Are There Any Questions?

Over the past few months, I've been preparing for Lab Week by collecting questions from my friends and readers about laboratory work. I've done my best to be honest, because the point isn't to trick people into joining the ranks of Medical Laboratory Scientists by painting the profession in a prettier light than it deserves. I love what I do, and my goal is to educate folks on what I mean by "what I do," and how I got there. If that inspires anyone to look into laboratory work as a career, that's an excellent bonus, and I encourage those folks to pipe up with any other questions they may have.


What sort of school is required for the job (in the US)?

That's a tough question, because "the job" can mean a few different things, and different schools handle Medical Laboratory programs differently. Most hospitals prefer to hire people who are certified by the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP), so if you're considering a laboratory career, their website is a good place to start. This link will bring you to their certification section, where you can look into the various requirements to sit for the exams and earn a certification. There are several different certifications, and several ways to qualify for them, depending on your level of education and experience. In a nutshell, you qualify for certification as a medical laboratory technician (MLT) with an associate's degree, and a medical laboratory scientist (MLS) with a bachelor's degree. The difference between the two, in practical terms, varies a lot. Many employers will give an MLS a higher salary than an MLT, reflecting the extra years spent at school, but some places don't bother to differentiate between them. If you're looking to move up into management, keep in mind that most places will require the higher degree for supervisory or charge positions. You can also choose to certify in only one sub-specialty of laboratory science, like biochemistry or microbiology, but that will limit the areas you can work in, and all the schools I know of prepare you for the "everything" exams.

At school, you'll learn chemistry and biology and math and physiology, with a little bit of computer stuff and instrumentation thrown in. In my limited experience, a bachelor's level program will go deeper into the why and how of laboratory testing, but a graduate of a 2-year program is no less equipped to do the actual work. There are sit-and-take-notes classes, of course, but also many hours spent in the school's labs, learning techniques. Hospitals sometimes donate their older equipment to Medical Laboratory Science programs, so students get a chance to work with the instruments instead of just learning things theoretically. See if the school you're applying to has an internship program, or if you need to find work experience yourself. Internship programs are great because you get a feel for what the lab is really about, and employers get a free trial of you as an employee, so there's a chance you'll get a job offer out of it if you impress them.

Is it a good long-term job, or do most people get into it temporarily on the way to something else?

I think it's a great long-term job because of the job security. The laboratory workforce is aging, and there aren't enough new techs graduating to fill the positions left open when people retire. Hospitals are doing their best to cut back and make do with fewer techs, but the fact remains that someone's got to run the laboratory if the hospital is going to provide decent health care, so laboratory personnel aren't going to be downsized out of existence.

I'm happy that I made this career choice mostly because of the built-in flexibility. Because hospital laboratories are running 24 hours a day and never close, there are an incredible number of schedules to choose from. There are usually three shifts - days, evenings, nights - and some hospitals even have some swing shifts that fit somewhere in the middle. You can work full-time or part-time. You can work only weekends. You can be "PRN" (which means "as needed") and get called to fill in gaps in the schedule when people are sick or on vacation.

Not everyone shares my opinion about how good a career choice it is. Unfortunately, the pay for most Medical Laboratory Technicians and Medical Laboratory Scientists is far less than for comparable healthcare professions, like radiology techs, nurses, and pharmacy techs. Here's the most recent data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Because of the lower wages, it's difficult to keep ambitious and talented young people in the field. Many younger techs I've worked with have used the laboratory as a part-time job while they go back to school to pursue advanced degrees in the hopes of moving into nursing or pharmacy. Let's just say that the med techs who stick with it long-term are definitely not in it for the money.

How much continuing education do you have to do? How well does your employer support it?

To maintain my MLS certification with ASCP, I need to complete 36 education credits every three years, spread across different areas of laboratory work. ASCP offers some online activities to help me earn credits, but unfortunately most of them aren't cheap. I try to look for free educational activities through vendors and other professional organizations. There are several ways to earn credit, including attending college classes, publishing a research paper, serving on committees, or attending lectures. The amount that an employer will chip in for educational activities varies a lot - education is often one of the first casualties of a shrinking budget. I've heard that some hospitals are very diligent about keeping their techs certified and helping track their education credits, but I've been more or less on my own so far.

