You might remember a few weeks back that I took a picture of a mussel and a baby squid from my zoology lab. According to my website access statistics, that blog post got passed around quite a bit (probably because of the baby squid and not the mussel). Unfortunately, there will be no more pictures of adorable baby animals anymore, because the remainder of the labs that involve animals are dissecting dead ones rather than looking at alive baby ones.

Such as next week, we’ll be dissecting a rat.

I’m pretty sure everyone will hate me if I post a picture of that on my blog, so if you really want to find out what that looks like, you can go to Google Images and search for “rat dissection.”

Fortunately, we didn’t dissect anything this week, and instead we learned about meiosis. As a part of the lab, we extracted DNA from our own cheek cells. Pictured below is mine.

I love how my camera focused on my lab partner’s notebook and her jacket rather than on my DNA.

For those of you who haven’t noticed yet, the white wispy stuff in the test tube is DNA. It was extracted through a process of scraping off cheek cells, adding a substance that opened up the cells, then adding another substance that made the DNA rise up to the top.