While You See Many Varieties Of The Common Mold In Your House And Garden, The Scientific Word To Describe
While you see many varieties of the common mold in your house and garden, the scientific word to describe them has a fascinating history. Aspergillus is a genus of 300 or so common molds found in all types of climates around the world. The Aspergillus mold was first catalogued in 1729 by the Italian priest and biologist Pier Antonio Micheli. These molds are in the fungus kingdom and while almost all are microscopic, colonies of the mold are easily recognizable and can grow quite large. Viewing the fungi under a microscope, Micheli was reminded of the shape of an aspergillum, which is the Latin word for a holy water sprinkler, itself from Latin spargere meaning to sprinkle, and named the fungus for the shape of the sprinkler.
You can see the similarity above, in the image of a silver aspergillium next to a microscopic view of aspergillus mold next to a colony of aspergillus mold growing on a damp terra cotta pot.
Image of aspergillium courtesy of Andreas Püttmann under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. Image of aspergillus and mold colony courtesy Kathie Hodge and the Cornell University Fungi team.
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Day in the life of a scientist
Me, at an art store: I need a paint marker with low toxicity and a delicate tip.
Employee: What kind of project are you working on?
Me: It's for a research project. I just need bright colors.
Employee: What medium are you using? Canvas or paper?
Me: uh....spiders.
Employee: Plastic or felt?
Me: ....live spiders. Like, from the forest.
Employee: ....
Employee: I have to get back to the counter.
If there was a sitcom based on my lab it would be a comedy of errors and near catastrophe featuring the Lab Weirdo™, the Confused Undergrad™, the Done With This Shit Fifth Year™, the Fourth Year Who Is The Only Person Who Knows How The Instruments Work But Is Impossible To Find™, the Ever Present Third Year™, and the Exhausted Second Year™
It would be called “Don’t Quench the Magnet”
Gases + Electric Field
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I have a lot of friends who are premeds, so they definitely aren't all bad. That said, some of them are pretty hard to be in class with. Especially the ones who are SUPER competitive - they dominate office hours and take up the instructor's time with questions that are sometimes only relevant to themselves. One of my TAs was complaining about one of the that argued with him for 30 minutes over half a point. There's a point where it goes past acceptable academic competition.
At the risk of being incredibly whiny, what exactly is everyone's beef with med students? D: I just finished my biology degree with pre-med and I guess I was just surrounded by med students because I do not understand
It’s just exhausting to be in a class you enjoy and are taking because you want to do science and be surrounded by students who are constantly complaining about how much they hate it, and don’t need it, and are only taking it because it’s going to be on the MCAT. Certainly not all pre-meds are like that, but even the 10% who constantly ask questions about if they’re going to get an A and look down at the mere science students kind of ruin it when you have to deal with them in every class.
I will say, a large part of the problem isn’t even pre-med students themselves, it’s the fact that biology departments have to bear the burden of the majority of their students being pre-professional in some capacity, who have completely different needs than pre-doctoral students who want to be biologists. Bio programs end up teaching to the MCAT almost out of necessity, which does a disservice to the students who want to be scientists.
I know that at my university, I considered switching to bio from chem, but ended up staying in the science and engineering college because the bio college was so focused on pre-professional students that they did a really poor job preparing you to be an actual scientist. Just based on the classes I took for my biochem minor, it was really obvious. I suspect that this is the case at a lot of schools, which sort of compounds the issues and makes pre-doctoral students frustrated with pre-meds, even though it’s not their fault directly.
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