blood spatter

blood. this was supposed to be the interesting bit, wasn't it?

blood stains

well, i actually thought that this lesson was better than the ones before. i like systematic stuff when doing experiments, it's nice to fill in tables with all the collated data.

now that's a jumbo picture for you.

the paper on the left shows stains which were created from 'blood' dripped on a paper that was angled differently each time. if you squint at the labels, you'll see that stains created from larger angles of impact were more circular in nature.

meanwhile, the paper on the right (which seems to have lotsa virus cells) actually has stains created from paint dripped from different heights. once again, if you are willing to make yourself look more chinese in nature, you may squint at the labels and realize that the greater the height the paint was dropped from, the greater the diameter of the stain.

it's pretty common sense, if you ask me.

identifying human blood

sounds pretty cool, eh? i still enjoyed the previous lesson more.

we were given six samples of red stuff to identify. once again, as with the chromatography lesson, it was pretty obvious who was really what (or rather, what was really what. but that sounds dumb).

we first used hydrogen peroxide to test for bubbling. really, it's not as cool as it sounds. the fun part began when we... poked around a bit while ms siow was out.

hey, it's all in the name of scientific inquiry, isn't it? it looked way cooler when the thing actually exploded in the middle like a volcano, but the bubbling had receded by the time this photo was taken. we also added some transition metal... sprinkles to spice up the volcano. teehee.

following that we sprayed the two samples which bubbled with luminol.

*gasp!* an exciting new development! only one specimen glowed!!! does that mean that... it's blood?!

...yes, but we still have to do a third test. our kastle-meyer reagent test didn't really turn out well since the blood sample was supposed to turn 'an intense pink'.

instead we see here a situation where only the edges - and only a small fraction of it - is barely pink. oh well.

you know what pisses me off the most about this lesson? the worksheet used two pages, one of which was used for the sole purpose of listing TWO REFERENCE LINKS. talk about saving the environment.





imaginary scenarios and other stuff
now we come to the part-which-everyone-waited-for-but-turned-out-a-little-disappointing! i was looking forward to totally vandalizing the toilet, but it turned out that we would have had to clean up should we have dirtied the plastic sheets.

my benchmates and i created the following crime scene.

the scenario we invented wasn't exactly creative, actually. notice the white sheet of paper in the shape of a person's head and shoulders on the sheet on the ground? that's supposed to be the victim. midget daughter.

this was our opposite bench's scenario:

being the fail bench that we are, rachel, huikai, caroline and i concluded that the assailant used a machine gun on the victim. hahaha. it turned out those two lines of blood are slashes... a bit anticlimactic, don't you think? it would be totally bad*** to use a machine gun on someone.

the later half of the lesson was spent doing this rather pointless activity called dripping-paints-of-different-colors.

totally csi.