Washburn CHAOS Lab

Washburn CHAOS Lab Welcome to the Washburn CHAOS Lab — Center for geoHealth and Applied Omics Studies based at the Kentucky Geological Survey. Join the chaos.

We are feral scientists who sequence to metal, decoding the interaction of earth processes with health.

05/16/2026

You know how conspiracy boards have red string connecting everything together? Literature reviews are basically the scientific version of that, except peer reviewed and with significantly more caffeine.

Somebody locks themselves in a room with 200 papers, emotional support caffeine, and academic trauma, then emerges to tell the rest of us what the field actually knows, what it thinks it knows, what completely failed, where the gaps are, and where research needs to go next.

They are the “state of the union” for one hyper-specific science topic and honestly one of the best ways to learn a new field because reviews are basically the TL;DR plus the receipts.

Currently deep in revisions on one right now, so the feral cave goblin has temporarily evolved into a professional paper goblin.

05/15/2026

The ground in Eastern Kentucky has been burning for decades and now scientists are finding microbes in it that can help develop new medicine.

This is the story about the Ruth Mullins Coal Fire.

05/13/2026

How could science explain why salt works against ghosts and demons in Supernatural?

Basically, it comes down to ions, affordability, and bioelectrical energy. Yes. Again. Apparently my entire science creator hobby is slowly turning into “what if electricity, but haunted?”

And on a side note, I have a lot of conceptual ideas for tactical deployment of salt against supernatural entities. If the Wi******er Brothers ever started an R+D department, I would be more than happy to be their feral science collaborator.

05/12/2026

Who's that microbe?

It's a probiotic, anaerobic, and is your OG gut biome.

05/11/2026

Let’s talk about the time researchers played a Halo 3 match to answer a question: do male players talk to female players differently in competitive games, and if they do, what does that actually look like?

Today we’re highlighting a study done by another research group: the 2015 PLOS ONE paper by researchers Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff that tested this in a live game environment.

And before the comment section deploys emotionally, this was a controlled experiment run by an actual research lab, not somebody rage-posting after losing Ranked.

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.

Address

310 Columbia Avenue
Lexington, KY
40506

Website

https://youtube.com/@washburnchaoslab

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