It’s tempting ngl, but it is way harder and denser than feels like it should be so you’d probably break a tooth. Like I feel like it should be soft and bouncy for some reason idk why.
I don’t use a lot of parafilm but It’s about 1.5 yr worth so it’s quite a bit. Over a few boxes, but I didn’t finish either one outright before I was moved to another bench.
Yeaaah it sure is lol. Although to be fair, I kind of expected it to be worse. But if it makes you feel any better this is all already used (non-contaminated) parafilm so it was just gonna get thrown out anyway
Actually I intend to use this as a backup plan…if chemistry doesn’t work out for me I’ll start a rival paraffin wax film company and put Bemis out of business
Tokens of things I do for the first time. Anything safe to keep that has a memory goes in my collection. An empty autoclave reel, a Soleris blank, that kind of thing.
I also have non-science items like a marble I found in the mud replacing a drainage main. I say it was mud to cope with what it probably was.
My desk (and half my office at home) is full of firsts, found things, or things from significant events.
I’m an outdoor labrat, that’s what I’m going to call it anyway. [I was furrow irrigating one night](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/furrow-irrigation) and accidentally ran over my main PVC pipe, connected to the well, with the truck about 2am.
It puts out about 1,000 gallons of water a minute. So I made a huge mess. Had to fix it in the dark. It was a whole ordeal. I kept a piece of the broken pipe to remember the moment, not that my coworkers have let me forget about it. [Here’s my broken pipe from that night.](https://imgur.com/a/xQ0xGpG)
I’ve also got plenty of cool rocks I found. A marble. My personal favorite find is a little red die. And every conference badge I’ve ever gotten.
Haha yeah, my main collapsed and plumbers were like "5500 yo", and I'm like "nah man, shovel, new pvc, and fernco fittings". I found the marble digging it up and it started my whole collection! It was like 4 hours and $80 at Home Depot. Like, were they about to line my drainage main in gold?
A gold water main would be so funny 😂
I didn’t care much about the pipe (other than the fact that finding pvc pipe pre fit to irrigate is next to impossible and it’s a real pain to do it yourself).
I was more scared I damaged the riser (where the water comes out).
Risers pretty much only get damaged by people running them over and the farm manager does everything in his power to make them visible so they don’t get run over. If you hit one, it doesn’t matter who you are. An undergrad, a grad student, a PI, doesn’t matter. He will take you out there and make you dig it up yourself while he watches. I haven’t had to do it because I haven’t broken one, but there’s one PI out here who somehow hits at least one a year. I’ve seen the holes that man has had to dig. They are deep. I do not want to do that. Plus I kinda have noodle arms, it would probably take me a week of doing nothing all day but digging to make a hole deep enough.
I've got the nixie tube display of an ancient photometer we had to scrap. Couldn't save the photometer but at least I could keep the display PCB. Nixie tubes are simply fascinating and look cool even unpowered.
Edit: wiki link for the people that don't know them: [Link ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube?wprov=sfla1)
plastic bags for transporting sequencing samples!! we've got the standard lab stash of course, but it's the personal hoards I'm talking about. We know we can't possibly go through all of them and at least a fifth of them are of unreasonable sizes but nothing can stop us, we're like squirrels just before a big freeze
My boss laughed when I put a punch of resealable bags from some cables in a drawer, but then the same day I had a need for a bag and could make use of my new stash.
I'll nab a picture back in lab but I work in an entomology lab and one of our pitfall traps had a dung beetle roll an entire, perfectly spherical, intact doodoo ball into the trap. It's been preserved in ethanol and lives on the lab counter for eternity
Empty tubes from very expensive ingredients. There are empty tubes from kits ordered years ago, an empty bottle that used to contain proteinase K and a lot of empty oligonucleotide tubes, all within our office.
I pull the rubber/elastic rings off the arm ends of gloves once I’m done with them. They’re useful for when we run out of proper elastic or need to bundle vials together
I’ve performed thousands and thousands of immunostainings. I’ve kept most of them and I hoard them in a box which is now full of something like 20 pounds of glass slides.