If you're employed outside of the hospital world, certification maintenance is less important. Of course, keeping up on developments in your field of work is a good idea either way.

How much of your work deals with software?

Laboratory computer systems are interfaced with the hospital's information system so that tests can be ordered and reported electronically. Especially in hematology and chemistry, tests are mostly run on large analyzers which are hooked up to the computer system, so the techs only need to accept results on a screen before they send them on their way. You definitely need to be comfortable with learning how to work with new software if you're going to work in a modern lab, because the instruments all have their own operating systems, and most of your day will be spent ordering and reporting tests on computer screens. The more you can learn about how to make the instruments do what you want, and how to fix little issues that arise, the less stressful your work shifts will be. Of course, none of that helps you when the computers crash and you need to do it all on paper...

Do you have to wear different levels of protective clothing depending on the test?

I'm always wearing gloves and a lab coat when I'm handling specimens, because it's safest to assume that every specimen may be positive for something infectious. Where I am right now, all the blood I work with has tested negative for all the bad stuff, but it's important to remember that only means "the bad stuff we currently know about and test for." Blood wasn't tested for West Nile virus or Hepatitis C twenty years ago, and I have every reason to believe that some new bloodborne disease will become an issue in the next few decades and I'll find out that all this blood I thought was "clean" may have in fact been exposing me to some new pathogen. So I glove up, always. Why take a risk?

On top of the gloves and lab coat, I sometimes wear a face shield or work behind a splash guard if I'm doing something that might cause splashes. Cutting open units of plasma and pouring them into a pooling vessel, for example. That gets messy, and I don't need plasma in my eyes. I've also got big insulated gloves to wear when I handle specimens frozen in liquid nitrogen.

What's the neatest/most unusual thing you ever found (if you can talk about it)?

I think it's pretty incredible that in many cases, I was the first person to know that someone had influenza, or herpes, or leukemia. Until I called the doctor with the result, it was a suspicion. Afterwards, it was a diagnosis. That sort of thing kept me very aware of how important the work is.
 

Lab Week Link Roundup

It's that time of year again, where the laboratory professionals emerge from their basement lairs and sniff the air hoping to detect the scent of muffins brought in by glassware vendors.

I write about my work often on this blog, and I especially enjoy highlighting my profession during National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week. It's a profession that's not well understood by most other healthcare employees, let alone the general public, and I feel that it's important for me to educate more people about who laboratory professionals are and what they do.

I do have some new posts planned for Lab Week (April 22-26, so I guess the weekend techs get no respect this year, what's up with THAT?), but because some folks might be coming here for the first time, I wanted to link back to some of my previous lab week posts so everyone has a chance to see them.

I've written about influenza testing, and how the doctor knows it's the flu and not just a bad cold, and what doctors are looking for when they hand you a cup to pee into.

Someone asked me about all those different tubes they fill with blood when you go for a blood test, and so I wrote a little about the different tube types and what they're used for. I took it a step further and explained what happens to the tubes once they get to a lab, getting into lab information systems and automation.

Because much of my lab career so far has been spent in the blood bank, I've also got a few posts out there about blood donation and what it's like to see regular patients receiving that blood. For those interested in more of the science behind blood types and transfusion, I covered a little of that too.

Two years ago, I made a (very amateur) slide show detailing how important laboratory professionals are to the health care team, and what exactly it is we do all day. And night. And weekend. And holiday.

Not all lab work is hospital work - I will try to talk more about that this year, but for now, you can have a look at what my job in a manufacturing lab is like. 

I hope you enjoy reading a little about laboratory work. I like writing about my profession, and I'm never sure how much detail people want to see in my posts about it, so I'm always excited to have Lab Week come around to give me an excuse to geek out about it a little. There will be a few more posts up this week, so please come back!

Blood Donation During a Crisis

A horrible thing happened in Boston this week. As is our human nature when faced with violent acts, people reacted with horror, sympathy, and an aura of nervous energy. Whenever there's a tragic event, whether it's a bomb, a plane crash, or a tornado, most of us feel like we should do something to help those affected. Even if we're far away, even if we're not directly connected to anyone who was hurt, there's this spark of humanity inside us that drives us to action.

