Even more spit.

I haven't spoken about spit in a while and I thought it time to remedy that. In case you're new here, part of my PhD research involves collecting saliva to assess particular hormones released when people are distressed (because I stress them out - muah ha ha haaaa). In case you're not new, well sorry you're having to read about this again!

Not my actual samples, but it kinda looks like this [via].

Yesterday I finally ran the assays for the rest of my samples. I've been waiting a while for this as it's supposed to be my last study of my PhD. Unfortunately it's taken over a year to get to this point, as for some reason watching a distressing film and spitting into a tube does not seem to be a popular experiment to volunteer for. In case you are very grossed out at this point, I will mention that the samples all get irradiated to kill any germs and we still wear gloves anyway. So no touching of spit actually occurs. Also to make sure I don't gross you out I definitely won't talk about all the FLOATIES in the samples...

... err anyway. Now I'm a bit nervous to actually run the statistics - what if it doesn't work? It has been my plan to finish my thesis by November 12 (AKA arrgh-no-more-scholarship-must-hand-in-dreaded-thesis-day). However if my experiment is a total dud I instead will have to run another one or two experiments, taking my PhD into mid next year. I do not particularly care for that option.

Either way I will keep you all updated since I'm sure you're all dying to know what I've found in people's spit.

P.S. Totally unrelated to this post, something quite unexpected happened - I was voted the Featured Blogger for August over at 20SB! Thank you so much to the people who voted for me, I really appreciate it. An extra special thanks goes to Little Missy Me who nominated me: you're awesome! :)

Snippets

Snip·pet (noun): A bit, scrap, or morsel

I applied for a job today. The position is to be a lecturer in biological psychology at a university in the UK. It took pretty much the whole day to write the application so now I'm exhausted. Good thoughts, prayers, crossed fingers or whatever would be appreciated! 

I don't really like my hair cut now after all. It was good for a few weeks and I received some really flattering compliments (including from you guys - aww thanks). Now it's grown to an awkward mullet-esque length and I'm stuck between deciding to cut it again and just letting it grow out. 

My home laptop has died I think. It's had a good run of about 3 years and luckily I was suspicious the end was nigh so made sure to back everything up. Hopefully I will get a new one soon - my supervisor has nicely allowed me to borrow a lab laptop for a bit so that's what I'm using currently.

Shot from last year's city 2 surf.

The City-2-Surf (a 14km run) is less than 3 weeks away and I have definitely not trained sufficiently to expect to run very much. I enjoy running and I know exercise should be a priority but it is a bit difficult when I've got so much thesis-ing to do! My friend and I have decided to walk most of it, which considering it's 14km is still pretty reasonable. Hopefully we'll still dress up as sporty zombies from the 80s!

I got to be involved in one of my favourite things - a trying on clothes montage. As I mentioned a while ago my sister is getting married next year so my mum and I went with her to give opinions on about 12 wedding dresses. Although fun and some of the dresses looked really lovely on my sister, I believe that the montages on tv/movies do not adequately portray how long and exhausting the day ends up being!

Disturbing fact: foot spas at pedicure places have lots (and lots) of feet cells of previous users clogged in the jets. That certainly does not make me want a pedicure anymore, or help my foot phobia one bit.

Ahh this is so comfortable soaking in other people's feety grossness [via].

My most recent baking disaster the other day saw me ruin yet another pot attempting to make custard. It was burnt so badly we've had to throw it away. That makes three now... oops. In a recent baking success however I made banana bread muffins which were awesome. Husband and I agreed it was the best thing I've ever baked (which perhaps considering the baking disasters doesn't say much). 

I got a 'revise and resubmit' from a journal for one of my papers. That's much better than a rejection so hopefully they'll accept the revisions!

OK that's probably enough snippets for now. Sorry for a not overly coherent post but... eh.

Quirk.

I am afraid of feet. Thankfully it's winter here so feet are covered generally and I don't have to see or think about feet much at the moment, but seriously they freak me out. Generally I think most people's feet are pretty unattractive (no offence), but that's not what bothers me. What I really can't stand is having people's bare feet touch my skin. It actually happens more than you'd probably realise (if feet don't bother you) - under the table when eating, people sitting closely on the lounge or on the floor - it's creeping me out just thinking about it!

AAARGH they're coming right for us!!!! [via]

As someone who studies psychology, obviously I've considered that perhaps I had some sort of foot-related traumatic incident in childhood that haunts me to this day. The thing is, I really have no recollection of such an event. Maybe Freud was right and repression is real, and I'm just that good at making sure this foot memory never comes to the surface... NEVER! 

I also can not endure shoe sharing. The reason I bring this up is that yesterday my sister nicely lent my mother some of her slippers to wear since it was cold, but it really freaked me out. Other people were very shocked and confused at my reaction that I would refuse to give my poor mother some slippers to borrow if she were cold. Sorry Mum but knowing our feet skin cells would be interacting makes me want to vomit. 

Baby feet: allowed.

The problem with telling people is, they then seem to think it's highly amusing to go out of their way to TOUCH ME WITH THEIR FEET. Boy feet are definitely worse, and they are the feet that have been shoved in my face. The thing is though, if someone says they are scared of spiders, do you rush out and find a spider to dangle in their face? I hope not. So what gives? Perhaps the difference is that a spider phobia is really quite reasonable, since well the spider could bite you and you could die (or at least experience some pain). The consequence of people's feet touching me is... tinea or something I guess. Yeah I realise this is a stupid thing to be afraid of.

