due to various scheduling issues of living across the country and being adults none of my friends except one could make it to my birthday so we decided to buy a cake and serve it to the people at a bar to just create a birthday party. which worked pretty well until my friend exitedly went “do you know what happened on this very important day?” to announce my birthday only for one girl to interrupt them even more exitedly with “the day germany standardised paper sizes!” which we all quickly agreed was an even better reason to eat cake.
which is how i ended up singing the sentence HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR DIN A4 PAPER with a group of drunken strangers on my birthday, which is better than anything I could have planned in the first place.
i’m obsessed with this painting called tomato king and i’m even more obsessed with the man who drew it. his name is stuart dunkel and he is a classical oboeist and he also paints tiny little oil paintings of mice living their best lives. he looks like this.
Dr. Elinne Becket, a microbiologist from Cal State University, is in the middle of one of those Fridge Experiments that happens to us all - except in this case, she is uniquely placed to unravel the science down to the microbial level.
While cleaning out her fridge, Dr. Becket found that a tub of family-recipe beef vegetable soup had turned bright blue. “Ok I’m outing myself here,” she tweeted, “but there was forgotten
beef soup in our fridge we just cleaned it out and it was BLUE?!?!? Wtf
contam would make it blue??? Like BRIGHT blue!! Even w/ all my years in
micro I’m not handling this well.“
Read on for a breathless and ongoing saga of Soup and Science, and the wonderful international community that is Academic Twitter.
For those following along, Blue Soup has a buddy! Meet Science Cheese!
Sebastian Cocioba tweets: Alright, we got another pilot #BlueSoup experiment underway to test if the glowy bugs make blue on soft cheese! A few articles suggest that Pseudomonas fluorescens can make cheese blue so I put some mozz in 12 well plates + 1mL of mozz broth + 30uL of BS1-A cells.
Photo: a translucent SEALED plastic vial of yummy looking mozzarella balls suspended in clear liquid, with the handwritten label: Science Cheese DO NOT EAT #BlueSoup 3/10/23
“Cheese plates were then incubated at 30°C and 4°C (lab fridge) and will check on them on Monday. I also streaked the cheese broth onto King’s Agar B to check if background glowy microbes are present before processing said cheese. Excited to see if this works!“
Photo: a clear plastic sample tray, about adult-palm size and a half inch deep, with 12 circular wells. Each well has a tiny mozzarella ball tucked inside. They fit perfectly. The tray is labelled “30C” and “BLUE SOUP 3/10/23″
[ID: a screenshot of the mobile Jansport website. There is a banner that says ‘free standard shipping.’ Under the banner is a link that says 'for audio description video click here.’ Under the link is an illustration of 4 different types of mobility devices, each with its own adaptable Jansport bag. End ID.]
Jansport is a little pricey but it isn’t like the adaptable bags are any more expensive than their other stuff, which is nice to see too!
Oh this is sick
Jansport is pricey because it’s the last bag you’ll ever have to buy. Seriously, buy two Jansport bags, when one breaks you send it back to Jansport and they fix it and send it back to you. In the meantime you use the second bag.