It's crucial to note, though, that not all helpful actions are necessary, and not all good actions are immediately helpful.

Many people in my Twitter feed were urging people to go and donate blood. I am an occasional blood donor. I encourage people to be regular - for their own personal definition of "regular" - donors. But this week, when I saw the flood of "go give blood" tweets, I cautioned against rushing to the donor centers. 

Why? People were horribly injured and being rushed to hospitals for surgery. Didn't they need blood?

Yes, many of them likely did. But the hospitals were prepared. Every hospital has a plan in place to help them deal immediately with an "external disaster." They keep a good supply of blood on their shelves, and they have means to get more very quickly.

An organization like the American Red Cross* can move blood products efficiently from one area of the country to another. It happens every day, even in calm and peaceful times, but in an emergency, the wheels turn very quickly to get blood products to where they are needed as fast as possible.

There seems to be an almost-constant "blood shortage" going on, so it does seem confusing when Red Cross officials tell people not to come in right now and donate. What's important to understand is that the key to having enough blood available for a crisis is to have an adequate blood supply at all times. That's why the Red Cross encourages regular donations: the need is constant.

So why isn't more blood better? Why is the Red Cross of Eastern MA asking people to please wait and come in next week if they want to donate blood?

The thing about blood is that if you go to the donor center right now and roll up your sleeve, and have a unit taken from your veins, that blood will not be used immediately. It needs to be tested for HIV, Hepatitis B and C, West Nile Virus, and all sorts of other things. There's a two-day turnaround for blood products. Donating blood during a crisis isn't necessarily going to help the victims of that particular crisis. The Red Cross will do its best to accommodate all the generous donors inspired by the tragedy, but there's a risk involved with a huge rush of donors at one time. Blood is perishable. Units of blood get a 21-to-42-day expiration date. So what happens a month after the crisis, when everyone's just donated but all the blood is about to expire? Nobody wants to see blood wasted.

And that's why I urged people to wait and see whether there was a need before rushing to donate. Replenish the supply by donating a little later, so that there's always blood available for everyone who needs it.

What can you do to help when disaster strikes, then, if you shouldn't give blood?

1. Don't misunderstand me! Do donate blood. Please do. It saves lives and nobody would argue otherwise. But don't rush in after a disaster. Wait. See if the American Red Cross puts out a call for donors. If there is no immediate need, make an appointment a week in the future, or two weeks. Give often. Help keep the supply constant so hospitals can do their thing when they need to.
2. Follow @RedCross on Twitter or like them on Facebook. When something is happening, those accounts are very active and are an excellent source of news and support. There are accounts and pages for local Red Cross areas, as well. They will tell you how you can help.
3. Learn CPR and first aid. If you're ever in a position to give more direct help to someone injured in an accident or attack, you will be more confident and better equipped to act.

*I use the American Red Cross in my examples because I have a familiarity with their processes thanks to my work experience, and because they are a very important blood supplier for much of the United States. I don't claim to speak for them in any official matter.

In My Blood

In most other workplaces, a blood-spattered desk would be cause for a police investigation.

For me, it was just Friday.

Let's just say that if blood or other bodily fluids and excretions bother you, you probably don't want to pursue a career as a medical laboratory scientist.

But maybe you do want to pursue that path. Maybe you love medical science but aren't masochistic enough to put yourself through medical school. Maybe you love helping sick people but don't want to be anywhere near them while you do, because, frankly, they're a little needy. Maybe you love biology and lab work, but don't want to spend a lifetime begging for grant money to keep your cell cultures or graduate students fed. There's hope for you yet! Stay tuned to find out how you too can have a vibrant healthcare career!

I know, I'm a ridiculous infomercial, but I feel like it's my duty to promote my profession, because there are too few of us out there, and we're not well understood or respected. I want that to change. Everyone knows about doctors and nurses, but the third vital side of the healthcare triangle, the medical "techs", live in relative obscurity.

The Board of Certification for medical technologists here in the US changed things up a couple of years ago and tried to give us more respect by changing our title from "Medical Technologist" to "Medical Laboratory Scientist". It was a lovely gesture, but it didn't really help. I mean, I didn't get a raise or a talk show or anything, and I still get a blank stare and polite nod when I tell folks what I do. Although I think people picture a lab coat and some test tubes now, which is a little closer to right.