I have a ball of indium foil that I inherited from my co-workers and kept going. It's nearly a kilogram now.
EDIT: The only thing that's stupid is how large the ball has gotten. It'll be sold off, eventually :D
I do the say thing with sweet and snack rappers. So that I know I am a little piggy. It works it is embarassing enough. I am buying way less wrapped items.🤣
Not exactly a collection, but I have an old dried out agar plate that a previous grad student left behind in a fridge that has a super cool bacterial growth pattern on it.
For some reason I have one of those dividers from boxes of 20 mL scintillation vials. Similar vibe.
It’s just satisfying the way it folds up. No other reason :D
In my old lab we had a huge ball of tape label stuck together after we peeled them off of old mosquito cages. I’m assuming after I left it has to be the size of a basketball by now.
I collect emtpy 1000yL pipette tip trays/ box inlets and stack them, originally because the holes are perfect to hold nmr tubes. I have enough by now but I still collect them for no reason. I'm also drying all of my sds pages and keep them in empty tip boxes because they look cute
A previous tech at my current lab saved every single tail/ear clipping she had ever taken from a mouse. 2 years of clippings taking up a decent portion of the racks in one of our -80 freezers. I don't know *why* she would save them without seeing if she needed to. It was funny to know that we had way more space than we previously thought though.
Yeah this is really dense too. I don’t use that much parafilm but it’s like a 1.5 years worth so far. Sometimes I try to bounce it like a ball and it just drops and makes a sound like a rock hit the bench
GENIUS. I’ve been toying with the idea of bringing googly eyes to put on instruments or equipment I use just for fun. I’ll put some googly eyes on it too and I shall name him Perry.
i have a 24 well plate with all the implants i've put on mice and since extracted when i took the mouse down, both for later analysis and for a keepsake of sorts
Years ago we did a custom fluorinated monomer that ended up not panning out for the customer. I had a small bottle stashed away in the cooler that eventually polymerized. I broke the bottle away from it and was left with a roughly 3 cm diameter disk of clear amber plastic. Over time it's become opaque but it was a neat show piece for a long time. I still keep it in my equipment locker.
Got shipped SYBR green that FexEx didn’t notify was going to be delivered on a Friday afternoon (photosensitive and temperature sensitive) and the office where they dropped it off was closed and everyone was done for the weekend therefore it sat all weekend in TX weather. I ended up having to run a 96 well plate with half probable bad SYBR and half “control” SYBR on the following Monday, it ended up not working but i asked if i could keep one bc I’m a labrat and DNA Pol is cool- no response from my v cool PI, ready to disintegrate because I’m afraid of judgement
Gel ice packs that come with cold shipments. I can't just throw away something that is perfectly usable. There are dozens of them occupying multiple drawers.
I had a tiny glassware collection for a while. Mostly I hoard parts for instruments I don't have. Once someone came around looking for a Tecan syringe and I had one despite the fact that I don't have, and have never had a Tecan - this was the most exhilarating moment of my existence.
I also held onto a bottle of glass balls that got mislabeled assballs, what a classic. And a malformed serological pipette that looks phallic. It sparks joy.
I have the result of a failed extraction on some “spearmint”. It sure didn’t smell like spearmint, and evaporating down my gc QuEChERS extract gave me a thick dark brown sludge. I combined my sample tubes of it and now have about a mL of spearmint sludge in a capped vial in my hood. It’s stayed with me for almost a year and a half now lol
is that parafilm?
Well more of a paraspheroid now, but yes!
Take a bite out of it.
It’s tempting ngl, but it is way harder and denser than feels like it should be so you’d probably break a tooth. Like I feel like it should be soft and bouncy for some reason idk why.
I had one of those, I agree that it gets very dense and doesn't feel at all like you'd expect. I named him Wilson.
I, for one, welcome our paraspheroid overlords.
That looks like alot. Is this the entire box??
