber tube, about the size of a paper towel roll, which is held a few inches off the floor with a couple of wings so that the mouse or rat can't see how far the bottom is, or where their fellows are, while they walk on it. The mice don't want to fall, so they will walk or scurry atop it until they slip and fall on their butts, at which point the experimenter puts them in the home cage. The rotarod can be run at various speeds, and you test fine motor skills by seeing how fast you can turn the rod without the mouse falling off.

The problem with this idea is that, well, singing mice are both considerably less docile than lab mice and also considerably more athletic. I have observed a singing mouse leap five inches to the edge of a cage and in the next instant fling itself off the blind edge of a three foot table, apparently without pause. I have watched a determined mouse leap ten inches from a standstill, and seen one with a good head start achieve two feet in a single bound.

I imagine that running them on a traditional rotarod would be something like an exhibition of murine popcorn. I tried a variety of wheels in boxes to capture a similar, if more constrained, approach... but I never could get such a thing to work without making frequent escapes virtually certain.

Next I tried seeing if there was variation in hunting prowess for lab reared mice given crickets. We're not sure what exactly they eat in the wild, but we know insects make up a lot of their diet, and there was a study done some time ago about squirrels successfully learning to open a nut. I figured that I could score the difference in time between the mouse noticing a cricket and successfully capturing and eating it.

Of course, the problem with this concept is that house crickets apparently have the survival drive of a particularly suicidal house plant. Without fail, an individual mouse would appear to notice the cricket, march up to it while the cricket stood motionless, and eat the cricket's head with no apparent resistance from the cricket.

About this point I gave up and started thinking about scoring body condition in terms of blood metabolites.
posted by sciatrix at 6:58 PM on January 27, 2019 [6 favorites]


Ran around town and visited a number of "grey market" Cannabis dispensaries - to buy 0.5 to 1g of each variety they had available.

(This was to perform a phylogenetic analysis of locally available varieties to determine the "genetic space" of the local grey market.)
posted by porpoise at 4:45 PM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


Ooooh porpoise that sounds really really interesting, what'd you find?

Hey, phylogenetic testing seems like a really good way to trace blackmail cannabis, does anyone do that?
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 3:43 AM on January 29, 2019




eh - outside of very narrow contexts/ applications, whenever I hear "blockchain" I automatically think "scam" (or fundraising - through scamming) Blockchain adds nothing to genotyping.

We standardized on a set of 15 VNTR markers (plus some as backup in case we run into ambiguous cases).

Broadly, we were surprised that mis-naming was less common than we expected; mostly its people giving "new names" to an existing variety or a cross. Sometimes the naming convention correctly identifies the parental varieties/ lineages but often are just house- or whimsical names. Very rarely was a (garbage) strain mis-represented as a different well known/ high-value strain.

In our location, there looks to be three related but genetically distinct clusters of "Kush" - if something was named Kush, it almost always fell into one of those three clusters.

We found one variety that lived up to it's namesake/ oral history - a geographically isolated early Jack Herer that was crossed with isolated local ("hippy," ditchweed) varieties. Compared to samples from different geographies, it looks like the operations are likely home-grown/ propagated rather than imports of finished product (which makes complete sense for our location).

Some varieties identified as "landrace" from distant locations genetically bears out; they haven't widely been bred with local varieties and are slightly more likely to be clonal rather than backcrosses/ seeds.

The black/ grey market is served by both seeds and cuttings (isotypic clones). We can infer some information on the number and size of the illegal producers/ their distribution structures.

Normally chemotype/potency testing requires grams of materials (sometimes up to tens or hundreds of grams if the batch is very big, like, hundred(s of) kilograms big - the samples have to be homogenized for the results to be statistically meaningful) - typically through some flavour of HPLC.

We have been working with an academic lab that does mass spec to quantify chemotype and potency and requires miligram quantities of material.

Not surprisingly, the "genetics"/ genotype allow for potential chemotype and potency, but nurture plays a very large role in potency, whereas chemotypic ratios are roughly the same except at extremes of the potency range for that isotype/ clone.

As for tracing black market dried flower - we can do that, but given that you can clone plants, you can't really definitively state that this producer produced this product - since someone else could be propagating the same clone.
posted by porpoise at 11:50 AM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


Doing phylogenetic mapping… with blockchain. I… why? I can't read this article at work. What are they using blockchain for? What are they doing with it?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:12 PM on January 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


What are they using blockchain for

Fundraising from clueless buzzword investors.

Superficially, it's for some sort of chain-of-custody thing, but I suspect that the "scientists" on their team have no real reason to claim that they use blockchain.

We looked at this outfit about a year ago. The Medicinal Genomics/ Kannapedia people used to be Courtagen Life Sciences who used to do completely unnecessary and near-useless WGS NGS specializing in pediatric developmental delay and autism. They closed in July 2017 claiming inability to get reimbursed by medical insurance companies (rightly so) and subsumed into Medicinal Genomics, originally founded by Kevin McKernan.

We looked at some of their "validation data" on their qPCR microbe testing and it was garbage; they were working from purified DNA and not field isolates or even primary cultures and they were not able to show specificity.

Their NGS genotyping is garbage (no Q values, very low coverage, a bunch of their "uniqueness markers" are very likely sequencing/ instrument errors). They even drank the "genetic drift" koolaid (that old mother plants experience "genetic drift" and that's why cut clones from them suck - not that the mother plants develop high pathogen loads reducing vigour, and the cut clones are pre-burdened with pest load).

They also had some LAMP kits that on the face of it had some seriously bogus claims with no data validation.

They claim that they have a highly experienced bioinformatics team that created "ZiPhyr" (trademark registered, no pubmed entries).
posted by porpoise at 3:09 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


I remember just enough of what I learned in grad school to understand that that is some serious bullshit they are peddling. Bunch of fuckin' Theranos wannabes, I guess. Charlatans.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:38 PM on January 29, 2019


Jon_Evil: "drilled tiny holes into rats' skulls so we could inject alzheimer's disease into their brains."

This is the diametrical opposite of the plot of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:33 AM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


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