I write about my work sometimes on this blog, and last year, I wrote a series of posts here for Medical Laboratory Professionals Week. Some of them explain the science and techniques behind laboratory tests, and some of them are about my experiences in the various labs I've worked in. I would very much like to do that again this year as a way to raise awareness about the profession. I never heard about medical laboratory science careers until I was already through university with a Bachelors in Physiology and couldn't find much to do with it. I hope that by writing about it here, I can make the profession just a little more visible, and maybe inspire someone to look into it as a career.

Even if I can't inspire anyone to get into a lab career, maybe I can help people understand what the job is about. Why do you only have to fast sometimes before a blood test? What happens to a blood donation? How does blood tell the doctor how sick someone is? I'd love to make Medical Laboratory Professionals Week into a sort of Q&A session, but for that I will need your help. Does anyone have any Qs that I can A?

What do you think the job is? Have you ever heard of it before? What would you like to know about labs, blood, and medical tests? I'm getting started early this year because I want to collect questions and get to work answering them well. I want to give myself time to draw diagrams and take pictures and maybe even interview folks in different types of lab positions, so I can really do right by my profession and show off my colleagues as the caring, intelligent, dedicated people they are.

So, hit me with your questions, and I'll do my best.

Plate it out

This is the 22nd of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here.

This week, I got a brand new ornament for my tree. My friend Natasha, who sent it, also contributed a great guest post for my blog, explaining why she bought it for me. When she saw it, she was reminded of me, and of microbiology, and thought it would be a nice way to connect us across a distance. I am very touched by the gesture.

But... it's wrong.

Not that Natasha chose badly, of course. I love it for what it is and what it represents. But the pattern on the petri dish, as pretty as it is, would flunk that artist right out of med tech school.

Microbiology is different from some of the other laboratory sciences, because it's about identification more than about quantitation. When you get a blood test done, you're getting a count of types of cells, or a measurement of the concentration of cholesterol or iron you've got in your body. With microbiology, it's a murder mystery, a whodunit. The aim of the game is to label the bug that's giving you trouble, so the doctor can deal with it properly.

I'll get into the details in a later post (I promise) but you should know that when bacteria are put onto tasty food like what's in a petri dish, they grow like crazy. Each individual cell stays in one spot and divides like mad, making a little spot. When you have a ton of bacteria, the spots smush together into a smear of goo. To identify the bug, we need a pure colony. Which means a spot that was made by one original bug, isolated from all the rest. We need to spread out the specimen so thin that we're planting single bugs at a time. That's not easy.

We use a technique of "streaking" across the quadrants of the plate. 

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The idea is to smear a little bit of specimen on the plate, then use a new, sterilized tool to drag a tiny amount of it over to the next quadrant. By the end, you're dragging thinner and thinner concentrations of bacteria across the plate, and you'll get isolated colonies that you can then run tests on.

So, while the ornament gets the gist of it, I suspect it was created by an artist who was inspired by the beauty of microbiology, rather than a microbiologist who was moved to create art. Watercolor isn't the best way to go if you're trying to recreate the streaking pattern. A thick paint, dragged across the page like you'd do with the bacteria, would probably be more accurate.

But that doesn't mean I love it any less.

It’s Kind of Like They’re the Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen of Christmas Ornaments

Note: Because I skipped a day of the Ornament Advent Calendar, and because I received a beautiful new ornament as a Christmas gift this week, I am doubling up on today's posts with the help of my good friend Natasha. She wanted to write a piece about the ornament she sent me, to explain the motives behind her choice. Here is her guest post. I'm going to call it post #21. My post about the ornament will be up later today, and will be #22.

Ornaments! Left: Natasha Right: Jen

You know what I mean. Fraternal twins that look so much alike you wonder if they’re identical. But if you look hard enough, you can see the differences.

Admittedly, our ornaments are more obviously different than some of those twins. Jen’s ornament is dark blue on dark blue. My ornament is dark blue on light blue. Totally different.

The pattern on the ornaments is the same though, and that’s most of what matters here. For most people, this pattern is just some strange streaks down the left side. However, once I laid eyes on it, I knew Jen had to have it for the pattern. And so did I.

