User:Anthony Salvagno/Notebook/Research/2010/02/09/Tethering prior to BPS2010

I am making this page a day early so I can get a good jump tomorrow on getting this done in the am.

How to Sonciate Beads in our Sonicator
According to sources, beads are properly sonicated when you see little splashes on the side walls of the microcentrifuge tube. Here is what I did and what got me results: It seems that last option works the best. I am giving up for now because I think the transducer is heating the water. I sonicated for a total of 12 min messing around with the above options. I will try again another time.
 * Water heigh halfway between min and max - no splashes
 * Messed with tube height in water - no splashes
 * Water level at minimum with tips of tubes barely in water - getting some splashes

Results
I definitely need a smartphone or maybe a live feed note taker program. Basically I don't want to drag the laptop around with me everywhere I need to to be able to get to take notes on OWW. Maybe I should look into getting the Droid asap, or maybe we can get a tablet pc soon. The iPad is a let down, but maybe the courier will be for real and awesome. Anyways...
 * Steve Koch 00:50, 9 February 2010 (EST): What about the iphone that doesn't have a phone? (can't rememember what it's called, itouch?). How expensive are those?

So tethering did not work in this try. There were no stuck beads at all (except near the nail polish) in all 4 samples (2 with DNA, 2 without DNA). I spent at least 5 min looking around every sample and analyzing stuck beads, possible tethers, etc. I found no evidence for any of that. I think my slides were insufficiently clean (or too dirty) because I saw a lot of weird structures I wasn't able to recognize. They definitely were not clumps of beads. I don't think I'll have time today to do all this again so I'll try again tomorrow.

One interesting thing of note: In and near the nail polish I noticed lots of stuck beads. While this isn't so weird, what is weird is that the beads would stick only in bands. Like there would be a line of stuck beads and then a gap of nothing and then another line of stuck beads. The bands were probably like 5-10 beads thick (with little spaces between the beads) and were the entire sample in length (from tape to tape). I have never seen that before and thought it was interesting.

In Other News
I had this weird dream last night that I had to write a bunch of scripts for windows. One of which was the turn pictures b&w and invert them. Another one was to add gaussian blur to photos. There were more, but I can't remember what other scripts I had to write. I do want to do all this, but I need time and right now, I do not have this. After BPS though... we'll see!