Scientist humor part III

Scientist have a very interesting jargon. I thought that I would share an experience with it today. As a molecular biologist, I will frequently measure the mRNA levels in islets under different conditions. This used to be a very tedious process, one that needed radioactivity in a process called a Northern blot. However, with the advent of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), as well as the use of reverse transcriptase it is now very common to measure the amount of RNA as a function of its ability to be replicated over time. This can be done in one of two ways. The classic (insert the word old) way is to stop reactions every so many cycles of the PCR and run these on a agarose gel. You should see a linear increase in the amount of product. This is doable, but, it is a huge pain. The more common way is to use a PCR machine that has the ability to measure the amplification of a particular sequence overtime. It does this by way of a fluorescent dye that only shows up when a new copy of the message is made in the reaction. This is called real-time PCR, because you are able to measure the PCR products in "real time", without stopping the reactions to verify that each is working and running them over a gel. To do this you use a thermocycler with real-time capacities, or in other words, a "real-time machine".

So that huge introduction is to tell you about a two minute conversation that we had in the car the other day. Our real-time machine at work has been on the fritz for the last two weeks. The machine was finally fixed this last Friday. As we were all in the car Friday evening, I mentioned to Kathleen that I was very excited that the real-time machine was now fixed, so that I could finish up some of my experiments. My exact words were"I need to go into work early tomorrow because I need to put a plate into the real-time machine." From the backseat of the car I heard the sound of confusion coming from Benjamin. He had just been to my work, and was quite frustrated that I had not shown this particular machine to him. He said, in his particular incredulous way, "Dad, you have a REAL time machine? You didn't show me the REAL time machine when I went to work. Why do you need to put a plate in the REAL time machine?" I imagine he was quite confused why I needed to send a plate to the future, because surely they will have them there. I still don't understand why he didn't hear the hyphen in my pronunciation. Anyway, to clarify any other confusion of REAL time machines vs. real-time machines, here are two pictures:
A REAL time machine (which is also known as a pretend time machine)
And a real-time machine (Which could also be designated a real real-time machine). So there goes, now you know, and knowing is half the battle.