Open Science Journal

Chronological Lab Notebook

Daily logs with notebook pages, experiment photos, and markdown notes.

Red tomato project has achieved blob

Permalink
Notebook page for 2026-09-21

Not many bits survived the process but I have one especially good-looking callus going with signs of red RUBY and signs of the purple anthocyanins going.

Photo dump

Permalink

Things that should get a ln but haven't this past week

Tiny little earring exchange

Permalink

Notably modelled and printed by Astra with no oversight, then painted and put out

Making rubies

Permalink

0.5% Cr2O3 in Aluminium oxide, carbon arcs with a welder set to ~70A. Nice glow under UV, some pinkish color but lots of black/grey/brown too, nice red under UV

Water Mold

Permalink

Sadly, despite a last desperate bleach-related rescue attempt, my possibly-miraculin-transformed duckweed fronds are overcome with mold.

Cpopper-infused sunstones glow under UV unlike clear ones

Permalink

Daily Entry

Permalink

Pushing copper into sunstones, this test 1100C for 48h, needs more for longer!

Baby oxalis and strawberry

Permalink

Pinball machine

Permalink

Tidying up

Permalink

Cleared out dozens of tubs and a bunch of petri dishes with duckweed experiments. Sadly ruby batch got water mold, washed a few in bleach + water to attempt rex. Ditto miraculin bunch.
Anything GMO got bleached to death.
Yay fresh start.

Thin film biofilm

Permalink

Beautiful blues (other colors too with angle change) thanks to thin film effects in in this biofilm

Ito En jasmine tea is probably ~75mg caffeine per L

Permalink

Rough test, looks like 30-40mg per bottle (guesstimate)

Tomato tfm

Permalink

Media: 25 ml MS media with 25ul bap, 2.5ul NAA, 50ul timentin, 200ul PPM

PPM only included second time after first got mold. (Pic shows mold) (Todo other pics)

Agro dip for 1h then 24h co-culture on plain ms media, then rinse in dilute bleach (2nd time, mold inspired), then tfer to antibiotic media. Here's hoping

LASERCOLOR

Permalink

I found this old product at SCRAPS PDX. Its a stack: PET carrier, some sort of release layer, shiny blue + aluminium layer and some heat activated adhesive. OG use was getting selectively stuck to laser printer toner to give your printed pages some bling. WIth a little heat it sticks to PLA quite nicely, although even surface contact seems important.

More RUBY fronds than there were

Permalink

So at least some seem to be making stable daughters :)
GOsh I have so much stuff I should document and make notes of but I might have to declare bankruptcy on some of them, I'm behind and need to do more new experiments.

Forgot to add nutrients to duckweed

Permalink

My poor duckweed stock; I cleaned em out and then forgot to add nutrients (I think)? Just noticed the state of them. Added some quickly, more than usual, will see what happens.

UV camera

Permalink

Hacked a UV camera to work on my mac!
https://github.com/johnowhitaker/uvcam
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H15QWXWB

RUBY duckweed

Permalink

Last transform was mid-april, most of these are from older ones. I collected some red fronds together to show off, here's the collection. They don't thrive, but I think there are some new small ones? Any left along end up surrounded by green though. Got some new tips for transform to try.

Separating Duckweed

Permalink

Lemna major vs minor (I guess major is now Spirodela polyrhiza but still)

green things

Permalink

Separating out some algae (also starting to think about ordering some chlorella and spirulina for edible algae experiments). Sorting old duckweed, about to sort new and big duckweed from whitaker ponds slough. Some water mold on one old dish. Some glow in eyGFPuv dwe but mostly from damage, TBD what grows.