41–50 of 131 posts
Learning that MIT has an ancient bottle of rotting milk reminded me of my 9th grade science teacher. He had been teaching for decades and had a tremendously messy little office attached to his classroom. The pièce de résistance of his menagerie of scientific oddities was a large fish tank filled with many strata of mottled goos. I asked what it was and he said it used to be an ordinary aquarium, filled with fish and…
In case anyone else is curious about the current status: > The Milk was declared missing on August 20th, 2022. > The dorm’s extended mailing list of over 300 current students, alumni, and other assorted Random-adjacent humans was contacted, twice. > In the end, no Milk. https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/guest-post-the-random-...
In case anyone else is curious about the current status: > The Milk was declared missing on August 20th, 2022. > The dorm’s extended mailing list of over 300 current students, alumni, and other assorted Random-adjacent humans was contacted, twice. > In the end, no Milk. https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/guest-post-the-random-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing-children_milk_carton
This almost throwaway line from the article struck me as an example of what we can do with technology, if we choose to put our billions of dollars towards it: "I downloaded the BC30 genome".
This is kinda disgusting but I think applies to this discussion. Blue cheese. Its living mold. I think it tastes good. BUT.. when I eat it, I notice a few days later that my excrement smells more like blue cheese as well. My guess is that I'm inoculating my own digestive tract with blue cheese molds. Another mishap happened with my cat too. I gave her some beef from our supper. Some of the gorgonzola blue cheese sauc…
A great read from the author. It reminded me of my previous life as a bioprocess engineer, where I led investigations into biologically contaminated batches in biotech. It was fun stuff and I still remember some of the best advice I received from an Executive Vice President to never underestimate a microbe. On this subject, I once led an investigation in which Bacillus cereus somehow survived in situ media sterilisat…
> it was the bioburden load of a media component and water temperature used during compounding. In English, please ;-)
"So, in ordinary language:"
"One dirty raw ingredient introduced far more spores than expected, and the way it was mixed into the water made the sterilization cycle less effective against them. The autoclave itself was probably not broken."
"The exact relationship to water temperature remains somewhat ambiguous because the HN commenter did not provide the detailed investigation findings."
It turns out vim vs emacs is a universal phenomenon.
Spore forming bacterium are notoriously resistant to most ways of killing them. There's even a species that can resist radiation amounts that are 1000x the dose needed to kill a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
That was a fun read. The author has a really good storytelling style. I dont understand why the cold brew test had fewer bacteria than the steeped teas. If the bacteria are shielded in spores, shouldnt it be expected that they have the same amount of bacteria?