Kyobanim
11-05-2005, 22:56
The thing speople do in the name of science.
Popular Science article can be found here (http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/806ffb24a5f27010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html) in it's entirety
10. Orangutan-Pee Collector
"Have I been pissed on? Yes," says anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University. Knott is a pioneer of "noninvasive monitoring of steroids through urine sampling." Translation: Look out below! For the past 11 years, Knott and her colleagues have trekked into Gunung Palung National Park in Borneo, Indonesia, in search of the endangered primates. Once a subject is spotted, they deploy plastic sheets like a firemen's rescue trampoline and wait for the tree-swinging apes to go see a man about a mule. For more pee-catching precision, they attach bags to poles and follow beneath the animals. "It's kind of gross when you get hit, but this is the best way to figure out what's going on in their bodies," Knott says.
9. NASA Ballerina
Her dance partner is a supersensitive Robot
8. Do-Gooder
Bugs, bears, and a melting earth—you call this a vacation?
7. Semen Washer
It's a job that separates the boys from the men
OK, OK, their real job title is usually something like "cryobiologist" or "laboratory technician," but at sperm banks around the country, they are known as semen washers. "Every time I interview someone I make sure I ask them, 'Do you know you'll be working with semen?' " says Diana Schillinger, the Los Angeles lab manager at the country's largest sperm bank, California Cryobank. Let's start at the beginning. Laboriously prescreened "donors" emerge from a so-called collection room that is stocked with girlie mags and triple-X DVDs. They hand over their deposit, get their $75, and leave. The semen washers take the seminal goo and place a sample under the microscope for a sperm count. Next comes the washing. The techs spin the sample in a centrifuge to separate the "plasma" from the motile cells. Then they add a preservative, and it's off to the freezer, where it can stay for 20 years. Or not. Thanks to semen washers (and in vitro fertilization), more than 250,000 babies have been delivered in the U.S. since 1995.
6. Volcanologist
When the earth heats up, they head in
5.Nuclear-Weapons Scientist
They've mastered fusion. Next up: Filing
4. Extremophile Excavator
Never has success smelled less sweet
3. Kansas Biology TeacherOn the front lines of science's devolution
2. Manure Inspector
The smell is just the start of the nastiness
Almost 1.5 billion tons of manure are produced annually by animals in this country—90 percent of it from cattle. That's the same weight as 14,432 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. You get the point: It's a load of crap. And it's loaded with nasty contaminants like campylobacter (the number-one cause of acute gastroenteritis in the U.S.), salmonella (the number-two cause) and E.coli 0157:H7, which can cause kidney failure in children and painful, bloody diarrhea in everybody else.
1. Human Lab Rat
Warning: Pesticides are bad for you
Pharmaceutical companies have long relied on hard-up college students to act as guinea pigs. (Dudes, I was in a double-blind Viagra trial! And I got paid!) But did you know that the pesticide biz is hiring too?
Last year an industry-funded University of California at San Diego study paid students $15 an hour to have the root killer and World War I nerve agent chloropicrin shot into their eyes and noses. Chloropicrin is also a component of tear gas—that trusty suppressor of Big 10 sports riots—and at high doses can lead to nerve damage and death. Duuude. Because of its irritating qualities, small doses of the chemical are often added to other pesticides to act as a "warning agent," and it's the safety of those doses that the study looked at.
Popular Science article can be found here (http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/806ffb24a5f27010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html) in it's entirety
10. Orangutan-Pee Collector
"Have I been pissed on? Yes," says anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University. Knott is a pioneer of "noninvasive monitoring of steroids through urine sampling." Translation: Look out below! For the past 11 years, Knott and her colleagues have trekked into Gunung Palung National Park in Borneo, Indonesia, in search of the endangered primates. Once a subject is spotted, they deploy plastic sheets like a firemen's rescue trampoline and wait for the tree-swinging apes to go see a man about a mule. For more pee-catching precision, they attach bags to poles and follow beneath the animals. "It's kind of gross when you get hit, but this is the best way to figure out what's going on in their bodies," Knott says.
9. NASA Ballerina
Her dance partner is a supersensitive Robot
8. Do-Gooder
Bugs, bears, and a melting earth—you call this a vacation?
7. Semen Washer
It's a job that separates the boys from the men
OK, OK, their real job title is usually something like "cryobiologist" or "laboratory technician," but at sperm banks around the country, they are known as semen washers. "Every time I interview someone I make sure I ask them, 'Do you know you'll be working with semen?' " says Diana Schillinger, the Los Angeles lab manager at the country's largest sperm bank, California Cryobank. Let's start at the beginning. Laboriously prescreened "donors" emerge from a so-called collection room that is stocked with girlie mags and triple-X DVDs. They hand over their deposit, get their $75, and leave. The semen washers take the seminal goo and place a sample under the microscope for a sperm count. Next comes the washing. The techs spin the sample in a centrifuge to separate the "plasma" from the motile cells. Then they add a preservative, and it's off to the freezer, where it can stay for 20 years. Or not. Thanks to semen washers (and in vitro fertilization), more than 250,000 babies have been delivered in the U.S. since 1995.
6. Volcanologist
When the earth heats up, they head in
5.Nuclear-Weapons Scientist
They've mastered fusion. Next up: Filing
4. Extremophile Excavator
Never has success smelled less sweet
3. Kansas Biology TeacherOn the front lines of science's devolution
2. Manure Inspector
The smell is just the start of the nastiness
Almost 1.5 billion tons of manure are produced annually by animals in this country—90 percent of it from cattle. That's the same weight as 14,432 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. You get the point: It's a load of crap. And it's loaded with nasty contaminants like campylobacter (the number-one cause of acute gastroenteritis in the U.S.), salmonella (the number-two cause) and E.coli 0157:H7, which can cause kidney failure in children and painful, bloody diarrhea in everybody else.
1. Human Lab Rat
Warning: Pesticides are bad for you
Pharmaceutical companies have long relied on hard-up college students to act as guinea pigs. (Dudes, I was in a double-blind Viagra trial! And I got paid!) But did you know that the pesticide biz is hiring too?
Last year an industry-funded University of California at San Diego study paid students $15 an hour to have the root killer and World War I nerve agent chloropicrin shot into their eyes and noses. Chloropicrin is also a component of tear gas—that trusty suppressor of Big 10 sports riots—and at high doses can lead to nerve damage and death. Duuude. Because of its irritating qualities, small doses of the chemical are often added to other pesticides to act as a "warning agent," and it's the safety of those doses that the study looked at.