Postpartum Hair Loss Monday, Jan 12 2009 

Pregnancy and Science! , , GeekLady 9:00 pm

Ah, pregnancy.  Even almost six months after giving birth, you still manage to throw me a curve ball.

I knew that your hair stopped falling out, i.e. grew, more than usual during pregnancy.  But what no one tells you is that more than usual hair follicles go to sleep when your hormones plummet after giving birth.  And when all those follicles wake up again and grow a new hair, the old one falls out.

Thus an awful lot of hair starts falling out anywhere from 1 to 6 months after you give birth.

An awful lot of hair.

Even though I read about this weeks ago, it never prepares me for shampooing or brushing my hair and coming away with long tangles of lost hair wrapped around your fingers.  It’s surreal.

 

Bad RNA Wednesday, Nov 14 2007 

Science! and Work GeekLady 6:27 am

I could not, for the life of me, get a good concentration of RNA yesterday. And it’s driving me crazy.

I know it’s not my technique, because I tested it with some old tissue samples in the -80, and got half a microgram per microliter. But with the real samples, I got between 9 and 60 nanograms.

I know it’s not the Nanodrop machine, because I tested them on two different ones.

I know it’s not due to my scraping the cells badly, because I tested samples that PhD scraped when she was showing me how to do it.

It’s just maddening. It annoyed me all last night, and then I had nightmares about my boss yelling at me and telling me my work was horrible and I was going to irreparably damage PhD’s thesis project and keep her from her degree.

So excuse me for a day or so while I stew.

 

Some extraneous nerdiness… Thursday, Aug 30 2007 

Science! , GeekLady 6:29 am

I feel like I should post something every day, just to get into the habit. Eventually I intend on going chronologically through all the big stuff that happened this summer, but I overslept today, so no time. Instead I shall regale you with a tale of just how nerdy I can be.

So I was vegetating in front of the TV one day this summer (and by vegetating, I mean working on a counted cross stitch pattern while watching – I am incapable of just sitting in front of the TV) and an ad came on for Vagisil Screening Kits – see if you have a bacterial infection in the comfort and privacy of your own home.

I was intrigued. I wanted to know how this worked. So I bought a kit. You know what it is? A piece of damned pH paper on a stick, complete with the little color chart! Fifteen bucks for two tests. For that money, I could buy a lifetime’s supply of pH paper from Fisher Scientific!
…
I’m really just grumpy because I thought it’d be something more interesting than pH paper.