Doo be doo

I went Blackberry picking today in Trent Park. It was quite enjoyable, although I now know that geese do not eat blackberries! Dad's just popped out to get some pastry provisions; we're going to make apple and blackberry pie!
There's a bit of a problem with blackberry and apple picking. The bushes are stripped. I'm not one to be racist, but since Eastern European people have been frequenting Trent Park, the pickings have got to be much less good. This is just observation, but it seems true - it has been shown the Eastern European populace has been fishing out our rivers and even eating swans! It seems they strip the bushes and freeze the berries to avoid having to buy things (which is sort of understandable when you look at the average earnings compared to the cost of living, but it's a bit mean!). The apple trees were also bare (there's an old orchard right by Wisteria Walk; you're allowed to take apples) although the presence of chairs suggests students. Besides, there were plenty of cooking apples!
I've been watching The X Files. Mostly season 9 on the TV (I don't know how I lived before on demand channels!) but also on a DVD of Series 1. I've only seen the pilot of season 1, but it's really good!

Wahey!

Wooh!
Got to school at 10 AM, and we all got our results. Everyone did really well! Results are up again! Yay! I got the following results:

Business Studies-A*
Art and Design-B
French-A
Science-A
Additional Science-A*
English Language-A*
English Literature-A*
History-A
Maths-A
ICT-B

Anywho, afterwards, we all went to Nathan's house. He got a new laptop! Then, we played Chairman Mao. It's a bit like Ludo (You get ~5 cards, then put them on the pile. So, if someone put a three of hearts down, you could put down a three of diamonds, three of spades, three of clubs, or any heart card (and, if you're playing with more than one deck, the three of hearts again!)), but the thing is there's loads of secrets rules (tap Jacks when you put them down, say "Have a nice day" when you put a 7 down, etc.), and half the fun is working out the rules.
Then, after a meal of pizza and a quick game of "Resistance: Fall of Man" (awesome game), I went home. Mum and Dad were really happy! We had Fish, Chips and Champagne! Also, I got £100.

Uncle Joe

I've neglected to mention this, but my Uncle Joe died last week. Mum's been over in Dublin (fair city etc.) to the funeral. She wore her bright pink "PARIS" rain cape to the funeral (which was awfully rainy), and says that Uncle Joe looked wonderful when he was laid out. I've only ever met him once, so I feel no great personal loss, but it's always sad to have a death in the family. Auntie Thérèse phoned the other day and she was lost in reverie, so Mum is obviously suffering a great deal too.
Uncle Joe lived in Dublin, then moved to England (up North, for work), then back. He complained he never "fitted in", and Auntie Thérèse reckons it's because he never truly grew up; he always remained a bit childlike, and couldn't bear to see a child suffer. One time when Thérèse was little (it's complicated; Thérèse is technically my cousin, but my Mum was the youngest of 16 so she's younger than some of her nieces), she scraped her knee, and Uncle Joe gathered loads of daisy "so many, [she] couldn't hold them in both cupped hands!". He lived quite a lonely life, and suffered from narcolepsy. His last days were not very nice, with near-daily dialysis, comas and amnesia. It's really a release.
On a lighter note, there's a plethora of Dublin stuff now! I just had a chocolate guiness (it certainly has alcoholic undertones), and there's loads of postcards for my wall of travel. Oh, also, I bought some canvas and am setting to work making a school bag!

End of Work experience

Everyone has been really lovely there. I even got a box of chocolates as a reward! :D
This picture shows some DNA I did. I forget the process, but you make up some agar gel containing Ethidium bromide (Which is a carcinogen! Ooh! Scary! That seems to be everyone's response, but in reality, making the gel is like using bleach in the toilet).
You then mix the DNA samples with some blue die that glows under UV light, run an electric current through the gel (This process is known as Gel Electrophoresis) and put it under UV light!
I made a Quiche today, but it didn't turn out very well. The pastry is good, and the filling is quite nice, but I didn't have any baking beads so I used rice. Long story short: Uncooked rice grains stuck to the pastry. Ick.
It seems I always take on projects and then abandon them, but my friend has been rabbiting away about how awesome zebra finches are. I've been thinking about getting a bird for quite some time (when I was in Madrid, they had massive stalls in Las Ramblas full of canaries, mice, ferrets, chickens, ducklings, iguanas and a sickly looking giant African horned frog), but I suppose I could get a couple of birds should my GCSEs turn out alright (6 days to go! Ick!). This cage costs £29.99, but how about Canaries? Actually, scratch that, I don't know if getting a bird is a good idea. It'd be a burden (more like birden, ha ha ha), and my parents have attested that the chirruping can get annoying.