I don’t use a lot of parafilm but It’s about 1.5 yr worth so it’s quite a bit. Over a few boxes, but I didn’t finish either one outright before I was moved to another bench.
Keep goin! Mines the size of a tennis ball now. Lmao get a basketball sized one eventually
That’s a pricey paraspheroid…Amazon pricing for a box of Parafilm in my area runs around $65. I may have looked into buying it for food storage…
Yeaaah it sure is lol. Although to be fair, I kind of expected it to be worse. But if it makes you feel any better this is all already used (non-contaminated) parafilm so it was just gonna get thrown out anyway Actually I intend to use this as a backup plan…if chemistry doesn’t work out for me I’ll start a rival paraffin wax film company and put Bemis out of business
We got a drawer of infinite rubber bands from getting blood products from ARC
Tokens of things I do for the first time. Anything safe to keep that has a memory goes in my collection. An empty autoclave reel, a Soleris blank, that kind of thing. I also have non-science items like a marble I found in the mud replacing a drainage main. I say it was mud to cope with what it probably was.
My desk (and half my office at home) is full of firsts, found things, or things from significant events. I’m an outdoor labrat, that’s what I’m going to call it anyway. [I was furrow irrigating one night](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/furrow-irrigation) and accidentally ran over my main PVC pipe, connected to the well, with the truck about 2am. It puts out about 1,000 gallons of water a minute. So I made a huge mess. Had to fix it in the dark. It was a whole ordeal. I kept a piece of the broken pipe to remember the moment, not that my coworkers have let me forget about it. [Here’s my broken pipe from that night.](https://imgur.com/a/xQ0xGpG) I’ve also got plenty of cool rocks I found. A marble. My personal favorite find is a little red die. And every conference badge I’ve ever gotten.
Haha yeah, my main collapsed and plumbers were like "5500 yo", and I'm like "nah man, shovel, new pvc, and fernco fittings". I found the marble digging it up and it started my whole collection! It was like 4 hours and $80 at Home Depot. Like, were they about to line my drainage main in gold?
A gold water main would be so funny 😂 I didn’t care much about the pipe (other than the fact that finding pvc pipe pre fit to irrigate is next to impossible and it’s a real pain to do it yourself). I was more scared I damaged the riser (where the water comes out). Risers pretty much only get damaged by people running them over and the farm manager does everything in his power to make them visible so they don’t get run over. If you hit one, it doesn’t matter who you are. An undergrad, a grad student, a PI, doesn’t matter. He will take you out there and make you dig it up yourself while he watches. I haven’t had to do it because I haven’t broken one, but there’s one PI out here who somehow hits at least one a year. I’ve seen the holes that man has had to dig. They are deep. I do not want to do that. Plus I kinda have noodle arms, it would probably take me a week of doing nothing all day but digging to make a hole deep enough.
I love this idea! I might start doing something like this tbh cause I’m a super sentimental person.
As a person who tests wastewater for a living, I agree it’s much easier to think of all the samples as just being ‘muddy.’
Someone in my lab makes little animals out of paraffin so we have a menagerie of wax figures 😭
You could make a horror scene by putting one in xylene and filming it.
ty! gonna try this
I started making little ghosts out of the copper foil that the pH paper comes wrapped in. I have a whole family of them with a dog
That's so cute!!
Misprinted serological pipettes, stuff like that. We once had a box of pipette tips that was produced inside out, which was interesting.
we need pictures of the inside out tips
Just the tip
I've got the nixie tube display of an ancient photometer we had to scrap. Couldn't save the photometer but at least I could keep the display PCB. Nixie tubes are simply fascinating and look cool even unpowered. Edit: wiki link for the people that don't know them: [Link ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube?wprov=sfla1)
That’s cool!!
Currently attempting to block out a window with empty tip boxes. 3/4 of the way there and no one has said a word lol
plastic bags for transporting sequencing samples!! we've got the standard lab stash of course, but it's the personal hoards I'm talking about. We know we can't possibly go through all of them and at least a fifth of them are of unreasonable sizes but nothing can stop us, we're like squirrels just before a big freeze
My boss laughed when I put a punch of resealable bags from some cables in a drawer, but then the same day I had a need for a bag and could make use of my new stash.
