Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Interesting Objects and or Stories from Oak Ridge National Laboritories

The_Davster - 24-8-2013 at 10:47

Quote: Originally posted by zenosx  
NO WATER CONTACT signs everywhere :))



I'd like to see photos of this if possible...

hyfalcon - 24-8-2013 at 11:34

Agreed, considering I live very close to one of the feed plants for Oak Ridge. Probably from Trichlorethylene contamination. At least that's the "official" story.

Well...

zenosx - 24-8-2013 at 12:44

I somehow managed to delete the entire post when attempting to edit this from my iPhone DOH!.

Anyway, from the one reply I was talking about the wonderful "No Water Contact" signs all over the area of Oak Ridge. You might also remember the perfect rectangular patches of defoliated, dead looking trees from a "beetle invasion". I've always hated those beetles that eat trees in perfect rectangles....

Anyway, here are some picture for your viewing pleasure.
All of the following came from the K-25 laboratories. This was the gaseous diffusion plant down the road from Y-12 that did centrifuge U-235 purification/extraction. Y-12 is still active as a fissile materials storage and weapon disassembly area. X-10 is the actual ORNL facility also down the road, and we now have the new Spallation Neutron Source they built a few years back.

Rats in a jar!

Label reads "2 x 4wk (male symbol) One Pressured +/-, E5 (male symbol) +/-, E8 (male symbol) +/+
Note that they still have their skin
I used to have a litter of baby rats that were dyed blue.







uL Syringe
I used to have one supposedly of the same type to inject plutonium solutions into biological subjects, like the 40+ humans they experimented on. It was similar to this one but longer with a 6" needle.



Centrifuge Tubes and a SS test tube rack

I thought the ground glass stopcock one was cool



Coulter Counter
For those that do not know, this is used in a rather elaborate apparatus to count cells. It was invented as a way to do fast blood cell counts since the military needed fast blood work in a nuclear attack (from what I read anyways). It is apparently very accurate at measuring the volume of what passes through the aperture.



Another test tube rack
Nothing special, but the pipettors are neat. They are 10uL, 100uL, 1000uL and 5000uL.

UnintentionalChaos - 20-11-2013 at 23:04

That uL syringe is for a gas chromatograph. They're quite standard and boring and most even moderately run labs usually have a few somewhere.

With regards to the preserved rats, I know that adding alizarin (a natural anthraquinone dye) to feed stains bones and teeth red. Preserving and making tissue translucent isn't a particularly special trick either. I think the label says "presumed" not "pressured"

What - 20-11-2013 at 23:44

Quote: Originally posted by UnintentionalChaos  
With regards to the preserved rats, I know that adding alizarin (a natural anthraquinone dye) to feed stains bones and teeth red. Preserving and making tissue translucent isn't a particularly special trick either. I think the label says "presumed" not "pressured"

I have heard the dying process called "diaphanization" in the past. I have a nicely prepared mouse of this type that resides in a jar on my desk. :D

phlogiston - 21-11-2013 at 05:51

The label says "presumed +/-", and I would speculate that this refers to its genotype. In experiments where you make mice with a disrupted gene (a so-called knockout mice), you most commonly take a male and female mice that each have one of their alleles knocked out so they still have their other normal (wildtype) copy. These are called heterozygotes and are indicated +/- where +indicates a wildtype allele and - a knockout allele. When they produce a litter, 25% of the pups will get two wildtype alleles (+/+), they are healthy normal mice, 50% will be heterozygotes like their parents (+/-) and 25% will be knockouts (-/-).

They red bone staining is most likely from Alizarin Red, a dye uesd to stain bone red. Often, a combination of Alcian Blue and Alizarin Red staining is performed to stain cartilage blue and bone red. Adult mice (4 wk) have very little cartilage, but I don't see any blue at all, so perhaps only Alizarin red was used.

E5 and E8 is a common way to denote 'embryonic day 5' and 'embryonic day 8', an early stage in embryonic development. It is probably relevant to the experiment these were used for.

[Edited on 21-11-2013 by phlogiston]

bfesser - 21-11-2013 at 05:53

Fascinating. Thank you for the insight, <strong>phlogiston</strong>.

zenosx - 1-12-2013 at 21:06

Sweet, nice to phlogiston, thanks for the feedback! I had always wondered what the hell was going on with this jar of rats (of which we had several this is the only surviving one).

As far as the dies you mentioned, that would explain why the litter of pups I had in a jar were completely blue, while the adults were either red, or a mixture of the two (connective tissue)....

Now if we only knew what experiments were performed on them... :P

And yea, the uL is usually for MS/GS, boring I know :)

As as side note,, when your mother brings this shit home from the lab, how can you NOT get interested in science :P :)
[Edited on 2-12-2013 by zenosx]

[Edited on 2-12-2013 by zenosx]