[video]
IT’S THE LAST DAY OF THE QUARTER!!! y hablo español muy bien :) I am excited to announce that my goals for this month do not include anything about TAing.
My first goal can be checked off my list already: resubmit the ceramide manuscript (to BMC Research Notes). I should hear back in about 6 weeks.
Steven and I have started to actually work on the pinto ab (now pinto ab and olympia oyster) manuscript. I think we’ll have a really solid draft done by the end of the month - possibly another submission?
On the theme of manuscripts, I will hear back from Marine Biology about my larval paper this month. Whatever their decision, my goal #3 is to revise that paper and/or find another journal for it.
Lastly, I’m heading back to the lab! It sounds like we’re firming up plans to do some NGS using Eli Meyers’s protocol and I’m excited to get started on that. Now that I have an extra $5,000 to spend on sequencing, I know that I’ll actually be able to get some data (thanks to all my fuelers!). I would also like to figure out exactly what we’re going to do about proteomics. We have 2 choices: to collaborate with a new student in the Goodlett lab or to work with the UW Proteomics Center.
Those are the things I plan to focus on for this month. I’d like to get most of that out of the way before more larval experiments (maybe) start later this summer.
Doug’s Contraption
[video]
We all need them. Do you have yours?
Locomotion of the Octopus Vulgaris
Katy WiedemannScientific Illustration for the Narragansett Bay Audubon Society
(via scientificillustration)
[video]
On Thursday, April 5, 2012 Audrey, Marga, Riley, Parker, Mars, Kenzie and Kayla went out with Frazee and Smith for an adventure to Wass Pass on the Auklet. We were on a mission to collect as much plankton as possible. It was partly cloudy, fairly mild weather and calm water.
First, we calculated our velocity using a stopwatch and a log in the water as a reference point. The hull of the boat was the other reference point. It took us 6 seconds to go 6 meters, giving us a velocity of 1 m/s or 60 meters/minute. Since we wanted to go for ten minutes, we calculated that we would cover a total distance of 600 meters. After calculating distance and velocity, we measured the diameter of the plankton net and from that calculated the area to be .053 square meters. Using our calculations we found that the flow rate through the net would be 3.18 cubic meters per minute. Our net filtered a total of 127.2 cubic meters of water, and we succeeded in our mission. We caught a lot of plankton, fish larvae and other organisms in the water. The cup on the end of the net was thick and soupy, full of life.
After we got back to the lab, we checked out all of the organisms we caught under microscopes and sketched a couple representative plankton. Audrey’s personal favorite was the tiny, blue, mangled fish larvae. Marga’s personal favorite were the pennate diatoms that looked like fireworks.
Overall it was a great trip. We had a lot of fun and really enjoyed getting out in the field!
[video]
Scholar Alert: New citations to my articles
My rockethub project closed today and it was an incredible success! I raised $5,175 - more than my goal. The success of this project was due to a group of family, friends, colleagues, and strangers who thought my project was cool and/or were intrigued by the crowdfunding model. Overall, it was really awesome to see how many people got excited about science and wanted to help out. Here are some pointers on how to make your own project a crowdfunding success:
1. Make sure your project information is accessible to a broad range of people. Transcriptome sequencing can seem pretty esoteric to many, but I had a number of people tell me that my project description made it easy to understand.
2. Use your social media connections to get the word out. A large majority of my fuelers came from advertising my project over facebook. I posted about it on my wall (and friends re-posted), but I also created an “event” so that people actually got invitations to donate to my project.
3. Spread the word to people who are somehow connected to what you do. The last-minute surge of donations came mostly from people involved in the shellfish industry. I had contacted Bill Dewey of Taylor Shellfish about my project and he spread the word to his colleagues. A number of them showed amazing generosity, including one person who created a challenge for the others to collectively donate $750, which he then matched!
Thank you to everyone who made this project a success! I’m excited to put the funds to good use and generate some much needed data on how ocean acidification affects Pacific oysters.