Not funny at all.
Today at uni I broke one of a matched pair of quartz cuvettes, worth £600.

Oops.
(Petite chien is going to do science to it, Mon 25 Jan 2010, 20:23, 11 replies)

Are they those sort of knee-length trousers?

( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Mon 25 Jan 2010, 22:14, closed)

I kind of wish they were
then they wouldn't be smashable.
(Petite chien is going to do science to it, Mon 25 Jan 2010, 22:34, closed)

Ah, the precious cuvettes of doom.
To the dull-witted (and we had a lot of those in our class), they are apparently indistinguisable from the uber-cheap disposable plastic ones.

Which leads to seriously pissed-off lab technicians; forced to either buy new ones ($$$); or slowly pick through several waste bins (each containing multiple-hundreds of used pipette tips, cuvettes, and other waste; tainted with an unknown combination of contaminants [carcinogens, corrosives, infectious agents]). Inevitably, they chose another dent in the budget; and being grumpy for the rest of the week.
(The Incredible Sulk Finally remembered his password on, Mon 25 Jan 2010, 23:32, closed)

aren't these essentially
test tubes? or so they appear when i just googled them.

those are some expensive test tubes. if i were a test tube baby i'd want to be made in one of those.
(TheManWithThePlan cussed your mum on, Tue 26 Jan 2010, 9:30, closed)

No
They're glass (in the case, quartz) holders for solutions for fluorescence and UV-vis spectroscopy - they have to let as much light through as possible for the experiments to work properly, and quartz is expensive, hence the price tag!

I'm not a silly first year who can't tell the difference between the plastic and glass ones either. I'm in the fourth and final year of my MChem degree :S
(Petite chien is going to do science to it, Tue 26 Jan 2010, 11:20, closed)

I have done exactly the same :(
Managed to somehow drop them in such a way that the sides sliced clean off. Not mendable though. You at Leicester per chance? We might be slowly destroying the same set of cuvettes!
(Puddle of Sugar was still wallpapering on, Tue 26 Jan 2010, 15:01, closed)

I did exactly the same thing!
But no, I'm at Sussex. I'm from Wellingborough though so I'm fairly familiar with Leceister. What year are you in?
(Petite chien is going to do science to it, Tue 26 Jan 2010, 16:44, closed)

You know it's going to be expensive when your cuvettes come in their own jewelery box...
I'm a master's student. Decided to mix stuff up a bit by getting a BSc and then staying on for another year! I wonder why they make cuvettes with such strong sides and flimsy corners...

The crucial question - do you have to pay for the sods?
(Puddle of Sugar was still wallpapering on, Wed 27 Jan 2010, 14:25, closed)

Cool
I'm in the final year of my MChem degree, so basically the same place! No, thank goodness! Each lecturer gets £800 for having an MChem student so that should cover them :D
(Petite chien is going to do science to it, Wed 27 Jan 2010, 17:20, closed)

Buy a Nanodrop spectro
We got one in the lab a couple of years back, much easier than pissing around with the inevitably-broken insanely expensive cuvettes.

Unless of course you aren't speccing DNA/RNA or protein.
(oball needs Satan more than he needs me, Wed 27 Jan 2010, 3:13, closed)

That would be amazing
But unfortunately I'm speccing quantum dots.
(Petite chien is going to do science to it, Wed 27 Jan 2010, 9:36, closed)