Flour beetles served as model organisms for evaluating how genetic variation helps a species adapt to environmental change.

One of the anticipated (and feared) consequences of rapid anthropogenic climate change is the reduction in biodiversity. The essential problem is that the pace of climate change can outrun the rate at which species can adapt to the new environmental conditions. The first step in understanding the dynamics is learning how genetic diversity within a population helps that population respond to environmental changes. To examine that question, a University of Texas-Austin graduate student looked at how flour beetles adapt to changing conditions. He generated genetically diverse populations in laboratory incubators then changed the conditions in the environment.

The thesis is at repositories2.lib.utexas.edu.

Ultrasonic cleaners are valuable not only for cleaning, but for their ability to dispersed clumped samples.

The ultrasonic cleaner is an effective and convenient lab apparatus. But it’s a lot more than a cleaner. The same sound-wave-induced cavitation bubble creation and collapse — and the resultant pressure jets — also have many other uses. One of those uses is to disperse colloids with sonication. Why would you want to do that? Well, one example is provided by an analytical procedure from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In this case, the ultrasonic cleaner serves to break up clumps of soil prior to gas chromatographic analysis.

The procedure is at www.epa.gov.

Not as cute as a mouse, but a good lab subject nonetheless.

Science is observational. That doesn’t mean theory isn’t important, it simply means that the most beautiful theory in the world means nothing if it’s not supported by experimental evidence. So students in every branch of science should be comfortable with the experimental foundation of their field. That’s a problem for beginning neuroscience students, because even basic experiments are time-consuming and difficult. A 2010 paper in the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education summarizes an alternative: measuring nerve activity in earthworms. One advantage of earthworms is that they can live in the lab refrigerator for 4 to 6 weeks.

Read the other advantages at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

You can see why researchers were concerned that dams like these could restrict fish movement.

You’ve got your lentic environments and your lotic environments, and then you have your beaver dams deparating the two. Researchers with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments wanted to know what the effect of the latter was on the former. In other words, they wanted to know if beaver dams were restricting fish flows between lakes and their feeder and outlet rivers. To answer the question, they did all sorts of measurements, including weighing a bunch of fish with a platform scale. They concluded that times of high water flow allowed enough fish to cross that populations were not diminished by the presence of dams.

Read why at alaska.fws.gov.

The laboratory incubator: “accurate, reliable, and convenient.”

A group of students at the University of Michigan was tasked with evaluating the optimum conditions for anaerobic digestion of biomass for production of methane. Their requirements are quite succinct: “For this research, labs need to have the capability of mixing gases in reactor bottles containing microbial communities and running short anaerobic batch experiments in a controlled temperature environment.” Anytime you see the words “labs” and “controlled temperature environment” together, the first thought that comes to mind should be the laboratory incubator. Why? Again, the students have a concise statement: “Laboratory incubators are used in most cell culture laboratories because they are accurate, reliable and convenient.”

Their well-written report is at deepblue.lib.umich.edu.

I just don’t get the message: “My hip is watching you”???

I think I’ve mentioned before that tattoos are something I just don’t understand. I mean, any business that has to have late evening hours on weekends just so they can get customers when they’re drunk enough to decide to mutilate themselves just seems inherently questionable. But if you are going to get wasted and let some scruffy fellow jab ink into your skin, it’s nice to know that fellow has to meet at least some standards. In 2012 California put a new set of laws into place to establish common hygiene standards for “body artists.” It’s also nice to know that an ultrasonic cleaner is part of the required equipment.

San Diego’s summary of the requirements is at www.sdcounty.ca.gov.

At first I thought this video was a rather transparent and not very clever attempt to encourage people to help fill blood bank refrigerators: bring in a supermodel to tell people how important blood donation is. Well, there’s a lot more to this story. The supermodel in question is Niki Taylor and the people she is talking to are 13 blood donors whose blood was used to save Ms. Taylor’s life after a traumatic car accident. As we’ve noted before, these personal stories — anecdotal by definition — can be stronger motivators than all the statistics you can muster.

Looks pretty, but the influx of pollutants may be making that appearance deceiving.

The Egyptian High Institute of Public Health wants to keep an eye on the effluents flowing into Lake Mariout. It’s a lake that receives both agricultural and industrial wastes and also gets inflow from a nominally freshwater canal — a canal that’s salty and polluted by the time it enters the Lake. To get a handle on the problems they face, the Institute instituted (what else do institutions do?) water monitoring procedures. They’re holding themselves to a high standard: “”Sediment and water samples will be collected and preserved according to the EPA standards of sampling and preservation.”" Of course, that includes the step of preserving some samples in lab refrigerators.

You can see what else it includes at pdf.usaid.gov.

I can think of at least a few jobs that are more fun than analyzing rat intestines.

I understand the importance of this line of research, but it still doesn’t sound like fun. Researchers at Chengdu Medical College in Sichuan Province, China, evaluated the effectiveness of three different methods of partial intestinal obstruction in rat models. Partial intestinal obstruction is a common side effect of abdominal surgery, and they wanted to select a reliable method for inducing the condition in rats. Part of the procedure required the researchers to section a portion of the intestine and weigh it on an analytical balance. The ileum in partially obstructed rats was heavier than that in controls.

Find the rest of their procedure at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

    Some of the equipment Sandia Labs uses to prepare surfaces.

Surface properties are the most critical factor in determining a material’s interactions with the world. Whether you’re a tree, a person, or a hunk of metal, your interactions are mediated through your surface. And if you happen to be a metal, you might be concerned with such things as how well you can mate with other materials, what your thermal conductivity will be through the interface, how tightly you can bond. And even if you aren’t concerned, the folks at Sandia National Laboratories are. That’s why they have a whole department tasked with evaluating how clean surfaces need to be for their applications, applying different cleaning methods, and quantifying the effectiveness of those different methods. And anytime you’re talking cleaning, an ultrasonic cleaner has to be in the discussion, as it is here.

The remainder of their discussion can be found at www.sandia.gov.