August 12, 2016 at 03:12AM

Today I Learned: 1) So, I got to peek pretty deeply inside our lab's big floor shaking incubator, and it turns out it has a few nice features to protect itself from spills. The interior is one big basin, with only a couple of holes in the middle for the rotor and a couple of stabilization hard points, so mostly anything spilled down there just sloshes around. Water (or media full of bacteria...) can get through the rotor-hole and the stabilization hard points, though, which would be bad. To protect against this somewhat, those three holes have their edges curled up, as a little barrier. There's another hole that leads to a drain line, which is sunk in slightly. The interior has a large enough floor area that the half-centimeter or so of difference in height is enough to keep media out of the guts of the incubator unless you spill a LOT of media. The only problem I have with the design is that the drain line is literally just a piece of tubing, maybe two and a half feet long, with a valve at the end. It doesn't hold much liquid at all -- it would be much better to have it drain into a detachable reservoir. I guess the point is that if you spill a ton of stuff, you drain out the bottom instead of mopping up everything from inside the way I did. 2) Greenland sharks are now probably the oldest-known vertebrates, with the oldest-known greenland shark clocking in at about 400 years old -- in other words, about as old as calculus. Shamelessly reposted from Caroline Golino's post today: http://ift.tt/2aGujKe 3) From the same article as above -- did you know you can radio-carbon date biological tissues from specimens less than 50 years old? It turns out that there was enough carbon-14 dumped in the ecosystem by nuclear weapons tests in the 60s that you can carbon date extremely young things with it.