Ooh, Lab Bench Cake!
Who can guess what all the items are? Bonus points if you tell us what they are used for. #showoffyournerdyside
Via http://www.cakecentral.com/gallery/i/1929656/lab-bench-cake
#ScienceEveryday
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Ooh, Lab Bench Cake!
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madame scientist's not-so-mad musings 
Just stay away from the gloves..don’t know where they’ve been 😀
Sweet … ;-D
From left to right –
Centrifuge hot plate, beaker, graduated test tubes, tube shaker, (don’t know what the red hook things are, nor the red rectangular blob), pipette injector, girl’s gloves (hey, they’re pink), and the all important notebook.
Underneath is a refrigerator and storage cabinets.
Maybe something to do with genetics?
Tom Nathe The gloves are probably purple/lilac, a really popular brand/color. I’ve never seen pink or girl gloves 🙂
Rod Thorell , you got the vortexer right. Reminds me of the first day I walked into a lab. Someone gave me a tube and said, here- vortex this. I could only think of the Wizard of Oz and pictured Dorothy clicking her red shoes. I was so delighted to find a machine that made little vortexes (vortices?) in a test tube!
Magnus Fahlén for once we can say, literally sweet 🙂
Too awesome to eat! I am lost after the gloves, ha!
Rajini Rao Lavender sounds right. I was being silly with the pink.
Mara Rose yeah, purple lab gloves are really cool, latex free and non-allergenic too 🙂 But in a molecular biology lab, we work with tiny amounts of toxins, so I wouldn’t want to eat one 🙂
Rod Thorell so that’s why the purple gloves have the distinctive color! The latex gloves (powdered inside) are really hard on one’s skin, worn day after day. I’m so glad they’re history.
Yep you got it Rajini Rao … ;-D
Potential diabetes risk lab bench.
Benchtop centrifuge (to spin down cells into a pellet), hotplate (I use to label radiotracer kits), Corning glass bottle, 50 mL Falcon tubes, plastic rack for Eppendorf tubes, vortexer to vortex/mix tubes of stuff, pipette, nitrile gloves, power supply for gel electrophoresis?, lab notebook, I can’t tell if that’s an incubator or refrigerator.
Fondant? Or clay? Well done, to the sculptor!
Chad Haney the red twisted thingies had me stumped until Beatnik Boy suggested power leads, which made me also guess a mini power supply for desktop gels!
I think Puffer Hubbards sell lab refrigerators..possibly a -20 freezer for storing your personal supply of restriction enzymes?
rare avis you get culinary points but to earn science nerd points, get yourself to my lab asap as a volunteer! By the way, our lab benches are unusually white-top, instead of black because I insisted on it…makes the lab brighter and more cheerful.
I hate latex gloves because your hands smell like them even after you wash. Our nitrile gloves are blue-grey.
Now thats a Cake !!lol thanks for sharing Rajini Rao :)P
The cake page cites this photo from Janice Chen as inspiration, so I’d say you’re right on the power source, Chad Haney
http://goo.gl/vOsy2o
Rajini Rao
Will do. I’m sure I can make some lovely maki rolls that look a bit life-science-y, for your snacking pleasure… But this artist deserves mega-points, on both ends of the spectrum! 😉 Have a lovely weekend!
Yes, we need to experiment with maki-rolls at the lab bench as a new form of translational research. Forget about “bench-to-bedside”, it’s time for “bench-to-dinner table”, rare avis . Have a good weekend, too! I’m so glad to be finally posting on G+ and finding my friends.
Good to see you, too Tom Willingham . I shouldn’t have let my work load keep me away from G+. It’s not good for me 🙂
Rajini Rao I’m sure that you’re the very last person who needs a lesson on equilibrium.
It’s very nice to see you back, and having fun. 😉
Thanks, rare avis ! So I shouldn’t take Tom Willingham ‘s comment as another item for my To Do List- update lab web site!! 🙂
“No food storage” sign on the Puffer Hubbard? I guess you can’t eat the fridge? Or is that a flammable material storage sign?
Tom Nathe red hooks are leads for the electrophoresis power supply.
Jim Gorycki definitely no food or drink allowed in a lab! Also, flammables can’t be stored under a work bench. They would have to be in a separate cabinet under the fume hood.
I can identify Michael Jackson’s gloves =)
Lev Osherovich I think they’re leads too, although they had me stumped until my 16 year old suggested it 🙂
they’re all fondant. what did I win?
