More spit please.

[via]

For those of you who couldn't get enough of it last time, I'm going to talk about spit again. So as a brief recap, in my experiment I collect spit from participants as a way of assessing whether they are stressed or not (more detail here). What I didn't tell you last time however, is that in Australia, saliva is considered a Risk Level 2 BIOHAZARD (insert suspenseful music and shrieking here). This means that a lot of extra precautions need to be considered when collecting it, and analysing it. So yet again I have to trek out to another uni for help analysing the samples after they've been irradiated (by using an ominous sounding thing called the cobalt cave), which I'm doing on Tuesday.

The funny thing is, anyone can spit on the ground (although it's generally frowned upon), but put spit in a tube at a university and it's a biohazard. I also had to go to biosafety course to learn about GERMS. Now, I was a bit of a germophobe in the past, but I was able to get over it mostly - I do catch public transport after all. However it is back with a vengeance baby.

Don't worry germ toys, we're still cool though.

Seriously WHEN is somebody buying me these!? You can get them HERE.