It is ok to warn people on dangers, but also it is OK to explain how to do that properly, because many of people will try this anyway and it is good to see proper way.
I love ur videos, i actually brought my first microscope because of ur videos, an Olympus CH2! Because i wanted to examine my garden soil, also specifically the "compost tea" theory which is a trend i guess now in the gardening community, and you do that by putting a handful of compost preferably a worm castings in a mesh bag in a water with air running through both water and mesh bag for 24-48 hours to increase bacteria and microorganisms which should be good for soil, what do you think about that? And would you be interested in testing this experiment and maybe make a video comparing before and after under microscope, there is a lot of videos for Dr. Elaine ingham about this and she highly recommends, she also made videos to teach gardeners how to examine soil under microscope but its old one, i would really like to see u do that because u r very detailed in ur information and please keep up the good work, thank u
Also can you please do a review of foldscope, it's a very cheap paper microscope made by some MIT guy, it has a magnification of 140X and can also do projection microscopy. I would love to see your views on it!
Good afternoon Sir, I have a question. How would one aquire the magnification of a microscope with mislabeled magnification? It is the kind that is handheld. Please and thank you.
Very extremely instructive, thanks Oliver. Just a somewhat related comment: my west coast city near the Pacific Ocean has become a destination for transients (so-called "homeless") from all over the US, perhaps all over the world. Amazingly, if you're walking down the street, you'll often hear these people comment, "Oh, I just got into town from Philly" (Philadelphia), or Atlanta, or whatever. Anyway, there are concentrations of these people all over town, even behind my house in the alley, with large piles of junk, debris, feces, urine and other filth--a veritable smorgasbord of bacteria. Typhus, TB and other diseases have now become a problem again, even measles because of parents refusing to immunize their children. One of the worst and most contaminated environments is the LA Police Dept which was recently cited and fined by the State Health Department for unsanitary conditions. Strangely, there was a news report describing the City's efforts to reduce the problem with a mobile UV Robot (not actual cleaning and sterilization--but a Robot!) So, in my area, I'm pretty sure we are all living in a Level 2 or higher hazardous environment. ;-) Perhaps Heaven for a Microbehunter!
It's the saddest urban transformation in my lifetime :-\ We've tried to solve the problem in SLC by dispersing the shelters, but it is only causing conflict because no public input is ever sought on their location until after the decision on where they will be built has been made.
@@JohnMichaelson Sadly, but funnily, the person probably most responsible for the influx, our mayor Gil Garcetti (who started a program to welcome the transients to our city with "gift" baskets), has not allowed any transient encampments of any kind in his personal residential neighborhood.
For those who really insist on growing bacteria at home, when handeling the Petri dishes (opening the lid, preparing to harvest some to put on a slide, preparing the slide, re-closing the Petri dish, ...) always keep a candle or better an alcohol burner or even better a Bunsen burner burning in the centre of your working space as close to the Petri dish as possible. It will (i) avoid contaminating your Petri dish with airborne stuff, (ii) lower the chance of air-born components reaching your respiratory system and (iii) if you use metal tools, you can sterilize them by holding them into the flame for a second or two between actions like e.g. when using an 'öse' to spread out and collect bacteria.
I respect your concerns. I think a very good alternative is to purchase professionally prepaired slides. Prepaired slides are usually identified with a label so there is no mystery as to what your looking at. They also typically are nicely stained so that they are easier to observe. I think of prepaired slides as a "zoo in a box". Some online science shops have slide sets for a reasonable price. Advanced slide sets can get rather expensive. Besides bacteria, you can usually get very nice slide sets of plants and animal tissues. Hope this helps.
Growing bacteria at home can be educational and doesn't necessarily have to be unsafe, as long as you take reasonable precautions like wearing gloves, cleaning up after yourself, and following aseptic procedures. Bacteria don't have wings--they're not going to fly off a culture on a petri dish and invade your lungs. There are only a few ways you can infect yourself: skin contact (particularly if you have open cuts), ingestion, and inhalation. The first can be mitigated by washing your hands and/or wearing gloves and cleaning up the area when you're done working with the bacteria with a disinfectant. Avoid ingesting bacteria by not eating when working with them, and keep your fingers out of your mouth. Inhaling bacteria is difficult unless the cultures dry out and become aerosolized. Disposing of bacterial colonies also takes some care. Professionals use autoclaves to sterilize equipment and cultures. Amateurs can use a common pressure cooker to achieve the same results. The key point here is getting the material to sterilize up to 120C and keeping it there for 15-20 minutes. If you use a pressure cooker to sterilize your lab equipment, don't also use it to cook food. I'm not encouraging anyone to go out and grow pathogenic bacteria like anthrax in their basement, but with proper precautions amateurs can grow many kinds of non-pathogenic bacteria in a home lab.
Is there any other way of disposing the petri dish and the bacteria on it if I wasn't planning on reusing the materials? Is it safe to just dispose it in general waste bin after the home experiment is done?
@@NerdyNEET Here I made a video about that can not only show how to grow bacteria but also know what bacteria that are growing. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-EP5sr7f1qxs.html I always love microbes, especially bacteria and virus, and I hope I can find people with the same interest, so I start my channel on RU-vid, come to take a look if you are interesting.
Never thought about the hazard ! Thank you , maybe you prevented a zombie apocalypse in my area ! But how about growing mycelium and fungi on petri dishes , ive wanted to do that for very long now..
