Tag: Microbiology

Going over the results we gathered from our background swab of the bones and can’t help thinking how frustrating research is!!!! Why are all my bones growing different stuff on them, and why is it every time i do a repeat i get a different result!!!! Why can’t it all be as expected and work out for a nice simple conclusion????

I guess thats just the nature of research, and we can’t make the evidence fit the conclusions we want, the conclusions must fit the evidence.

Don’t get me wrong i’m still enjoying the research and my experiances this summer, its just the lazy part of me wishing it was all black and white and i could get a simple logical answer.

Another long update post, must remember to do this more regularly!!!

So polywipes for our project still haven’t come in, but while we wait we are using spare supplies to see how long bacteria prevails on skeletal material. Unfortunately the results were a bit screwed up, so we have had to start again. On the bright side, despite the screwy results it looked like if there was anything on the bones it was gone after 24 hours, hopefully our repeat will show the same.

Also been very busy dealing with open days and work experiance students. On wednesday i think it was (Open day) we could barely do anything because of the prosepective new students and their families buzzing in and out asking questions. Had a workshop earlier last week as well, which was fun, teaching a class about how to build a biological profile from skeletal remains; some of the kids were really enthusiastic and eager, but as always there were a few who messed around and had me going up the wall!!!!!

Had a work experiance kid in with us for one day. His name was Luke, we showed him the bones and had him attempt to age, sex and calculate stature of one of the remains, and then showed him blood spatter and got our friend Hannah (Who is working with Dr Croxton on the composition of fingerprints) to talk about her project before we handed him back to Deborah for the afternoon, hope he had a good time.

All in all a busy and frustrating week, but i keep learning new tricks and tips and am still having a good time. Hopefully come wednesday i will have definitive results on the persistance of microbes on skeletal material (Just waiting overnight while the plates incubate) and possibly have our final supplies for the main project

Hey finally round to my second of these.

The catchup is that we have cleared our plan with Clare for the micro, and have poured a couple of Agar plates and are now waiting on results of our negative control (Blank sponge) hopefully tht will come back as expected and we can begin processing our samples next week.

Learnt how to use the stomacher with Sophie and had a good time in micro, fascinating what some of the guys are doing research on even if some of it is murdering caterpillars!!!!!!!

The fiskerton skull that Jacob is working on is now free of the massive lump of clay, and the skull is nearly clean and ready for analysis. It took 3 days to extract the clay!!!!

Sophie and i also trialed swabbing bones with ethanol to disinfect them, as reccomended by a guy at the university of Indianapolis, glad to say the bones were not damaged in any way (Dread to think what Gillian would have done if they were damaged)

Overall very good time on this research and the things in between like school visits. We had people from two of the three school groups pass out in gen lab 3, starting to think the room is cursed?!?!? I myself believe am getting very good at talking about the bones and how to analyse them, Gillian emabarrased me slightly by testing how to side bones and i failed; so will now work on that for next time.

Hopefully be living in SB209 from next week, so see you then