See, that pattern is actually what makes these ornaments perfect. They’re little watercolors in petri dishes, so they’re already “sciencey” looking. But that pattern is a painting of how microbiologists isolate bacterial colonies. To isolate a single bacterial strain (thus, genetically identical), microbiologists or lab techs (HI JEN!) or students or whomever starts by streaking a big ol’ mess of bacteria from an old plate to a new one. Then, they sterilize their streaking implement (usually a metal tool called a loop) and draw a line through the heavy streak, and streak again a bit more wide-spread. Once you repeat that twice more, the last streak should result in not lines of colonies grown together, but isolated colonies that each resulted from a single bacterium. (Wikipedia has a great image. And about.com has a very clear write-up, if you want more details.)

I had to get this for Jen because she’s undoubtedly done this a million times. (I’ve probably only done this a half million or so.) Because she’s a total science geek, just like me. Because it’s beautiful in it’s own right, but there’s like a little secret hidden in the art if you’ve been there.

Because we have a similar background with a lot of shared experiences, and I realized this could give us a tangible link to those shared experiences that we mutually geek out about regularly.

I hope she takes it on that cruise she’s always talking about and shows it off.

Natasha and I are long-time Internet buddies. We try to get together in reality sometimes, but we live far apart. Still, we talk a ton online, and I think we get along so well because we both like to geek out over stuff in our own ways. She runs a blog of her own, MetaCookbook, where she discusses food, science, and beer, and treats her readers to some fascinating blather along the way. I encourage you to check out her stuff. She's not a recipe blogger, and she's not a rabid granola foodie. She's just someone who loves food, from growing it to eating it to the communities it can build. She's funny and smart and real and I get mad at her when she leaves the blog un-updated for more than a week. That should be enough information to get you over there for a look! 

- Jen

'Tis the Season

Not the Christmas season, of course; it's much too early to be thinking about Santa Claus. Unless you're a major department store, in which case you've had your light-up snowman yard ornaments on display in your seasonal section beside the rakes and lawn bags for two weeks. I know it's true because I saw this guy at Sears last week and would have brought him home to live with me if he wasn't so ridiculously expensive.

But I digress.

What I'm trying to talk about is cold and flu season, which started a week ago for me. Despite my best efforts to wash my hands and stay healthy, I caught a real humdinger of a cold. In hindsight, handling a giggling snotty nephew wasn't the best idea, but I just couldn't help myself. So I got to enjoy blocked sinuses, sniffles, sore throat, fatigue, and a low fever, making me a miserable slug for a week. I'm grateful that everyone has given me permission to take it easy and rest up, and I'm glad that laundry is a fairly low-energy task, because otherwise we'd be out of socks by now.

Don't be like me. Don't get sick. Avoiding small, sniffling children is a good start, but that's only one (very effective) method of germ transmission. So what's to be done?

Wash your hands.

 

Everyone says this, because it's absolutely the best way to keep from getting sick. The CDC has a whole page dedicated to handwashing, with links to videos, factsheets, and podcasts.

How to wash your hands. Image from cdc.gov

Yes, sometimes people will cough or sneeze right at your face (small children, I'm looking in your direction) and you'll be out of luck, but it's far, far more likely that you'll get germs on your hands and deliver them to your face yourself. Someone coughs into their hands and then opens a door, or sneezes on an elevator and pushes the buttons, and then you follow behind them a few minutes later, unaware of the collection of cold viruses waiting for you on those surfaces. You open the door, you push the button for your floor, then you rub your tired eyes or bite your nails. The next day, you'll start feeling off and will probably start distributing those germs yourself.

Cold and flu viruses (and plenty of other nasties) can live on surfaces for up to 48 hours under the right conditions, so unless you want to wear gloves all day and get strange looks, you should make an extra effort to touch only what you need to, wash your hands every chance you get, and keep your hands away from your face. At home, if someone's sick, break out the Lysol now and then to spray doorknobs, toilet handles, and faucets. Encourage everyone to wash their hands after using tissues to blow noses, and to cough and sneeze into their sleeves instead of into their hands.

You don't need to bother with antibacterial soaps. Any soap will do, used with warm water and brought to a good lather. In fact, there's research to suggest that the main antibacterial agent in most of the commercially available hand soaps, Triclosan, is contributing to antibiotic resistance.

