In my PhD thesis, I dozed in a coffin-like structure in the floor (F) of a wooden room with Chagas bugs (Triatoma infestans), wearing a modified gas mask to lead my breath out of the room & video-taped what happened on the gauze-covered opening (GCO) right above me. #goodolddays pic.twitter.com/kvqE84m5vx
— Andreas Rose (@medentorose) January 25, 2019
Jason Rasgon is a professor of Entomology and Disease Epidemiology at Penn State. He studies mosquitoes and the diseases they spread. He asked his Twitter followers to admit the weirdest things they've done in their science careers. Since Rasgon works in biology, the thread was overwhelmingly slanted toward gross biology experiments.
cryosat-sliced freshly snipped human foreskin (obtained by running to maternity ward with a styrofoam coffee cup and dry ice) to use as an immunohistochemisty skin control in grad school
— Heidi Moss Erickson (@heidi_moss) January 26, 2019
Indeed. Thinking that the weirdest thing was using a crossbow to take biopsy samples from seals. Same project also required us to clipper seals and then bleach them with born blonde hair dye for identification. May still be a seal out there with NEIL on his back.
— Neil Gemmell (@ProfGemmell) January 25, 2019
Massaged hamster testes during a peritoneal lavage to increase macrophage yield. Set the hamster on fire (it was an accident!) while attempting to collect lavage fluid.
— Laurey Steinke (@laurey19) January 25, 2019
Yeah that's a junior high school goth date
— Jason Rasgon (@vectorgen) January 24, 2019
But some brave scientists from other disciplines were eventually represented.
I licked something that was later identified as human remains. #archaeologist
— Josh (@Ace_Collins) January 26, 2019
And not all replies came from scientists.
When I was 13 my friend and I got our bfs to fart in a jar each, we sealed them up, carried them in our school bags for a week and then opened them to observe if the smell had matured or disappeared.
— Rosewilder80 (@Rosewilder801) January 26, 2019
There's a lot more stories, but you might need a strong stomach to read them all. Oh yeah, in the experiment at the top, Andreas Rose found that the "kissing bugs" stayed still when his breath was directed out of the room, and attacked otherwise, so it is apparently the breathing that attracts them. Read the entire Twitter thread here.
-via Metafilter
Maybe the oddest was having to clean a nest of baby spiders out of a high voltage system. Or cleaning dead birds out of a capacitor bank (the capacitors leak a sticky oil that can act like glue traps). Or running parts from a room sized laser through my home dishwasher, as dish washer soap is great at getting off hard water marks. Or cleaning up the remains of light fixtures that caught fire above a capacitor bank. I guess life story: high voltage systems collect a lot of detritus.
Most other stories involve breaking tools or drinking (but not both... I don't mix things that shouldn't be), which can happen at any job. Surely everyone has screwdrivers that are an inch shorter than when new.