Ahem. Anyway, sorry about that crazy rant. I will say that for some reason I can tolerate baby human feet (not sure why) and I've forced myself to become accustomed to Husband's feet - though this has definitely not generalised to other people (even his identical twin who genetically has the same feet). 

Do you have any quirks like this that people love to tease you about? Would you try to touch me with your feet if you were to see me in person?

Lozzz123, Hazard Checker.

I've decided to adopt this title for myself following an embarrassing incident this past weekend. We went to the Sydney Royal Easter Show on Saturday, and I was able to demonstrate my hazard finding skillz by rolling (and subsequently spraining) my ankle on uneven ground. Yes, the same ankle from a few of weeks ago unfortunately. So after a few different security guards came to ask me if I was the person who sprained my ankle and if I needed first aid people to come (yes and yes), finally the first aid people actually came and I got my ankle bandaged up. Then I had to wait for safety people to come and question me, and secure the area. This also happened to be in an eating area, so a lot of people got an extra show with their lunch. 

[via]

I did manage to hobble around for the rest of the day, and even won a prize on a crossbow game (see I told you I should have grown up in medieval times!). One of the highlights for me was the Silkie Chickens. They are just so funny looking I could watch (and laugh at) them for ages. Husband said 'no' to buying one however. Rude. 

My ankle still hurts a little, but what hurts more is the chunk I took out of my hand when landing. It's pretty gross to look at, but also very fascinating to watch how the body heals itself. Here is a picture...

... just kidding.

Anyway, I got a follow up call, and for my excellent hazard detection ability (or more likely, so I don't sue anyone), I got two free tickets to the Easter Show next year. Huzzah! 

Questions for you:

Have you ever received free stuff for being accident prone? 

Any similarly embarrassing stories to share (to make me feel better)? 

Semester craziness begins.

The second semester started last week. With this comes tutoring (and I'm even doing a lecture) and also resuming experimenting (once people sign up). Obviously these are both good things in that I get paid to tutor, and I get data for my experiment. But most days I just feel like this:

PhD Comics: Undergrad Cooties

...Come back, holidays!

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.

SPIT.

The current experiment I am conducting involves looking at susceptibility to false memories after viewing a stressful or neutral film. One of the variables I'm interested in looking at is the hormone cortisol, which gets released into the body when a person is stressed. The short version of one of my hypotheses is that since excessive cortisol levels can impair memories, if people are more stressed and release more cortisol they might have worse memories for some aspects of the film. This may make them more likely to accept false information about the film into their memories, which I'm going to implant - muah ha ha haaaaa.

spit collection supplies from here

What this means though, is I need to collect saliva samples to run analyses to look for differences in cortisol levels. This IS as gross as it sounds. Participants spit down straws into tubes, and I store them in the fridge until I can freeze them for later analysis. You'll be happy to know I wear gloves. The most disgusting part is definitely the spit noises! Oh and floaties.

What I am excited about though - is spit camp. This is a whole day where you get to learn the saliva analysis techniques and even get to test your own sample. It was initially suggested by one of my associate supervisors that I go to one in Europe while I was there on my honeymoon. The sad thing is I actually considered it - luckily my primary supervisor told me not to! So instead I have worked on one being organised here in Sydney, and it is next week! It will be a very long day - 9am to 5pm at Macquarie Uni, but I really am looking forward to it. :)

I told you I'm a giant nerd!

New Ice-cream Flavour: Burnt (or, why I had to throw out the saucepan).

my icecream maker

I was very excited to get an ice-cream maker, particularly as I am trying to make things without sugar. My first few attempts were fairly average, mostly flavoured ice. However one day I was definitely in the mood for ice-cream, and decided to make chocolate flavour. When I started mixing it together, I thought the cocoa looked weird, coming out in little clumps, but whatever. It wasn’t until it was actually in the mixer, churning away that I caught a glimpse of what looked like a wing. Yes, those little clumps were BUGS. And sadly, I had tasted the mixture too. So I had to tip out the entire mixture (and rinse my mouth out for a long time).

I was a bit disheartened, but still determined to have my ice-cream. Chocolate was out, so vanilla it was. However now I didn’t have enough cream for that recipe, so I decided to try out a different recipe that required a lot more cooking time on the stove. For some odd reason, the whisk kept getting stuck on the bottom of the pan, but that didn’t deter me. Quite a while later I decided to investigate the cause of the sticking and realised that the mixture was starting to caramelise on the bottom. But caramelising is ok right? Surely the mixture would just taste a bit caramel-y. So I kept cooking. It wasn’t until I poured out the mixture for it to set in the fridge that I saw the bottom of the saucepan. BLACK. I tried scrubbing and scrubbing but realised that it was a lost cause. But hey, at least I still had the ice-cream! Sure it smelled slightly weird, but I was certain it would taste fine. So I went through the churning process and got my ice-cream. Finally. It tasted… interesting. Not really the caramel flavour I was hoping. But I persevered, eating nearly a whole bowl before I gave up and admitted that the primary flavour was BURNT. So I had to wait for it all to melt so I could tip it out. YUM.