New Species Discovered in Cubeville

In our line of work, we use a pretty wide variety of bottles for our analyses- there’s ambers for stuff that light will destroy, plastic bottles for metals, and the one we seem to use most often is the volatile organic analysis vial, or VOA for short. VOAs are pretty fragile things, and they have to be filled up just right because they have hydrochloric acid as a preservative. We always order extra when we’re sampling, because one always breaks or you tip the bailer too far and try to dump the whole quart in a quarter pint bottle.

One of these VOAs got ruined at one of our sites. I’m not sure how, they must have overfilled it, or it may have been an extra from an older project. Anyway, my cube neighbor found a way to re-use it, because it’s the perfect size to start something from a cutting. He’s got one growing on top of his file cabinet right now.

He calls it the VOA-dendron.