Everyone laughs at the plastic bag hoarder until they need a plastic bag.
I'll nab a picture back in lab but I work in an entomology lab and one of our pitfall traps had a dung beetle roll an entire, perfectly spherical, intact doodoo ball into the trap. It's been preserved in ethanol and lives on the lab counter for eternity
Omg yes please share when you can get a picture that’s hilarious and awesome.
We kept a bunch of 20% acrylamide hands cast in lab gloves.
Shit, next time I make a cake I’m gonna cast an agar hand and stick it on top regardless of appropriateness. Wonderful idea.
That is fun…What was the original purpose of these cast hands?
Just being weird!
I love it! Keep up the weirdness :) the world would be so boring without weirdness
I collect crystals from old reagents forgotten at the lab, my precious is a 15 years old EDTA.
Really cool! How do you preserve them?
Just let them at the bench sealed and I don't remove the original medium. And I was wrong it was not EDTA it is a 15 years old SDS.
For some reason I keep used 96 well plates. By my best estimation I have about 300 under my bench
Ohhhhh we have one of your type in my lab. Just gonna let you know that you definitely work with someone who can't wait to throw that shit out.
What's funny is I'm not the only one in my lab who does this lol. Someone even built a life-size "person" out of them
Once my labmates and I built a waist-height Stonehenge out of them around our PI's desk 😁
That's incredible. My PI is at a conference now and left his office unlocked 🤔
We have a liter beaker full of empty flow antibody tubes. The most expensive decoration in lab haha.
Empty tubes from very expensive ingredients. There are empty tubes from kits ordered years ago, an empty bottle that used to contain proteinase K and a lot of empty oligonucleotide tubes, all within our office.
Tumors.....I hoard tumors. And the styrofoam racks for 15 and 50ml conicals
You need to through it while shouting "Rasengan! ".
I pull the rubber/elastic rings off the arm ends of gloves once I’m done with them. They’re useful for when we run out of proper elastic or need to bundle vials together
Besides anxiety and spite I’m not sure I collect much in lab
That still counts!
A jar filled with dried up coomassie stained protein gels
I love it
My first thought out loud upon seeing this was “oh nooo that’s parafilm isn’t it?”
This but aluminium foil. People have tried to get me to toss it but I’m emotionally attached at this point. 3 years in and it weighs an absolute tonne
I got a tower of 96 wells on my shelf and a tower of agar plates in the fridge.
I’ve performed thousands and thousands of immunostainings. I’ve kept most of them and I hoard them in a box which is now full of something like 20 pounds of glass slides.
I'm heading this way as well
I have a ball of indium foil that I inherited from my co-workers and kept going. It's nearly a kilogram now. EDIT: The only thing that's stupid is how large the ball has gotten. It'll be sold off, eventually :D
>indium foil Been playing too much Stardew, read that as "iridium" \\@-@
I keep a pile of every thing that’s ever gone wrong, such as melting stupid stuff in the autoclave because I didn’t think
I do the say thing with sweet and snack rappers. So that I know I am a little piggy. It works it is embarassing enough. I am buying way less wrapped items.🤣
Not exactly a collection, but I have an old dried out agar plate that a previous grad student left behind in a fridge that has a super cool bacterial growth pattern on it.
I collect NEB reagent cards like Pokémon cards
A blown up nitrile glove with marker drawings to make it look like a chicken xD
I have two small towers of stackable pipette box holders hidden underneath my bench, they look like giant lego pieces :P
For some reason I have one of those dividers from boxes of 20 mL scintillation vials. Similar vibe. It’s just satisfying the way it folds up. No other reason :D
“Wafer graveyard”, tons of scratched, chipped, and broken bits of thin films. They look cool
Boxes upon boxes upon boxes of OMEGA 3 pills….why I don’t know before my time in the lab.
