January 20, 2016 at 02:48AM

Today I Learned: 1) "Octopuses", "octopi", and "octopodes*" are all accepted pluralizations of "octopus" in standard English. Source: http://ift.tt/1PgiiJU * Pronounced "oct-AH-pa-dees", like an Achaean hero, not "OCT-oh-PODES", like a marvel supervillan or a bunch of monsters with eight feet. 2) Lyophilization, which is just scientist-speak for freeze-drying (btw, TIL that "lyophilization" is just scientist-speak for freeze-drying) is the process of removing the water from stuff while it's frozen. Which I guess is kind of obvious from the word "freeze-drying", but I learned it anyway. Lyophilization apparatuses (apparatopodes?) work by applying vacuum to a frozen sample while simultaneously refrigerating it to keep it cold. Under strong enough vacuum, water will sublimate off the sample and right into the vacuum hose, drying the sample. I also learned why you would freeze dry something rather than heat-dry, as we do with speed-vacs fairly frequently in the lab. The trouble with speed-vacs and other heat-drying methods is that, well, they heat the thing you're drying, which can be quite destructive if you're trying to dry, say, a fragile protein. Lyophilization is the gentler way to dry stuff. 3) Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a an imaging technique akin to ultrasound, except that it uses infrared light instead of high-frequency sound. Like ultrasound, OCT gives a live, cross-sectional or 3D image of the target tissue. The inherent faster frequency of infrared light gives OCT much higher theoretical resolution than ultrasound, and modern setups can image down to about 1 micrometer resolution, which means you can just barely see single cells -- the images look almost like histological images, except that they're LIVE and IN VIVO. Unfortunately, OCT only works to a depth of about 2-3 millimeters in a human body, but that's good enough to get a single-cell resolution cross-section of a retina, in the eye, non-invasively. Welcome to the future, everyone.