Wahey

Ok, so here's info about the polymerase chain reaction. You take the sample (I used mouse tail), digest it using enzymes, then pop it in a centrifuge. After taking the liquid off the top, you pop it in the eppindorfs with another enzyme and then you pop it in a machine which cycles through temperatures.
In the olden days, you had to do it manually (which took hours) but it's a lot easier now, apparently. It heats up to 95 celcius, to get the soloution ready, then goes up to 98 for 30 seconds. This melts the DNA joins, so you get individual strands. Then 65°C for 40 seconds to bind the enzyme together. After which the temperature goes back up to 80, at which point the enzyme manages to make a new strand of DNA. This process repeats until you have enough DNA; so this is why it's used in CSIs - an itty bitty bit of DNA can be rezzed up to yield a tonne. There's rumours that it can make errors occur ("1 in 9,000 nucleotides"), but overall it's amazing! I don't really understand how the enzyme (which comes from a bacteria called "Thermus aquaticus" - that's why you have to heat it up so much; the bacteria likes hot water, so the enzyme won't denature. Incidentally, the protein only denatures at that point, so the high temperature is necessary) works, but the company who discovered its usefullness ("Hoffmann–La Roche") is rolling in it - $2 billion in royalties.
And on an entirely unrelated note, I saw the sweetest plushie; the Herpes virus! Relevant to me because I get cold sores. And only $7.99 - a steal at £4.20! Thinkgeek shall be a prime favourite when I start making my own money.

Anseptic technique

I learned Anseptic technique on Friday (curses for not posting it then; I'd have had a post on 08.08.08!), which is very useful. Apparently it's a major skill.
I'll tell you why; on Friday, I went to see the Microbiologist. We went up to the maintenance area and took water samples - raw water is brought in, softened with calcium, filtered and run under UV light to kill off bacteria. The maintenance system is complex - certain "clean" animal units are ventilated to have positive pressures so any pathogens are blown away from the doors.
Anyway, the taps are swabbed with a 70% ethanol mix and then allowed to run for a bit (in case any water is standing in the pipe - that skews how many bugs show up). The water sample is then taken back, and diluted three fold (this facilitates colony counting). You drop samples with a pasteur pipette - it's a special pipette that drops 1/5th of a millilitre per drop -
onto an agar plate (which sometimes has sheep's blood in it, depending on what you're trying to culture). The plates are incubated and the results are counted up - one colony grows out from each bacterium, so it gives you a vague idea of what's going on. There's almost always bacteria; the engineers allow a "bacteria film" of non pathogenic bacteria to grow inside pipes, as this stops bad bacteria getting a foothold so easily. Of course, some of these bacterias are "oppertunistic", so if the animals get stressed, an outbreak can occur.
What else...On Thursday, I helped take sperm samples from mice for freezing. Male mice have a lot more fat, but you pull it aside, and then cut out the vas deferens and the epididmus. The testes are filled with immature sperm, so they're pretty much worthless, but the rest is useful. You sort of have to walk the sperm down the vas deferens, and then incubate them in petri dishes, so the sperm spreads around. You then collect them using a wide tipped pipette (a narrow one beheads them), put them in nitrogen vapour for a while, then pop them in liquid nitrogen.
Oh, and the vials are called "Eppindorfs".

Contemporary Christian music band formed in Marietta, Georgia during the 1990s (Third day)

I got to watch surgery on a live mouse today!
The mice are tricked into thinking they're pregnant (they're "plugged" or "sechsed" [second word my own choosing] by male mice who have had a vasectomy). Mice, it seems, do not have access to pregnancy testing kits and so assume they're pregnant. This causes a psychosomatic response in that the mouse goes into pregnancy mode.
The mice are then given an injection to knock them out for around an hour (in labs with more space, the mice are given gas through a little mousey gas mask, but it's too cramped where I was). The injection doesn't kick in right away, so the mice stagger about drunkenly for a bit, and then collapse. They can still be awake - you check this by tickling their feet. If they're awake, they'll twitch.
Anyway, then ethanol is sprayed on their back (this helps keep fur out of the cut), and they're cut open. The oviduct is fished out and embryos are inserted. (I also got to watch embryo modification; fragments of DNA are pushed into an egg cell with a needle, and injected in the cytoplasm in the pronuclear membrane. The nucleus of an egg and sperm are haploid, containing half the information required. So they divide and then fuse; one division is discarded, leading to a "polar orbital" or something, which looks like a lump on the side of a cell. Anyway, the DNA fragments are inserted within the pronuclear membrane, and the pronucleus will then just weave the strands into the rest of the DNA. Truly amazing!). The mice need to be less pregnant than the embryos; the embryos can hang around in the oviduct while the surrogate mother catches up with her body clock, but it doesn't work the other way around - the mother won't wait, but piddle them out instead. The first mouse was a bit too pregnant, so she was put down. The second one was ok, so the wound was sutred (the sutre is made of a fibre that will just be absorbed) and then clamped shut with a little clip. She's then put into a recovery chamber at thirty degrees, wrapped in paper like a little mousey sleeping bag. The mouse is kept seperate for several days, in case her cage mates try and groom her and accidentally rip her open.
I then got to see the pregnant mice, as well as some male mice. The male mice are pretty much killed once they stop mating; if they won't mate but stay in the cage with nobody doing anything until they dont produce any good sperm, the line of mice is effectively dead.
I also did a polymerase chain reaction, like they do on CSI. More on that tomorrow!