Bryan Headrick
The icing on the cake. A sweet prize!
I can name some in french but I don’t know in english. Some are definitely foreign like the 2 red worms. And the orange loaf…
PS… has anyone dared mention that the red bit looks a bit like ebola, as portrayed in recent media photos? Arghhh. Too impressionable: me. 😉
rare avis now that you said it, can’t unsee it… Olivier Malinur red things are just electrical leads. Not sure what the color range for them would be in other countries.
Orange loaf is a plastic microfuge tube holder. Sometimes called eppendorf tube holder after a popular brand of microfuge tubes.
I’ll refrain from guessing, but that is a fabulous cake
Perhaps we can persuade our resident cake artist and science nerd, Kimberly Chapman to add this design to her repertoire?
Nice Vortex Genie!
Where’s your blue & yellow tips?
My 8th grade daughter got “Falcon” tubes. I said, “wow, you even got the brand name.” She replied, “blue caps–duh.” Kid’s been brought up in labs since infancy.
Paul M someone with sharper eyes than mine claimed there was a tip on the pipetman. It would have to be white, they are less common and usually reserved for the filter plugged type or the smaller 0-10 microliter sizes. I would have liked to see a yellow or blue pipet tip too!
Paul M Kudos to your daughter for ID’ing the Falcon tubes. I like to carry spices on holiday trips in these screw capped wonders. My daughter grew up filling tips into the boxes, as a substitute for those pegs in holes toys 🙂
I could totally make something like this Rajini Rao if I had pictures of all of the required equipment.
Before I had children I used to make iiiiiiity bitty little polymer clay kitchen tables with tiny cookie sheets and mixing bowls and muffin tins and ingredients on them.
I quite love doing miniature work.
I just need a babysitter so I have time. 😀
I wish I was close enough to babysit while you could go off and be creative. I miss having little ones around, Kimberly Chapman . We could find you pictures of the real labware, no problem!
Yep, my daughter has filled her share of tip racks, too. And dry ice smoke!
I have a small entry for a little show in April that I haven’t even started yet. I’m so behind in everything right now because Robin is no longer content to sit in her high chair while I cook/wash dishes/etc. like she was in the fall.
Rajini Rao, do you know what we use those cardboard buckets for (from Chen’s photo)?
Uhmm, mice? Chad Haney .
We use those take away boxes for Chinese food, with wire handles, to ferry mice around
Shhhhhh, Rajini Rao. They stock those buckets in the animal facility.
Yeah, and I’ve probably turned off people from take out Chinese food forever. TMI!
The grey thing is a defective battery charger they got out of the dumpster behind Auto Zone. They use it as a power supply and are now very careful with polarity since the nasty incident with the fudge.
Jim Carver they make some power supplies “idiot proof” these days so the polarity can’t be reversed 🙂 Many a grad student has walked away from a gel electrophoresis expt to find that their sample moved in the opposite direction and is now lost in the buffer.
Rajini Rao Haha, yeah, p’s and q’s are important and knowing where you are.
At my son’s work they hired a new guy to deliver appliances with Chris and I guess you could say he is training him. Chris tells him to change out a range cord for the one that fits the customer’s supply and the guy has done it before so Chris walks away to deal with another item. Later Flash BOOM …the guy had plugged it in before connecting it to the stove. Fortunately no injuries.
Best flash boom I heard about was on a geologist unit on an oil rig in Colombia. We use calcium carbide in quite large quantities. One idiot decided to store the bucket of calcium carbide under the sink, which was leaking.
A guy entered in the unit, switch on the light and kaabooom ! He found himself 5 m away sitting on the door.
Obviously the army which was protecting the rig against guerrilla went more agitated than a kicked wasp nest. Needless to say the technician who stored the carbide that didn’t last very long on the rig.
Olivier Malinur I used to play with that stuff as a kid…chemistry was always interesting.
Electrical arcs are something different, I never liked to play with that stuff. An explosive arc might save your life though. Most of the people who get electrocuted are unable to free themselves of the live conductor.
Carbide is not used for welding in that case. It is for calculating the volume of a borehole. You drop it in the pipes and knowing the internal volume of the pipes and the flow rate of the drilling mud, you can derive the volume from the time the gas generated by carbide takes to reach surface.
Olivier Malinur Can’t they do that using some other method? I’m not up on my petrol geology these days and mostly focus on weather and climate, but introducing acetylene into the well?
That sounds like making a dangerous situation worse.
