Today I Learned:
1) You can "Like" your own posts on Facebook. Seriously?
2) Graphite makes a really good crucible material. It won't meld to your metal while it's molten, and it's very resistant to warping at high temperatures. Relatedly, insulation for things like crucibles include a kind of ceramic that feels like styrofoam -- it's light and porous and seems a little crumbly. Apparently the space shuttle is heat-insulated with stuff kind of like that.
3) Culturing amoebas is really cool. There's this interesting dynamic you get growing protists that you don't have with bacteria or mammalian cells... involving contamination. See, amoebas eat bacteria, so the way you feed them is to co-culture them with E. coli or some other standard bacteria. The trouble is, if there are too many bacteria, they outgrow the amoeba and take over the culture. So you have to keep it at a sort of low-level contamination, which can apparently be... tricky. Also, amoeba need more air than most lab bacteria. Some species also can't swim very well, so they tend to settle to the bottom of any culture they grow in. That's bad, if they grow quantities such that the form a sediment and choke each other out. The solution: bubblers! Also also, amoeba pellet weirdly when you centrifuge them -- they make a tiny normal-looking pellet, then a giant, totally clear pellet on top of that. I didn't learn why.
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