Washburn CHAOS Lab

05/07/2026

Can you lick the swamp salad growing next to cave lights?

Well, this is lampenflora: algae, mosses, cyanobacteria, and microbes growing anywhere we accidentally installed cave mood lighting. It can damage cave formations and alter native cave ecology, which is why we study it in CHAOS Lab.

05/07/2026

How could science explain midichlorians from Star Wars?

We're going to dive into the concepts of endosymbiosis, gene reduction, and mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell)!

05/05/2026

Is this rock interesting?

Rock balls. Yeah, I said it. Iron concretions just out here forming perfectly round little geologic gremlins inside sandstone like they’ve got a personal vendetta against being boring. It’s basically minerals deciding to cluster up and precipitate around a nucleus until, boom! Nature makes its own cannonballs.

Kinda interesting. Not gonna lie.

04/29/2026

How would the proton pack from Ghostbusters work, scientifically?

04/27/2026

Who's that microbe?

It's a single-celled parasite that hijacks rodent brains and makes them drawn to the smell of cat urine just to get itself eaten, and it gets tangled up in the whole “crazy cat person” chaos.

04/24/2026

Did you know a man infected himself with bacteria just to prove a point, and ended up winning a Nobel Prize?

This is the story of Barry Marshall, stomach ulcers, and H. pylori.

04/22/2026

Let’s talk Warhammer 40K, specifically how Space Marine immunity could work, scientifically speaking.

Here’s your 3-minute speed run of how the Emperor’s will could translate into real immunological processes.

I’m an immunologist, so this is my lane, and if you want a deeper dive on any part of this, let me know because I will absolutely spiral.

If enough of you enable me, this might turn into my first long-form video. Or if there’s something else you want science’d into existence, drop it in the comments.

04/21/2026

04/18/2026

Happy Bat Appreciation Day! Today’s Feral Science 101: Bat etiquette.

We go into caves. Bats live there. This is their house, we’re just the weird flashlight goblins.

So what does CHAOS Lab do?
We mind our business. We don’t touch them, we don’t bother them, and we work around them.

Respect the bats. Study everything else.

04/16/2026

Can you lick the weird crusty stuff on the side of some hiking trails?

That's a type of biocrust, and we advise against it. Not only is biocrust a multi-microbial community, but also plays an important ecological role and protects against erosion.

04/15/2026

How could science explain the flux capacitor in Back to the Future?

Apparently all it takes is 1.21 gigawatts and enough confidence to rewrite causality in real time. We treated it like real data and now physics has questions.