Today Was One of Those Days

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

So, sometimes I realize that I just really enjoy teaching. Today was one of those days. It was an easy lab, from the teaching standpoint. They worked in small groups to discuss questions from readings about influenza and prion diseases; mostly, all I had to do was wander around and answer questions and clarify things and make sure they were on the right track in finding the answers. But of course, sometimes I just pull up a chair and jump into their discussions, and it’s just SO COOL. There is some amazing knowledge in their brains, and it’s wonderful to hear them make connections and add new information to the discussions. (Like the guy who told us the whole lifecycle of toxoplasmosis, and you could just tell he thought it was SUPER COOL). And they decided that prions are basically zombie brain cells, which is scarily accurate, really.

I did lecture a bit, about influenza pandemics, and the thing that was REALLY COOL is that when I tried to get their attention, and they didn’t quiet down right away, my usual technique is to just stop talking (instead of trying to shout over them; as long as a couple of people realize I want the class’ attention, eventually they’ll get the hint and shush the others). But tonight, when I stopped talking? They totally got the hint right away, and I had silence in, like, three seconds. THIS IS FABULOUS. It feels like a sign of respect, and I am grateful for that. And they seemed interested in the discussion and AHHHH it was just really cool.

And someone made an appointment to come see me today about some stuff she missed, and that was lovely (I’m one of the freaks who LOVES it when students come to my office hours. YES THAT IS WHY I AM HERE! LET ME HELP YOU)! So, yeah. It was a good day.

Baby Turtles

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

These are western pond turtles (Emys marmorata), California’s only native freshwater turtle. They are also tiny and adorable right after they hatch (yes I am a scientist I have data to prove this). 😀 These babies were incubated in their nests (at my field site), and the eggs were collected last week, so they could hatch in the lab. They’ll be raised for either one or two years at one of three local zoos, before being released back into the wild.

Western pond turtle. That protrusion on the belly is the turtle’s external yolk; this is normal, and will be absorbed into its body during the next few weeks.
I AM SCIENTIST therefore I record data on paper towels. What, doesn’t everyone do this?
Literally just hatched.
Our incubators. Reasonably low tech, but they get the job done. OH LOOK more paper towels.
Precious babby. They are so tiny when they first hatch. I’d say on average they’re about 4 to 4.5 grams. This one is not even 4 grams (although the one in the first photo was big – almost 6).

End of Field Season

- Wendy St. John 1 Comment

And … as of a few hours ago, my field season for this year has officially ENDED. I didn’t think I was even going to find any turtles today, but then, at the tail end of my last walkthrough, I found this gorgeous lady, JUST after she finished nesting (which is the absolute best time to find them, for a bunch of different reasons). So, YAY Turtle #261! My last turtle of what might be my last official field season on this project. Isn’t she the prettiest princess EVER?

Overall, it was a weird field season. We didn’t find nearly as many nests as in previous years, and we never really had a “peak” – there is usually a week or so when LOADS of turtles are all out on the same days; I think the most we ever had on a single day this year was five. I attribute this mostly to the weather (which alternated between rainy and cold, which they won’t come out to nest in, and EXTREME heat, which they also won’t come out to nest in). But, it was still fun, although I will say I’m glad it’s over. I get a bit tired of camping two or three nights a week.

Baby King Snake

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

Few things feel better than a hot shower after three days in the field. It was a good three days, though. Found a total of eight turtles, and the most adorable baby king snake ever. I have never seen a king snake this small before; it was SO TINY AND SO PRECIOUS and really chill about being handled. So beautiful. I’m going to keep checking this location every time I go by; hopefully I’ll be able to see this precious baby again. Photos taken in Lake County, California.

Turtles!

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

TURTLES! We found four of them last night. PRECIOUS BABBIES! This one is #248. AND SHE IS THE PRETTIEST PRINCESS IN PRINCESS TOWN! She was really adorable, too. She stuck her head out while we were taking photos, and let me rub under her chin. SO...

TURTLES! We found four of them last night. This one is #248. AND SHE IS THE PRETTIEST PRINCESS IN PRINCESS TOWN! She was really adorable, too. She stuck her head out while we were taking photos.

Don’t know if we’ll see any turtles tonight. Weather is all over the place here; we had a MASSIVE thunderstorm last night, and a bit of rain. They won’t come out to nest unless the ground is dry, so if it rained too much at the field site, tonight will be dead up there. But we’ll see. Either way, TURTLES!!!!!!

Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

This is my system for archiving and organizing all my Tumblr posts offline. (It could also be used for Facebook, or LJ or any other site that allows you to pull an RSS feed).

Evernote is organizational software I’ve been using for several years, and I love it with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns. It keeps pretty much my entire life organized, with the exception of my calendar. It’s a program for storing documents and files of just about any type, and it allows you to organize them into notebooks (of your designation), and to tag them any way you like. Many types of documents are also text searchable. It is phenomenal. Really. (There are also some other amazing features, like a web clipper that is possibly the best thing on the whole planet, and it’s word processor is good enough that I do all my fiction writing in Evernote, as it’s really easy to organize chapters).

In order to get archive/backup/offline copies of all your future Tumblr posts, first you’ll need to find your Evernote email address. You should be able to find it under “Account Summary,” and it will end in “evernote.com.”

Next, go to Blogtrottr.com, and create a free account there USING THIS EVERNOTE ADDRESS. That part is important. 😀 (Unless you want to bypass Evernote, and just send your posts to your email account. If you have a fab system for organizing emails, this might work, and you wouldn’t need Evernote. But Evernote is wonderful and you want it anyway, so pretend I never said this about emails :D).

