Category: Journal
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Measuring respiration rates
Here’s what the last month of my life was like. This video shows the process of measuring limpet respiration using a fluorescence-based oxygen measuring system and a custom-built 15-well respiration chamber. The water bath maintains the desired temperature, and the user’s only job is to sit there and move the fiber optic probe to each…
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The littorine snail in that kid’s knee
This news story about a seashore snail found living in a child’s knee wound has been making the rounds lately. Apparently 4-year old Paul Franklin from Southern California was camping at a beach in central California near Morro Bay, when he fell and hurt his knee (Orange County Register). For several weeks afterwards, the wound…
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Stupid water bath tricks
As part of the downward spiral into increasingly esoteric subjects that is currently happening on this site, I now present some info on making a water bath do things. Simple things, but things nonetheless. As part of an ongoing project in the lab, it became necessary to start carrying out simple temperature ramps with…
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O2 conversion
The molar volume of an ideal gas is ~22.4 liters per mole (we’ll consider O2 to be an ideal gas for these purposes, and 22.4 is an approximation that varies with temperature, it’s 22.414 at 0C). Convert from 22.4 liters to milliliters ( = 22400 ml per mol). So if you have 1 milliliter of…
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Removing security features from a pdf
Whoops, I totally made my own pdf and accidentally included a bunch of security features, so now I can’t use my highlighter or type notes on the document. It sure would be handy to take off those security features that I put there myself when I made the pdf, myself. With a full copy of…
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ImageJ StartupMacros
Before I lose this file again: StartupMacros.txt This is a text file, based on the original StartupMacros.txt file that came with ImageJ, that can be dropped in the ImageJ/macros folder that is created when you install ImageJ. Start up ImageJ, and if this macro doesn’t automatically run, go to Plugins>Macros>Startup Macros to load it. It…
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Adventures in kludgy software – Diving PAM edition
As a general rule, expensive pieces of lab equipment must come with software of questionable quality. In this case, I just want the raw data off a $20,000 submersible DIVING-PAM fluorometer, which can be used for measuring the photosynthetic yield of algae and plants out in the field, away from a computer. But downloading the…
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Have some squid
You might be forgiven for thinking that the ocean is an endless bounty of edible goodies when you walk outside and find squid just strewn everywhere on the beach, waiting for you to pick them up and eat them. This happened the other day at work, when a group of juvenile Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas)…
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ATtiny84 LED display and heater project
Here’s a little project that uses an ATtiny84 microcontroller, programmed with the Arduino software, to build a thermostatically-controlled heater. It allows the user to choose a temperature setpoint, and then displays the current temperature using an Adafruit 4-digit 7-segment LED display over I2C. The youtube video below demonstrates part of the project, where an ATtiny84…