It's also a good idea to keep an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with you, for times when you may not have quick access to soap and water. Again, antibacterial agents aren't necessary here - anything that's got an alcohol content of 60% or higher will be effective in destroying most of the bacteria and viruses that are on your hands. You should still look for a sink eventually, though, and wash your hands the old-fashioned way as soon as you get a chance.

With all this handwashing, you're likely to get dry skin, no matter how many emollients the soap and sanitizer manufacturers add to their products. Get yourself a good hand lotion, because chapped and cracked skin is not a good barrier against germs!

K-cup Vivisection

Things got a little brutal yesterday at work.

I've moved up in the world and now work in a place with a communal Keurig machine in the break room. Everybody buys their own K-cups, so there's no fighting over who paid how much for their coffee dues, and we all get to make our favorite flavors. Heaven. Seriously. It's the small things.

After spending too much money on K-cups, my coworker and I each picked up one of those DIY-K-cups from Bed Bath and Beyond (with a 20% off coupon, naturally). The packaging says you just fill it with your preferred ground coffee and pop it into the machine for a delicious cup of coffee for a fraction of what the official K-cups would cost you.

The thing is, we can't get it to work. We get coffee, yes, but it's terrible. Even filling it to the absolute maximum line and setting the Keurig for the smallest cup (6oz), the result is extremely weak. We've tried putting more coffee, less coffee, finer and coarser grinds, and different brands of coffee, but it always comes out like a cup of watered-down coffee. Watching the process closely to pinpoint the problem, I noted that the liquid coming out of the Keurig with one of these things in place was a lot lighter in color than when a K-cup was in there, so I put in a K-cup (since I wanted a decent coffee!) and watched the machine to confirm my suspicion. Sure enough, the coffee looked dark at first, but gradually got lighter until it looked as watery, right at the end, as the stuff coming out with the Solofill cup.

Hypothesis from the peanut gallery in the break room: Maybe the K-cups are super-packed with much more coffee than we could fit in the Solofill! Considering how everyone who walks up to the machine with a K-cup is always unconsciously shaking their little coffee pod like a maraca, I knew this couldn't be true: if it was packed really tight, it wouldn't make noise when shaken. The group wanted proof, of course, so I fetched a sacrificial K-cup from the box of freebies in the office supply closet, which is stocked with decaf and flavors nobody likes. My victim: spicy eggnog. Eeeeeewww.

It was obvious, once I held the pod up to the light of the window, that it was only half full. The interesting thing is, it's the top half that's full, and the bottom is just air. I cut it open to confirm that it was just air and not a filter or something, and yes, just air¹. The top half of the cup was taken up by a thick papery filter full of coffee.

Second hypothesis from the peanut gallery (we have very chatty peanuts in our group): maybe it's not real coffee in the K-cups! Maybe they put instant coffee in there to fool us! The problem with this, though, is that a used K-cup still has coffee in it. Yes, we dismembered one to check. 

New hypothesis! Maybe there's a combination of instant coffee and real coffee in there. This would explain why there is still coffee in the pod once it's done brewing, and explain why the coffee is darker at the beginning, because the water dissolves the granules right away while the rest of the coffee does its thing. My goodness, what a sexy hypothesis! How to check? We tore the lids off the new and used K-cups to compare the volume of coffee grounds, because obviously the instant coffee would have melted away. Weighing them was immediately rejected, because one was waterlogged. Instead, we dumped out some of the dry coffee from the new pod and compared it to regular ground coffee. It looked the same, but just to be sure, I sprinkled some of the K-cup coffee in a coffee cup and added warm water to see if it would dissolve. It did not.

So now we all know what goes on inside a K-cup, but aren't much closer to making decent coffee with the reusable filter. The current hypothesis is that the filter isn't fine enough and the water goes through too fast, not bringing enough coffee flavor with it. Cramming more coffee into the Solofill just causes an overflow problem, so that's not the answer. The paper filter in the real K-cup is very thick, so we're thinking that's the key.

They sell other kinds of multiple-use Keurig pseudo-pods², so the new plan is to buy a couple of different ones and see if they work any better. All of them seem to have similar reviews online, so it's hard to decide what to try, but with our filter hypothesis, I'm going to look for one with a very very fine mesh.

