The Autoclave Adventure

So I thought I would post a little story from last week. Janet and I were staying late in the lab to finish up pouring some new plates for our new diesel experiment when we noticed the autoclave had a bunch of mold in the bottom of it. This is really odd because the autoclave is a oven-like contraption that sterilizes anything that can fit in it with deionized water, so there should not be anything for mold to grow on. While still puzzling about this we set about our business measuring, mixing and autoclaving our media. It wasn't until half-way through our pouring did we notice that a few of the flasks were missing some media. We wondered where it was; then it hit us, the autoclave. We took a look at the bottom of the autoclave and you know what we found? A whole lot of media that must have boiled over and accumulated at the bottom of the autoclave.

Great, now we have a huge mess to clean out of the autoclave. We had to wait a long time for the media inside the autoclave to solidify so we messed around waiting to clean it up. We took tons of fun pics and even organized the lab a little bit. It was a grand time.

Look at all the plates we poured!!

Here's what our media looks like after it's done in the autoclave, you can see the difference in volume from left to right!

Once the media in the bottom of the autoclave was solid we started cleaning,

And cleaning and cleaning! It took quite a while to get all that sticky stuff out of there!

Ewwww!! Look at all that gross stuff!

Anyways, it was a grand ol' mess but we had a good time cleaning everything up. Other than that story not much exciting has happened in the lab, our PAH experiments are almost done and we just started our diesel plates. The first measurements were today and I was excited to see I did not contaminate any of my plates! (Considering I transferred 60 that's pretty good!) Well, that's about it for now, I promise I will upload some more pics this week seeing as I just got a new camera from my dad! He surprised me with a Sony alpha300, I love it! Just have to read more about it, it's a little more advanced than my last camera!

Catch you later!

-C