Richard Dawkins and the giraffe laryngeal nerve. WARNING! VIDEO CONTAINS FOOTAGE OF A DISSECTION!

[deucemagnet]

Dawkins presents a beautiful example of an evolutionary legacy that cannot be explained by intelligent design.

[Heddi]

1. That was very interesting

thanks for sharing.

I enjoyed my biology class(es) and the dissection that we did in them. Never humans..I really REALLY wanted to work on a cadaver, but alas, they don't allow RN students to touch humans unless they're alive THEN dead...instead it was cats, the obligatory frog, shark, fetal pigs, and various parts of cows, sheep, and goats.

On the cat dissection, we were graded not just on our ability to correctly identify different muscles and such, but also on the quality of dissection we did, since each of our animals were used in testing. If one accidentally cut through a muscle, or destroyed an important tendon or what-not, the teacher would always say "oh, that's okay, that's why god gave us 2 sides of the body haw haw haw".

I always got good grades on my dissection work because I was very methodical, and actually enjoyed open lab time, sitting in the classroom teasing out every bit of messentery and fat and connective tissue that I could. I felt my cat was a work of art. An oddly smelling work of art.

I still have my cat dissection instruction book. Our cats were ferals from Mexico. Mine had a coin in its stomach Another student's had parts of a (at the time) recently eaten lizard, and yet another had a pre-death meal of stir fry veggies (at least I thought they were stir-fry, as they were cut on the bias).

Did you know female cats have a clitoris?

[deucemagnet]

2. I did not know that!

I'm a biologist myself, but I do microbiology. At my old job, the microbiology teaching lab was shared with A&P and forensics. We had a fume hood full of dead cats, plus bones, dermestid beetles, and some occasional housefly husbandry. My bacteria and media wasn't even close to the foulest smelling stuff in that little lab.

[Heddi]

3. oooh I loved Microbiology

My husband and I do homebrew, so often our house smells like the micro lab from all the yeast cultures

I had lots of fun in Microbiology. It was just a 101 class to get my ADN, but wow, how cool. I still hate the electron-transport-chain and Kreb's cycle (aren't they the same thing??) but when we had to isolate our 2 unknowns and identify them...awesome! Even more awesome was that the lab assistant had contaminated the samples so instead of there being 2 bacterium in each vial, there were, oh, 20 or so. So that made it a bit more challenging for everyone to say the least. We got extra credit if we isolated and identified more than 2

One of the exchange students was caught nibbling on the agar as a snack She says that it's a snack in whichever Asian country she was from (not sure). The professor didn't mind but told her not to come running to him when she got the trots

[deucemagnet]

4. That's another first for me, Heddi!

I have never had a student eat culture medium, nor have I ever heard of one doing so before now.

I'll spare you the lecture on Krebs and the ETC. If you've gotten this far in life without knowing the difference, you probably don't need to!

[rexcat]

5. Some of the anaerobes can generate some foul volatile acids...

Some of my worst days in the clinical microbiology lab had to do with anaerobes. Clostridium perfringens looks nice on blood agar with the double zone of hemolysis but the smell is horrible. That goes for most of the Clostridium species and all the other anaerobes. My specialty was pediatric infectious disease but that was more than a few years ago.

We clinical microbiologist always got a good chuckle concerning the nurses when it came to microbiology and biochemistry was one of my most favorite chemistry classes. For some reason biochemistry made sense to me.

[deucemagnet]

6. We used Clostridium species during the course of the semester.

Yeah, they're pretty smelly, but the forensics labs caused more foul odors than I ever did. Near the end of the semester some forensics students were raising houseflies as an honors project. They fed them by providing them with open containers of liver-containing dog food that rotted for days. They really should have been in a fume hood, but for some reason they said they couldn't do that. I felt sorry for the students who had to work near that. Of course, some of the flies escaped, which is not an ideal situation in a microbiology lab. It turned into a bit of a clusterfuck by the end of the semester.

Anyway, I start a new job on Thursday so these are no longer my problems. Plus I get paid more.

[Heddi]

8. what is your new job?

Science = fun!

[deucemagnet]

10. I got a visiting professor gig that might turn permanent.

I'm not teaching micro this year, though. Cell biology, Biotechnology, General Biology and lab sections for all three for the upcoming academic year.

You're right, though, Science = fun indeed!

[Heddi]

11. make sure that you give generous extra credit

to anyone who eats a petri dish of agar

[Heddi]

7. So C-diff smells as bad in a petri dish as it does in real life?

I love new RN's and MD residents/interns who have never, uh, experienced the wonderfulness that is known as Clostridium Difficile. The look of horror on their face as they say WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SMELL. Ah, my dear, that's your friend C-Diff. Remember the smell, and you can do your own bedside diganosis without having to wait X days for a positive stool culture to grow out

same with GI bleeds....smelt once and never forgot. Can detect it a mile away.

I worked with a doctor who could "smell" MRSA. He was right about 90% of the time.

[rexcat]

9. When I worked at a hospital in...

East Central Florida we had a patient who had gangrene of the lower leg. They ended up amputating at the hip. The leg was placed in the morgue and the next morning despite the preliminary culture ID of Clostridium perfringens they wanted a gram stain of the tissue. There was no tissue left but a mass of bubbling liquified tissue and the morgue and a horrible smell because of the leg. The gram stain was really cool because the Clostridium had already started to sporulate. You really don't get to see that in "fresh" specimens.

Not sure how bad C. difficile smells but I do know that feces with Giardia lamblia smells as bad as it gets. When we would get a fecal sample with Giardia in it we really did not need to do a wet prep or OP concentration! Those specimens have a very distict foul odor of there own.

[Heddi]

12. eeww

mass of bubbling liquefied tissue....sounds like a guy I used to date