1. I suppose it may have been helium. I did not run it through a mass spectrometer.

2. Pseudo-pods, as in "false pods" not as in "a temporary protrusion of the protoplasm, as of certain protozoans, usually serving as an organ of locomotion". To my knowledge Keurig coffee machines are not amoebas.

Mars and the Wright Brothers

During my week in the Outer Banks, I braved rain and high water to visit the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills. Even on a do-nothing-and-relax vacation, as this one was supposed to be, I couldn't resist visiting something historical and museum-y.

 

This boulder and metal track in the ground mark the takeoff point of the Wright Brothers' Flyer, and the four smaller plaques in the distance mark where the first four successful flights landed on December 17th, 1903.

First successful flight of the Wright Brothers

One hundred and twenty feet. That's how far Orville Wright got on his first successful powered flight, which the brothers were smart enough to capture on film. It is amazing to me that there is a photograph of this huge step forward in technology, this incredible achievement. And this all happened in 1903, which isn't really all that far away if you think about it. Not much more than a hundred years from their success in flight, we used a rocket-propelled sky-crane to gently lower an automobile-sized rover onto the surface of Mars.

I bring up the Mars Curiosity rover not only because it's awesome and on Mars, my favorite planet that I don't currently live on, but because we stayed up late on Sunday night, in the big rented house on the beach in Avon, and hooked up the TV to the internet to watch the live feed from NASA as they monitored Curiosity's descent to the surface.

Four of us, and a couple of sleepy weenie-dogs, settled in on the cushy sofas for the whole thing, from the interviews with NASA engineers to the triumphant cheers and tears of joy on the big screen when a safe landing was confirmed. More than once that night, as we watched the camera pan over the control room and the excited and nervous NASA folks speaking into their headsets, I was overwhelmed with a sense of awe and insignificance. Not only are we at a place in our evolution as a species that we can safely place sophisticated technology onto other planets, but it's become routine enough that it's not much more than a blip on the news. Sure, the nerds and space geeks of the world were huddled in front of their TVs and computers to watch it all unfold, but there's a bit of a "been there and done that" feeling from the news coverage, and that makes me both happy and sad.

I'm happy, because it means that awesome feats like this have become common enough not to make a big splash. Not only can we send stuff to Mars, or Jupiter, or to explore giant asteroids, but we do it all the time. We are an amazing damn species. But I'm sad, because when events are common, they stop being news, and people stop caring. When people stop caring, people forget why we're doing all of this in the first place and see it as a waste of money and resources.

But it's not a waste. No, it's not directly ending world hunger or fixing the economy, but space exploration has brought us so many advances in technology, and is worth every penny put into it. And, frankly, it's only pennies that are put into it. NASA's budget is a joke, and the joke keeps getting smaller. This comparison puts it into perspective:

I'm not trying to get all political here - I still don't have a vote in this country - but when you see how little NASA gets from the US budget, it's hard to understand the folks who are complaining that we're spending so much money to visit other planets for nothing. Especially when you see this:

Not that I'm bashing the Olympics (just NBC's dismal coverage and overuse of Ryan Goddamn Seacrest), but in the grand scheme of things, we get so much out of space exploration, and it's silly to argue against funding it. It's not just about rockets, minerals, and spectral analyses. It's about engineering, programming, and robotics, and dozens of other applications to medicine and nutrition and memory foam mattresses.

Three days after I watched Curiosity touch down gently on Mars to begin its mission of exploring the planet, I stood in the spot where we first took to the air in powered vehicles, and I whispered a thanks to the Wright brothers and all those who built on their work, for what they've made possible so far.

Purple Mashed Potatoes

As I promised, I'm back to share the results of my mashed purple potato experiment.

This batch of purple potatoes was not as purple as the first, so already we've got an unexpected variable to contend with. This is terrible science*, but at least I can admit it - the worst terrible science is the kind that tries to pass itself off as the real thing.

I blithely assumed that the potatoes from Wegmans would look like the potatoes from the farmer's market on the inside, because they looked the same on the outside. Consider this proof that you cannot judge the purple-ity of a potato by its skin. The Wegmans potatoes were pale immediately under their skins, but a medium, radiating purple at their core. Not as dark as the first set, and with more white streaks through the middle, but definitely still purple.