Now, in Blogtrottr, just subscribe to the RSS feed.

That’s really all there is to it! Now, all posts that you make will be sent directly into Evernote, where they will be kept on the Evernote servers, and also synced to your harddrive (you can control how often this happens; I have mine set to sync every 15 minutes). Once they’re in Evernote (I have them all dumped into a folder called “Inbox”), you can go in and tag them and organize them to your heart’s content. And edit them. And all hyperlinks and images will be included. (Although sadly, tags are NOT).

Now, like I said, this is only going to work from posts for here on out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some way to pull all your Tumblr posts relatively easily. Tumblr doesn’t have an export feature, to my knowledge, but something like Tumblr2WordPress might be useful? Especially if maybe you actually imported them into a new WP blog that was set up to send posts to Evernote. (You can set up multiple feeds in Blogtrottr).

So, hopefully this helps, and let me know if you have any questions. 🙂

ETA: A couple of things to add – you’ll want to select “Realtime Push” rather than any of the digest settings, so the posts come individually. Also, under email preferences, I have them: “Enabled,” “Show Thumbnails in emails” and “List media files (enclosures) in emails.” And Mail format is: Multipart text/html.

Graduate Showcase

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

My presentation at today’s Graduate Showcase went really well! I’m posting the slides here, in case anyone is interested. It only hits on two of my research questions, and all the stats were removed, as this was geared toward a non-scientific audience. Still, it should give an idea about the focus of my research.

Read more

Forensics Lab

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

I had such a good time teaching lab today. It was our “forensics” lab, where we talk about DNA fingerprinting techniques. (Specifically restriction fragment analysis and PCR). We do two activities – a “paternity test,” where students analyze a “gel” with the mother, child, and four possible fathers, to determine which father is most likely to be the biological dad. Then we try and solve a murder by comparing electrophoresis results for a whole bunch of suspects and comparing them to “blood” found at the crime scene that doesn’t match the victim. It’s the kind of lab that can be super fun or really dull, and today was super fun.

Also, I totally geeked out while teaching it. First, Taq DNA polymerase is just COOL! (It’s what allows us to take small samples of DNA and duplicate them enough to run tests. So much of the stuff we see on NCIS and every other crime show on the planet? POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF TAQ). It’s from a bacteria that lives in hotsprings like the ones at Yellowstone, and I sort of geeked out about how awesome biology is because of cool stuff like this. (There might have been some bouncing).

Then one of my students asked me how it was possible to get DNA from dried up tears, and that got us onto the topic of thousands of years old DNA extracted from frozen mammoths (AND FROM DINOSAUR BLOOD IN MOSQUITOS IN AMBER THAT IS REAL HUSH I BELIEVE IN IT AND I WILL HAVE A T. REX AS A PET SOMEDAY). So, we had a fun conversation about mammoths (and also about T. rex, because it’s possible I literally bounced up and down even more than I had before, and told them how much I really want a T. rex as a pet, even if it ended up eating me. And, I’m pretty sure they understood I WAS NOT JOKING). Then one of my students mentioned the possibility that T. rex had feathers, and I put that discussion off (because it was a bit off-topic) … but then the COOLEST thing happened.

After I dismissed the class, I brought up the subject of T. rex again with the student who had asked (and I won’t go into details here, but I’ll just say that the current “birds evolved from dinosaurs” theory has some GAPING holes, and should in no way be considered an absolute at this point in time) … ANYWAY … I started talking about this, and about a third of the class just STAYED TO LISTEN! They could have walked out, I expected them to walk out, but a bunch of them stopped, and stood around and they were totally interested in this little paleontology discussion we had and IT MADE ME SO HAPPY! Because I really did geek out at them quite a lot today, and they don’t seem to mind. If anything, I think it helps them get excited about the subject.

And I realized that THIS, really, is the best thing I can give them. Sure, they’ll learn some bits and pieces of biology from me in class, and hopefully remember at least some of it into the future. But if I can do something that helps THEM get as excited about science as I am, THAT is the real gift. And they probably won’t geek out about the same things I do, but that doesn’t matter, as long as they get the idea that it’s okay to geek out about SOMETHING. And holy crap, biology has an ENDLESS SPECTRUM of things that are geek-out worthy. Because biology is just F-ING COOL!

I think that might be my true calling. To help at least some of my students discover just how much they actually love biology, and see that it’s fine to express that. (Although I don’t expect all of them to bounce up and down about dinosaurs. But if they decide to do that, they will have my FULL SUPPORT).

So, yeah. Lab today was awesome. Oh, and I also told one of my students “I LOVE YOU,” because when I wrote “Thermus aquaticus” on the board, and asked them what I’d done wrong HE KNEW IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ITALICIZED OR UNDERLINED. I must be doing something right.

Student Artwork

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

In the labs I teach, we give weekly quizzes, and I encourage my students to do artwork for me (and I give a tiny bit of extra credit to any student who draws something for me on his or her quiz). I’m not picky about drawings; stick figures count the same as something more realistically drawn. Sometimes, however, I find that students have drawn tiny little masterpieces for me. This semester, one student in particular, whom I shall call Ms. B, drew the most amazing turtles for me, almost every week. Here are a few of them. AREN’T THESE THE MOST ADORABLE THINGS YOU HAVE EVER SEEN????? Oh yes. Encouraging my students to draw things for me was a very, very good idea.