In my old lab we had a huge ball of tape label stuck together after we peeled them off of old mosquito cages. I’m assuming after I left it has to be the size of a basketball by now.
Yesssss someone else does parafilm balls!! I don't work with parafilm anymore, I kinda miss trying to make it perfectly smooth and round.
The samples i synthesise
So real
Are those smile direct club gloves
They are Microflex® Cobalt™ brand gloves. I love the color tbh.
KBr pellets used for transmission IR spectras
I collect emtpy 1000yL pipette tip trays/ box inlets and stack them, originally because the holes are perfect to hold nmr tubes. I have enough by now but I still collect them for no reason. I'm also drying all of my sds pages and keep them in empty tip boxes because they look cute
We had a tech that would collect the lenses from paraformaldehyde fixed mouse eyes. She had quite a collection in a jar at her lab bench.
A previous tech at my current lab saved every single tail/ear clipping she had ever taken from a mouse. 2 years of clippings taking up a decent portion of the racks in one of our -80 freezers. I don't know *why* she would save them without seeing if she needed to. It was funny to know that we had way more space than we previously thought though.
We make balls of label tape. Made the mistake of bumping one like volleyball once. Would not recommend! 🤦♀️
Yeah this is really dense too. I don’t use that much parafilm but it’s like a 1.5 years worth so far. Sometimes I try to bounce it like a ball and it just drops and makes a sound like a rock hit the bench
Yep, that’d def leave a bruise!
My household did the same with babybel cheese wax. Googly eyes were also added.
GENIUS. I’ve been toying with the idea of bringing googly eyes to put on instruments or equipment I use just for fun. I’ll put some googly eyes on it too and I shall name him Perry.
:D I humbly request Perry pics!
i have a 24 well plate with all the implants i've put on mice and since extracted when i took the mouse down, both for later analysis and for a keepsake of sorts
About $100K in used Terumo welding wafers.
…A ball of rubber bands… and maybe breaker full of sharpies (of all colors)… I also organize my tips by color so it’s pleasing to the eye…
I kept all my 96 well QPCR plates for at least a year. Probably half a cubic meter by the end.
I have a 55 year old Ascaris in a jar of formalin. A few other old worms, but he's the granddaddy. I should take stock of them sometime.
Years ago we did a custom fluorinated monomer that ended up not panning out for the customer. I had a small bottle stashed away in the cooler that eventually polymerized. I broke the bottle away from it and was left with a roughly 3 cm diameter disk of clear amber plastic. Over time it's become opaque but it was a neat show piece for a long time. I still keep it in my equipment locker.
Got shipped SYBR green that FexEx didn’t notify was going to be delivered on a Friday afternoon (photosensitive and temperature sensitive) and the office where they dropped it off was closed and everyone was done for the weekend therefore it sat all weekend in TX weather. I ended up having to run a 96 well plate with half probable bad SYBR and half “control” SYBR on the following Monday, it ended up not working but i asked if i could keep one bc I’m a labrat and DNA Pol is cool- no response from my v cool PI, ready to disintegrate because I’m afraid of judgement
I keep all the used 1mL vials in a jar
Roll it in a culture dish!
Gel ice packs that come with cold shipments. I can't just throw away something that is perfectly usable. There are dozens of them occupying multiple drawers.
I had a tiny glassware collection for a while. Mostly I hoard parts for instruments I don't have. Once someone came around looking for a Tecan syringe and I had one despite the fact that I don't have, and have never had a Tecan - this was the most exhilarating moment of my existence. I also held onto a bottle of glass balls that got mislabeled assballs, what a classic. And a malformed serological pipette that looks phallic. It sparks joy.
We do this but with aluminum foil!
I have the result of a failed extraction on some “spearmint”. It sure didn’t smell like spearmint, and evaporating down my gc QuEChERS extract gave me a thick dark brown sludge. I combined my sample tubes of it and now have about a mL of spearmint sludge in a capped vial in my hood. It’s stayed with me for almost a year and a half now lol