- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections6 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Water, fire, & insects
These are three primary worries of herbarium curators. The collection TPP curates is small, only 50,000 or so specimens. Some of them date back 200 years, some were collected by famous people, and some are precious records of prior diversity. Basically our herbarium is a teaching facility. Still such collections are irreplaceable so their safety must be insured. Insects have not been a problem for us, and the sealed cases work well. However, the collection is on the first floor of a 4 story building and the infrastructure is crumbling particularly the plumbing. See where this is going? Leaks are quite common, and were even more common, and more noxious, when some chemists lived up stairs. When you turn on the tap in a sink in TPP's lab the water runs brown for quite awhile. Now some of the plumbing is due to be replaced, by necessity, so when maintenance people say there may be some unanticipated leaks while repairs are being made, us herbarium curators sit up and pay attention. Oh, and while fire is a long-shot problem, you have to make certain that water isn't used to put out a fire in the herbarium, and you hope no fire must be put out on the floors above. Water always finds its way down. So during the rest of this week TPP will be fitting some plastic sheeting over the rows of specimen cases to offer some protection should the worst happen. Ironically, while doing this the message arrives telling us that the building will be without water over the Thanksgiving break except maybe for leaks. TPP took some time to show the plumbers what the worry was, and interestingly enough, they were impressed by the age and condition of old specimens, and the size of the collection. The next day a big roll of plastic sheeting arrived.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment