The Universe of Disco

Evaporation
I work for the Penn Genomics Institute, mostly doing software work, but the Institute is run by biologists and also does biology projects. Last month I taught some perl classes for the four summer interns; this month they are doing some lab work. Since part of my job involves dealing with biologists, I thought this would be a good opportunity to get into the lab, and I got permission from Adam, the research scientist who was supervising the interns, to let me come along.

Since my knowledge of biology is practically nil, Adam was not entirely sure what to do with me while the interns prepared to grow yeasts or whatever it is that they are doing. He set me up with a scale, a set of pipettes, and a beaker of water, with instructions to practice pipetting the water from the beaker onto the scale.

The pipettes came in three sizes. Shown at right is the largest of the ones I used; it can dispense liquid in quantities between 10 and 100 μl, with a precision of 0.1 μl. I used each of the three pipettes in three settings, pipetting water in quantities ranging from 1 ml down to 5 μl. I think the idea here is that I would be able to see if I was doing it right by watching the weight change on the scale, which had a display precision of 1 mg. If I pipette 20 μl of water onto the scale, the measured weight should go up by just about 20 mg.

Sometimes it didn't. For a while my technique was bad, and I didn't always pick up the exact right amount of water. With the small pipette, which had a capacity range of 2–20 μl, you have to suck up the water slowly and carefully, or the pipette tip gets air bubbles in it, and does not pick up the full amount.

With a scale that measures in milligrams, you have a wait around for a while for the scale to settle down after you drop a few μl of water onto it, because the water bounces up and down and the last digit of the scale readout oscillates a bit. Milligrams are much smaller than I had realized.

It turned out that it was pretty much impossible to see if I was picking up the full amount with the smallest pipette. After measuring out some water, I would wait a few seconds for the scale display to stabilize. But if I waited a little longer, it would tick down by a milligram. After another twenty or thirty seconds it would tick down by another milligram. This would continue indefinitely.

I thought about this quietly for a while, and realized that what I was seeing was the water evaporating from the scale pan. The water I had in the scale pan had a very small surface area, only a few square centimeters. But it was evaporating at a measurable rate, around 2 or 3 milligrams per minute.

So it was essentially impossible to measure out five pipette-fuls of 10 μl of water each and end up with 50 mg of water on the scale. By the time I got it done, around 15% of it would have evaporated.

The temperature here was around 27°C, with about 35% relative humidity. So nothing out of the ordinary.

I am used to the idea that if I leave a glass of water on the kitchen counter overnight, it will all be gone in the morning; this was amply demonstrated to me in nursery school when I was about three years old. But to actually see it happening as I watched was a new experience.

I had no idea evaporation was so speedy.

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