My birthday, and continued craziness

Today, I finished the 3rd day of the job. So far, I have been at the lab for 10-12 hours each day. Today was our most intense "harvesting" day, which means that we butcher each little baby plant and record essentially every aspect of it. The last step is to do a root tracing of the root system. The tracings end up being really beautiful, and we hang them up to dry along the windows. There were approximately 3 freakout sessions, all of which were indirectly traceable to me....First, I completely misplaced a root. One second it was there, waiting to be traced along with all of its friends, and the next it had vanished. Do you ever have those moments where you loose something, but can absolutely not understand where it could possibly have gone? This happens to me a lot. I think I may be a superhero whose secret power is the ability to loose things. Thats how good I am at it.

The general idea of the project is to look at plasticity in the current and older versions of three weed populations to see whether the weeds expanding their range have evolved increased plasticity. Weeds are actually really interesting to look at because they are one of the most successful types of species in human-altered environments. They tend to have high genetic variation, and rapid evolution under strong selection pressures. We humans try and try to outsmart weeds, but they always get us in the end. In fact - crop weeds are one of the most pernicious types of weeds and often outsmart humans by evolving to imitate crop species. Back in evolutionary time, Rye was a weed which so successfully imitated crop species that it became edible. Evolution is pretty incredible. And yes, that rythmed. Ha!

Wow. I am so tired, just finished a delicious (and free) dinner with my housemates. Pasta, more pasta and baby bok choi (sp?). Yum. The best part of the the summer so far has been hanging out with my smart, talented and funny housemates. Right now it is just me and 4 guys, a ratio that I fully approve of. We all get together, hang out on the porch drinking beer (yesterday was my 21st b-day, so I now consider it appropriate to mention alcohol consumption on this blog...) and talk about science. The amount of inter-lab gossip that goes on here is incredible, we all know which grad students are dating, whcih professors are likely to get tenure, who is publishing, ect. The type of community that develops around science is very interesting. In my personal lab, there are 4 girls, so we literally talk about love, boys, tampons - the whole girly nine yards while dissecting seedlings.

Time to feed the lil turtles and take a shower.

- Emily