I treated them exactly like I would normal potatoes. I boiled them until they were fork-tender, drained them, and then mashed them by hand with some milk, butter, salt, and pepper. The water I poured off was an unappetizing grey shade, and the end result was a sad greyish lavender color, with a few purple chunks.

Honestly? They reminded me of Montreal's slushy winter streets, and despite them tasting exactly like regular mashed potatoes, I wasn't really happy with them. Some of the color washed out during the boiling process, since the water was greyish, but adding milk likely also contributed to diluting the purple. Maybe very purple potatoes would have fared better, but I'm not going to keep trying, since they're quite a bit more expensive than regular old potatoes. Nope, it'll be russets or reds for mashing, and if I decide to get fancy with purple potatoes again, I'll roast them to preserve their beauty and impress friends.

*To make this a little more accurate, I'd have needed white potatoes to boil and mash and compare to the purple ones, because maybe the boiled-potato-water is grey for white potatoes too and I've just never noticed before because it goes straight down the sink. I only saved the boiled-purple-potato-water because I was expecting it to have color. An experiment with no control, conveniently confirming my hypothesis? I hang my head in shame. Maybe they'll let me use the spectrophotometer at work to see just how much color difference there is in the runoff from boiled white vs purple potatoes...

Animal, Defender of the Home, Killer of Mice

"Hey, um, can I ask you a question?"

When that's the first thing I hear when I get home, I know something interesting has happened.

"Do we have a really, really realistic mouse toy?"

Eep!

Apparently, despite the fangs the vet had to remove from his mouth, our Animal is a mouser. It looks like eleven years of training and hundreds of determined butt-wiggle-and-pounce attacks on the purple catnip mouse finally paid off. At some point last night, Animal found and killed a real made-of-meat-and-fur mouse, and delighted in batting it around the computer room to show off in front of Dave.

And of course, Dave saved it to show me.

For those of you wondering how long you can store a dead mouse in a Gladware container before it smells absolutely rank... most definitely under twelve hours. Probably much, much closer to no hours at all. Just... yeah, don't keep dead mice. Or if you do, and your spouse really wants to see it because they're weird like that, I cannot stress enough the importance of not opening the container you have stored it in.

I have no idea where this mouse came from. We found a few in the garage when we first moved in, and the problem seemed to disappear when we cleaned up their nest area and laid down some traps. There's no evidence of more mice anywhere in the house, so this guy likely ran in unnoticed while we were coming in from the garage. Just one mouse, not a big deal.

No big deal, because I'm not afraid of mice, and it's clear we don't have an infestation, but with the recent study linking toxoplasmosis to suicide and self-harm in women, I'm a little uncomfortable about it. You see, the Toxoplasma gondii parasite is carried in mice (and birds), but requires a trip through a cat's digestive tract in order to reproduce. It manages to do this by messing with a mouse's neurotransmitters and making it attracted to the scent of cats*. Mice walk up to their new feline BFFs, and suddenly find themselves dead and eaten. People can become infected when they come into contact with cat feces, which is why everyone knows pregnant women aren't supposed to scoop the litter box - Toxoplasma is particularly dangerous to a developing fetus and can seriously mess with brain development. And since recent studies seem to link Toxoplasma infection with schizophrenia, depression, and self-harm, the non-gravid among us get to be paranoid too, hooray!

But, as all these news articles are happy to report, if you have exclusively indoor cats, they're not out eating Toxoplasma-infested rodents, so your home's litter box is not a danger zone. That meant my home was free of Toxo-related worries... until the mouse incident. Is it possible that the mouse walked right up to Animal and offered himself up as a sacrifice to the Toxoplasma parasites running his foggy little brain? I hope not, because I don't want to think of Animal, or us, getting sick. I need to stop watching medical dramas and those "OMG Scary Diagnosis" shows on Discovery Health.

I'll just keep washing my hands really well after dealing with the litter and try not to have nightmares about parasites in my brain. And I'll buy some special treats for Animal, Defender of the Home, Killer of Mice.

*It needs to get into a cat, so it controls mouse brains to get it there. Science is awesome. Also scary.