• Question: What did you do this morning?

    Asked by jenkinsp to Andrew, Emma, Marianne on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Andrew Maynard

      Andrew Maynard answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Hi jenkinsp,

      Got up *really* early and answered a few I’m A Scientist questions. I followed that by posting something on my blog (http://2020science.org) from Friends of the Earth. Then I went off to a meeting about science museums, at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

      There were one or two other things I did inbetween, but I don;t think you want that much detail!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I know a jenkinsp but i presume you’re not he? (a poet as well as a scientist, what a heart-throb).

      This morning I woke up to my alarm at 0700hrs, showered, got my burbling 18month old son out of bed. He said ‘Ball!’ enthusiastically as he does most mornings at the moment so we threw a bouncy ball around his room for a while. Then i got his breakfast together and entertained him with his toy-friends, Iggle Piggle and Monkey. I had a Nespresso double espresso from my new machine which was lovely. Then my wife arrived and i made her some tea and toast. Then I cycled to work and took blood from a girl who said she’d thought for along time that the principal of our university was a janitor. Then I did an experiment on some unsuspecting white blood cells (little did they know they had to die in the interests of science). Then I helped finish writing a begging letter (called a grant) for more money to do research. That’s all i got to say about that….Probs more than you wanted to hear.

      How about you?

    • Photo: Marianne Baker

      Marianne Baker answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Hey jenkinsp.

      So this morning. I got up at about 8:20, walked to work (as I do every day), washed my Western Blot membranes (special pieces of paper that proteins stick to)), put on the secondary antibody (Western Blots are a common lab technique we use to look how much of our proteins of interest are present in samples), did an experiment with our senior post-doc – we moved some cells I’ve been growing into a new growth medium (cell food, basically) ready for the treatments we wanted to apply.
      We’re using two treatments – one to look at how fast they’re growing and one to look at how much they’re dying! Together this will show us if the different things I did to the cells (I tried to decrease the amount of a protein I’m interested in) affected their ‘viability’ – how good they are at staying alive!

      So before lunch I developed my Western Blot (it’s a little bit like an old-fashioned photograph; we add fluorescent antibodies to it and then expose light-sensitive film in a dark room, develop that and see how much light is coming off the blot!) and saw it hadn’t worked very well, so I’m re-doing that now with some different antibodies to see if it’s any better.

      It’s been a really busy day actually, and I won’t get home until at least 9:30-9:45!!

    • Photo: Emma Pilgrim

      Emma Pilgrim answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I had to do a lot of reading as I am preparing to write my first book chapter – all very exciting

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Hi jenkinsp. I interviewed a young lady for a job here. We have a vacancy for a data analyst here. I then answered some e-mails on our future waste management:).

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