I think bacteria and yeast can be in fact safer to culture than mold, bacteria does not spread out of petri dishes easily because their colonies are wet and to grow many of the dangerous bacteria you need a bit more specialized media (plenty of exceptions tho). However many molds spread their conidia (spores) with air currents so once they start growing you shouldn't open the petri dishes unless you know what you are growing isn't dangerous end even if it isn't dangerous you need to be careful to not contaminate your work area because it can ruin your other experiments/cultures, also many opportunist and downright pathogen molds grow in very simple mediums like potato dextrose or V8 media some examples of this molds can be _Aspergillus fumigatus_ (opportunistic pathogen but also can sometimes infect inmunocompetent persons) it is everywhere! so very easy to find and grow or _Coccidioides immitis_ a very infectious fungi that is hard to find because its endemic to just certain areas of the south of USA and north of Mexico, in all microbiology manuals i have read advice against the culture of this fungi and remark that if really needed its preferable to culture it on test tubes and not on petri dishes due the risk of infection. Im not trying to discourage you but the opposite I think more people should get into culturing microorganism its very fun and not that dangerous if you know what you are doing. I can suggest starting with the culture of yeasts and lactic acid bacteria, very harmless and the media isn't that hard to make, plus you start to learn and familiarize with the aseptic technique and how to work with microorganisms safely, a mold that you can get to play with is _Penicillium roqueforti_ from blue cheese, just barely touching the mold in one of the cavities in the cheese with your previously sterilized inoculation loop is a good way to get a sample with a very low contamination of bacteria, open your petri dish or test tube and touch the center with the loop, close and then sterilize your loop again, incubate at 28C°. Im not a microbiologist but I studied the career for some time before changing my mind so i changed career still I learned and I still do all that as hobby.
@@NerdyNEET It was for the Science fair, and we didn't have any problems. Disposed of it in a plastic bag and put it in the trash. Hope nobody at the trash burning place dies lol
If you are willing to help me find what kinda bartrea are in or on green crabs ill send you a packet with some green crabs in it ill first have to see about making a packege for them to stay alive they are a salt water crab that are from nova scotia swamp im tryin to see if its posabel to make a plant that will use alot more co2 and make alot more air so if planted in large amounts it will do a good chunk of amosfair cleanin as we are way over doo for a cleaning or we will all end up dead thanks if ya do read this and message me back
I do not agree. You can't treat a gunshot with antibiotics or washing your hands, specially if the kid got the bullet into his skull. Depending on what medium you are using is the bacteria you will grow, you can't accidentally grow _B pertussis_ on V8 media, In fact spoiling food isn't that different than culturing intentionally, you would be surprised at the amount of bacteria that can grow on certain food, you can even see colonies if you pay attention to spoiling food so i don't agree with the notion that in culture media the amount of organisms is so much higher than in food, for example look at the video of the rotting cucumber on one of Oliver's channels you can see colonies of bacteria! many media for fastidious organisms kinda look like a recipe for a meat stew, some of the biggest differences is that with culture medium is sterilized and offers a convenient way to grow and manipulate the microorganisms ie solid media you can pick up and see the organisms, in a meat stew they just grow everywhere. It is indeed a risk to culture organisms at home but definitely isn't like you say, Even if it was so who would leave a loaded gun on the dinner table when kids are eating? guns should be stored on a safe place away from children, same for your cultures, away from unauthorized people and food/eating areas, and also just don't grow dangerous stuff, you might not know what you are growing at first but also you wont get anthrax spontaneously on media for lactic bacteria.
Water sample with paramecia. Add crushed wheat grain. wait 2 days. Take grain out, put a drop of the slime surrounding the grain on a microscope slide.
What if you want to check total microbe content of a compost tea ? Can you at least do that at home ? What if I was hunting for the next anti-bacterial wonder myself ... ? Beeing a self-confessed naturalist I would like to dose a mix of bacterial cultures with different seed sprout effluents and/or highly concentrated (ayurvedic) botanicals ? Do I really have to get a degree for that because that is what you're condemning me to. Don't forget penicillin - and thus the age of antibiotics - was accidentally discovered by a slough in his highly contaminated DIY homelab ! Has Science become so advanced/elitist that it is unreachable by the common hobbyists/naturalists/polymaths/alchemists/botanists/medicine men from whom it first came (Royal Academy). Has our health declined so badly that we shouldn't put our hands in straw soaked manure mix ? Has germ-theory made us all into scared phobic mental patients ? Or Am I really playing with fire.
You can perform something called “virulence test” to see how good the bacteria at causing disease. Basically the attack and defense ability of the bacteria, for example, how bacteria stood against WBC or complement, how they attach onto cell, do they have toxin or not....etc.
Thank you for a fantastic response video to my question! I deeply respect your qualified advice, and will look at the other alternative you have recommended! It deeply concerns me about the number of RU-vid videos I have seen, in which mum's especially are demonstrating growing microbes at home in petri dishes for teaching their children about biology! I have often thought to myself, how are they now going to safely dispose of them afterwards??? I also am studying and teaching my daughter chemistry at home, and the first thing I have taught her is always think of SAFETY first for yourself, others and the environment! Doing the experiment safely is one thing, disposing of the waste safely is another! Many thanks again, much appreciated advice. 👍😉