The quantity is small, very small. Drilling mud is often containing gas from the rock we drilled, in much larger quantity.
This is not the proper thread to discuss about it but, yes, there are other methods but they need you to stop drilling and run some tools in the hole.
Olivier Malinur Oh thanks, appreciate that.
Jim Carver Sounds like the 220 was not wired right (neutral, ground, etc.) Good thing no one was hurt! I hear horror stories from one of my electrician associates
Hmm…I wonder if it tastes good…(sorry all I can think of is eating the cake :P)
Jim Gorycki Yeah, not sure about the details but I guess Chris fixed it. I taught him basic electrical theory so he knows what to do.
I grew up on a farm where we used three-phase power for certain things. We had this huge motor that pumped water out of a pond and up to the fields. It was awesome. You had to be damn careful working around the water and all that power.
I see two graduated albino carrots. Sorry, that’s all I got.
Haha, David Archer . There are several orange-red objects but I’m not seeing any carrots. I must need more Vitamin A/retinoic acid.
That’s so nice cake…
Great to see you back Rajini Rao
Great to see you as well, R Prakash Prakash !
Great!
Hiiii
I’m able to identify only the gloves and the pipette. The other instruments are difficult to exactly identify. I guess they are used for analysis of chemicals, it’s most probably for experiments in biochemistry.
Is this mr Steve Jobs’s table?
Hello, Adit Morey , that’s a good start. If you scroll up the comments, you’ll see that many people have some of the right answers, with Chad Haney winning the icing on the cake for the most complete explanation!
It’s not fair though, since I’m supposed to know what all that science stuff is. I’m sure Buddhini Samarasinghe will get full marks too.
Cakes shouldn’t be so cool that we’d want to only stare and not eat them 🙂
Hello Rajini Rao.:) I tried to identify the items on the cake without reading the previous comments as I felt I had to at least try a little. After reading Chad Haney’s comment I infer that it’s a lab bench for experiments in cell biology…It’s a very cool and innovative idea for a birthday cake. 🙂
Oh wow that is an awesome cake! Let’s see…
From L to R, we have an Eppendorf micro centrifuge, a heating block, a Corning flask (yay orange lids!), 50ml Falcon tubes, vortex, 1.5 ml tube rack, a trusty Gilson pipette, power pack for Westerns (how to miss those red and black power leads!), nitrile gloves (should have been light blue or purple :P), and of course the protocol file (Maniatis would have probably been overkill?).
On the bench we have drawers, 4C mini fridge, and cupboard.
What’s my score? 😀
Buddhini Samarasinghe wow, A+, have some cake! I missed the power leads although Arjun guessed. I was also hoping to see the Maniatis “bible” on the bench. The greeting on the blue labeling tape was a nice touch.
I would love a cake like that, but prob won’t eat it because it looks so beautiful!
Buddhini Samarasinghe, the orange cap is a dead give-away for a Corning bottle. Am I right?
Chad Haney yes! I love Corning glassware! I am such a sucker for brand names 😛
I visited the Corning glass factory near Ithaca, NY! They had beautiful glass-blowing demos. I believe they sold off some of their divisions..possibly their Corningware for the home table.
Rajini Rao did u really ate this 🙂 how cruel
Rajini Rao , you are looking for regular carrots. David Archer pointed out that the carrots were albino and graduated. Now do you see them? The ones with the blue tops? 🙂
Karthic Kumar , no- I only admired it 🙂
Jyoti Q Dahiya the flask with orange cap could be an albino carrot! Perhaps the blue cap is an albino blueberry.
Hiiii
really creative..:)
I’ll have my birthday cake designed as a rowing boat 🙂
Stuti S A I I’m intrigued. Are you a rower?
Rajini Rao 🙂 I’m voyaging through “The Boys In A Boat” authored by Daniel James Brown and my imagination propels me to think of myself as one of the protagonist 🙂
Sounds like you recommend this? Will check it out 🙂
http://www.danieljamesbrown.com/books/the-boys-in-the-boat/#.VR7UjpTF_bo
Rajini Rao Yeah. It’s an amazing read 🙂 I’m through the first 200 pages though. A very gripping story, indeed. 🙂
Jan Costantini I missed your earlier comment entirely! It’s funny, let me take another look 🙂
Hi haleu
Nice cake,
It’s really a nice cake which shows the real respect of those people who are work with lab.
Very many thanks for your interesting posts.
Fantastic