The tissue homogeniser

Allow me to introduce one of the most exciting pieces of lab machinery I've had the pleasure to work with over the past few months: the Precellys 24 tissue homogeniser:

It doesn't have a name. They only name PCR machines in this lab.

It breaks up tissue samples. The idea is that you put your sample in a tube with some liquid and some very hard beads - the ones I used were chips of garnet. Then the machine shakes the tubes vigorously, so that the beads and sample slosh together and the sample gets ground up, and you end up with a sample soup that's much easier to do chemistry with. Here's how the manufacturer describes it:

The machine is about 50 cm tall and shaped like a can of beans. You lift that thick, heavy lid to get to the ring of holes where your tubes sit. You take off the white cog-shaped cap, slot your tubes in, put the cap back on, close the massive lid, hit start and retreat at speed to a safe distance. After a couple of seconds warming up, the machine gives a sudden WHRROOAARRRR, like a small JCB, the sample holder becomes a grey blur and the whole 30 kg lot shudders along the bench towards the closest edge. This continues for a minute or so. It takes a break and then goes again, however many times you've asked it to. Mercifully, it tends to stop travelling after a while.

When you dare come back in the room, you lift the lid and take off the plastic cap and remove your sample tubes. They feel hot through your gloves. My samples were soil and poo, and they came out of the homogeniser looking like frothy chocolate milkshakes. Needless to say, it's ruthlessly effective; only the garnets survived as solid material and I'm amazed that the tubes never broke.

But the most surprising thing is the white cap. In the instruction book, it calls it a "patented system" used for "quick and safe locking". But I've been generous calling it a cap. It's no more than a thin, flat piece of plastic that sits on top of the sample holder. There's no click, nothing holding it down other than gravity. It's comparable in weight to a large grape. And yet it stays on, and the sample tubes do not fly out of their holes.

Bravo Precellys, for a truly remarkable piece of engineering.