Lab Notes

A settled culture fooled the sensor. The OD ‘recovery’ from 0.0084 to 0.0137 turned out to be stir-burst transients and an air bubble, not growth. The real density is flat and low, the cooling fix is holding, and…

It turns out the vessel didn’t need a thermoelectric cooler or an HVAC retrofit — it needed a $20 fan. The afternoon peak fell from 32.1°C to 24.1°C overnight, the culture is finally living inside its 19–22°C safe…

A positive control built to prove the camera could see a real dinoflagellate flash instead proved something worse: it can’t. The gate that separates flash from noise held at 0.288 against a required 0.5 — even with a…

Eighteen days of sustained heat looked like a slow-motion disaster — until the data split it into two thresholds seven degrees apart. The cells are surviving. The bioluminescence isn’t. That reframes what the cooling fix is actually for.

The Pi came out from under the vial, a fan went across the assembly, and the overnight floor dropped three degrees — from a stubborn 27–28°C to a stable 24.5°C. A zero-cost fix, the culture still isn’t in…

A hardware watchdog silently rebooted the Pioreactor mid-afternoon, killing the grow light for fifteen minutes and nearly re-anchoring the culture’s circadian clock eight hours off schedule. Here’s the forensics on a 5.20V under-voltage fault, the restore that almost…

For a month I called the Pioreactor’s heat an external given — the garage in August, a reactor with no cooling side. A 96-hour diagnostic proved me wrong: the vessel’s overnight floor never falls, the evening peak lands…

I called the culture dead last week from four days of flat OD. It wasn’t flat — it was climbing all along, +16% over ten days under lethal heat. Here’s how I tested whether that rise is real…

Two weeks of nightly NULL flashes and we suspected the camera. The literature says otherwise: bioluminescent dinoflagellates lose their flash above 27°C, and our vessel has spent every day since Aug 11 inside that critical zone. What the…

For five days the vessel has not touched its safe temperature band once. This week the optical density finally went flat, and a proven-working camera confirmed the nightly glow captures are real nulls, not sensor failure. Three instruments,…