July 12, 2023
Any Requests for a New Red Wafer?
It’s subtle, but this wafer is just slightly pink over most of the surface. Probably nothing you would notice if you were just checking on it in a dark tabernacle. But it’s growing Serratia.
Which means I expect it to be nicely red in a couple days, maybe even with the dark gooey clots after about a week. But I’m running out of experiments I want to try. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I can’t check blood type easily because I think the standard at home kits rely on the sample being fresh blood so that it will agglutinate. For this I would need a test for dried blood or other tissue like they do in forensic labs. That’s going to take a bit more research.
Do you have any photos of it under the microscope?
it sounds like you can use a phone held up to the eye piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkaGWmyoIvU&t=56s
I have a DSLR and a camera mount, so that’s not the problem. How to prep it and stain it is the bigger question. Most of the claimed Eucharistic miracles do an H&E stain because they assume it’s human tissue, but that’s not generally what you would use for fungi.
I happen to have a red one I can take photos of this weekend. It’s like 3 months old now. But the red ones don’t actually look any different than the ones that don’t turn red. The red colour comes from Serratia bacteria, which when it’s isolated shows up as tiny specks at 1000X magnification. But any wafer that’s just been sitting out in water is also covered in fungi, which are much, much bigger. So there’s too much in the way to actually see the bacteria.
Unfortunately, you can’t actually see bacteria with my camera mount (and certainly not with a camera phone held up to the lens). To get to 1000X magnification I need a 100X oil immersion lens multiplied by a 10X magnification in the part I look into. The camera mount only has 2X magnification, so the best I can get with that setup is 200X, which is far from enough to see bacteria. I can show you the fungi though.
Actually maybe I can get some magnification from a camera lens. I’ll have to experiment.