Fourth of July and beyond

I finally have a project for my thesis! I'm definitely going to be looking at how long ex vivo tissue cultures can stay alive. The cool part about it is that I will be attacking the problem from four levels. First, I will use a couple of stains and a confocal microscope to tell the ratio of alive to dead cells. Then, I will run a PCR to check to see if the cells are producing RNA. I will make sure the cells are producing proteins using a Western Blot and finally use a ussing chamber to see if they are still transporting. If all of these turn out to be true, this could be a very nice and easy model system for culture. Much easier and simpler than traditional culture.
For the past few weeks, I've been doing a lot of hiking.
I climbed Pemetic mountain in the fog. We hiked through the clouds on the way up and when we reached the top we were above all the clouds and it was sunny. Maine mountains are amusing because the initial climb is really steep but the last third is usually much less so and meanders to the top. I also climbed Seargent and Acadia, as well as several other mountains with French names that I can't pronounce.
My roommate is a really good whitewater kayaker and she's teaching me how to roll in a whitewater kayak in between sea kayaking trips around the bay. So far she hasn't let me actually do roll, just practice the 'hip snap' but hopefully I'll advance to real rolls in the near future.
The big event in the recent past however was definitely the fouth of July. All the student interns made a float for the parade so we were working for the days leading up to the fourth on costumes and decorations. The theme of the parade was "fun in the sun" and like true science geeks we turned it into "fundulus in the sundulus" Fundulus is the genus of a species of fish that is commonly worked with in the lab. We made our float into zones of the ocean with a beach in the bed of the truck with people playing volleyball in muscle outfits followed by an intertidal zone where fishermen 'caught' individually wrapped sweedish fish and tossed them to the crowd. The best part of the float was behind the truck, in the deep ocean. There we had people dressed as sea creatures worked on in the lab. There were lobsters, crabs, jellyfish, dogfish shark, sea urchins, kelp, and of course fundulus themselves. One of the fundulus was actually mounted on a racing bike in a stroke of late-night genius. So my Fourth of July began around 1am when a couple of friends and I took a break from making costumes to drive into the national park and measure a 5K race for the fun run later that day. We got back around 2:30, went to bed for a couple hours before getting up to go to the parade at 6:30am. The parade iteself was tons of fun and we ended up winning first place for the most humorous float. After cleaning up the float, we went to a clamb bake sponsored by the lab where I ate my first clams and mussels. They were realy good. Immediately after eating a ton of seafood, we all drove over to the fun run. It turns out we didn't measure the run correctly so it was actually almost 6.5K instead of 5K but it was still a blast. Finally, we went to see the town band play and the fireworks. Unfortunately, the fireworks were almost completely hidden by the fog in the harbor. Their anticlimactic appearance was softened by the fact that we were all sitting in the harbor eating take-out thai food.
The next day we heard the cook talking about some other fireworks in a town about an hour away from the lab. We decided to go check it out and they turned out to be a private party at the house of a man who owns about 1/3 of the island. We walked in anyway, obviously out of place and ended up meeting the owner himself during the fireworks. Some of the wiring during the fireworks went awry and their dock ended up catching on fire twice but we had a great time pretending we ran in the circles of wealthy Maine.
Jellyfish lead the float

Rolling down Cadillac mountain at sunset

Acadia lake

Biking fundulus

My lab dressed in 4th of July finest

The whole gang

My hiking buddies, Lindsey and Liz

Glorious crabs