Growing from the inside out
After coming back to my room following reading week, my first task was to get rid of any rotting food in the room. I chucked a dozen apples out my window along with some oranges.
Notice the blue border surrounding the growth that came from the ink of a blue pen. The conditions must have been damp as the water crawled outwardly from the source. Flip the pages a bit more and black circular growth spots began appearing. Around this time, the spread of babyT was at it's max covering almost half a page. The source probably originated from here.
As the geological records go further back, yellow spots begin appearing in the foundation of the paper stack. When you flip pages that were on top of each other over, you can notice the perfect symmetry, a result of it's vertical growth. If you put the pages side by side, they almost look identical sans the scribbled notes they were wearing.
As the archaeological dig continued, babyT slowly diminished. You can see that the stack was quite big, consisting of several hundred layers. babyT read not only notes and homework, but magazines, sticky notes and anything else with words and numbers. At this point, I knew I shouldn't keep my pet babyT around any longer, after all colourful animals are dangerous - their coat usually a sign of poison, so I taped him up with plastic bags and shoved him under the sink.
The reason I did not destroy babyT is because I don't know what type of bacteria he is and would like to know (so if anyone does know, tell me!) Second of all, how could I destroy such good evidence, after being too lazy to record the growth of my own experiment, I was now being presented with a large amount of information on the growth of babyT. One had area of growth information that was carefully dated by my notes. The many pages could be examined individually as well as in a series, much like an MRI scan of the brain. Bacteria normally grows two dimensionally in a bacterial plate, but here I had a 3-d representation of the growth; amazing!
So my conclusion is, sometime around November, something must have dropped onto the right side of the stack of paper and began growing downwards. As fresh nutrition was piled on top, it slowly made its way up too. I hope babyT enjoys his new home under the sink surrounded by plastic bags - it must be a drastic change from the sunlight and gorgeous view of the windowsill. I wish him the best. - Tim-thebabyT-nourishing-bagwell-1styear
For the past few months, I tried without much luck to grow bacteria in my room. See following picture. Exhibit A is a test tube containing a Qtip that I used to swab some strange black stuff growing on my toothbrush. A few weeks later, it was confirmed that this substance was alive and although the image is blurry, the black tips show the growth.
I was disappointed at the slow growth but luckily while browsing the pile of scrap and used papers I had, I struck gold. I never threw away any loose leaf papers, notes, or homework that I completed this year; I just stacked them in a pile beside my window. And sometime in December something began to grow from the middle of that stack of paper. I didn't notice it at all, since new papers were constantly being added on top, until today.
The first signs of the bacteria - which will be referred hereafter as babyTgella (babyT for short)- were found in calculus notes- the area under a function (circa dec 2006) It's reddish apparel stood out from in the crowd of black and blue numbers. Remember that the top of the pile is the most recent (February) and the bottom (September), so babyT had grown all the way up to November. I dug further to find the source. One can see it sped right through the unit of thermodynamics.
Notice the blue border surrounding the growth that came from the ink of a blue pen. The conditions must have been damp as the water crawled outwardly from the source. Flip the pages a bit more and black circular growth spots began appearing. Around this time, the spread of babyT was at it's max covering almost half a page. The source probably originated from here.
As the geological records go further back, yellow spots begin appearing in the foundation of the paper stack. When you flip pages that were on top of each other over, you can notice the perfect symmetry, a result of it's vertical growth. If you put the pages side by side, they almost look identical sans the scribbled notes they were wearing.
As the archaeological dig continued, babyT slowly diminished. You can see that the stack was quite big, consisting of several hundred layers. babyT read not only notes and homework, but magazines, sticky notes and anything else with words and numbers. At this point, I knew I shouldn't keep my pet babyT around any longer, after all colourful animals are dangerous - their coat usually a sign of poison, so I taped him up with plastic bags and shoved him under the sink.
The reason I did not destroy babyT is because I don't know what type of bacteria he is and would like to know (so if anyone does know, tell me!) Second of all, how could I destroy such good evidence, after being too lazy to record the growth of my own experiment, I was now being presented with a large amount of information on the growth of babyT. One had area of growth information that was carefully dated by my notes. The many pages could be examined individually as well as in a series, much like an MRI scan of the brain. Bacteria normally grows two dimensionally in a bacterial plate, but here I had a 3-d representation of the growth; amazing!
So my conclusion is, sometime around November, something must have dropped onto the right side of the stack of paper and began growing downwards. As fresh nutrition was piled on top, it slowly made its way up too. I hope babyT enjoys his new home under the sink surrounded by plastic bags - it must be a drastic change from the sunlight and gorgeous view of the windowsill. I wish him the best. - Tim-thebabyT-nourishing-bagwell-1styear
posted by baby-t at 11:55 p.m.
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