23/1/14

Had a rather nice biology practical today. Used a light microscope. I could see quite a lot of stuff.

That's the light microscope we used. It's an Olympus one. We were supposed to prepare slides and then view them under the microscope, which was rather easy.
I like them. Unfortunately there wasn't much I could take away from this biology practical in terms of laboratory equiment.

And these are onion cells. I forgot their actual name. Anyway if you zoom in on the picture you can see a small ruler as well, which tells you how big the cell is. Each division on the ruler is 2.5 micrometres. Go figure.
And everyone was busy slicing up the onions with the scalpels because why not? And onions are tasty.

 And these are hydrilla leaf cells. The nucleus isn't observable but you can see the chloroplasts clearly. I also managed to get a video of cytoplasmic streaming. That's where the chloroplasts are moving around inside the cell.

If you look closely you can see the chloroplasts slowly moving around. Don't rush them.

Anyway besides these 2 they also required us to obtain cheek cell samples. And these are how my cheek cells look like.

They're quite irregular.
In several Western countries where oral sex is more common, it appears that students who do this may occasionally also find sperm cells. Ew.
Anyway we also decorated the massive window of our classroom. It's bloody amazing. I like it very much.

 JUST LOOK AT THE AWESOMENESS :D
On a side note, we made an extremely long Mobius strip with 5 sheets of paper, cut it in half, and then cut it in half again to get 2 long Mobius strips that were joined together. The whole thing was so long when we put it out of our classroom window it reached the 2nd floor. An our classroom is on the 5th floor. We'll be doing it again with more paper, just to see if we can't set the world record for the longest paper Mobius strip.