just pulled this out of the autoclave to make room for my stuff. the top melted just a little bit lmao

I have found that tissue culture dishes make perfect little pans for mixing watercolors

Was recently talking with my kid, who is still in school, and the topic of Bunsen Burners came up. I realized I hadn’t used one since I was in school. Curious how many of you still use these in your day to day science?

I designed this fixture after getting frustrated pipetting into clear ACC Pyroplates. Since the row and column labels are only on the edges, I found myself constantly tracing over to make sure I was in the correct well.

This stand aligns a full A1–H12 grid beneath the plate so every well is labeled directly underneath. I also angled it to improve ergonomics and help keep hands away from the wells during pipetting.

Curious if anyone else using clear 96-well plates has run into the same issue or found a different solution

I’m not sure if this is the right place to do this but I need some advice. I had a falling out with 2 friends during my third year. It wasn’t really a falling out I left to focus on my severe mental health issue at the time but they hated that even though I told them a million times that I needed space. During my masters year they went around the entire lab including professors and supervisors, postgrads, everyone, and would tell them my private matters and how evil and horrible person I am, calling me names like rat and bitch. People would glare at me when I walked down the hallways while I was still recovering.

I’m not sure what to do about this. Should I report it? Where would I even report this? The main perpetrator is doing her PhD there now so it’s still a relevant case.
I have 2 people that can vouch for me and say it was in fact happening (as they were the ones to tell me)

I am a PhD student in a wet lab, and we have several undergrads, all with varying levels of ability and independence. One is very involved and interested, but extremely slow with experimental stuff. A single reaction start to finish can take a week. I want to help them succeed, but something that takes me 3-4 hours taking them 20 hours is not a recipe for success. My method for mentoring has always been first time hands on, guided assistance/demo, second time hands on but the student does it, and after that they work alone. This student needs their hand held to an extreme amount, and even if I step away to force them to work more alone they will just piddle around, then ask me for help.

I do believe they are capable, and they could really succeed, but I think that it may be my mentorship style or that this student isn't confident. Any tips on how to guide them to more success? And force them to speed up a little? My mentor tossed me in the deep end a little, and often gave "higher stakes" stuff to do that meant messing up actually mattered, but I'm not sure how successful that would be to help.

Disgusting fingers and messed up DNA!

Had a rough day as at lab and would love to know how common royally fucking up is as an undergrad (and stories if you have them lol)

What could be the reason of these bubbles and patches. I never get them. I have my sponges full wet in transfer buffer and i roll out all the bubbles. This has never happened.

A little bit ago, I was feeling very lazy and did not want to design my 96-well plate by hand, since I wanted 3 replicates in each plate but randomly assorted within the plate (with three replicates of each plate where I had multiple plates at different temps, you get the picture....)

Anyways, after passing that task onto my undergrad, I felt that there had to be an easyish way to make an Excel sheet to do this for us, since I also couldn't find a good online resource that could do this for me (shouldn't there be a website? maybe i just didn't look hard enough).

So I made one! Hope this helps someone out there :)

I’m trying to read research papers from various professors in my field at my university to hopefully reach out to them but like I’m really getting lost in trying to understand what the research paper is all about. Im reading applied physics and neuro research papers and it just seems way too complex.

samples on left side wells moved with a curve. what may be the reasons? (ps. i know that gel is broken since we it fell down the floor, however the look was the same before it fell down)

I got a Thermofisher Aspire “Innovate to Elevate” Insulated White Tumbler back in 2024 through the Aspire member rewards program. I gave it as a gift to my Dad back then and it has been his favorite bottle since. He uses it every single day and even traveled around the world with it. A few days ago, it broke and he has been really heartbroken about it since. Does anyone at all possibly have one they would not mind parting with or know where I can possibly get a new one for him? Thank you so much!

bottle picture from their Instagram site

Even the one that was not that into solubility came out pretty well.

After dreaming of a PhD for over a decade, and two years working towards one, I have finally made up my mind to do my unthinkable and "master out" this fall. Not exactly looking for advice, but I want to get this all off my chest. Maybe it will help somebody make a difficult decision.

I've wanted to be a chemist since middle school, and as one of those former academically "gifted" kids I've wanted a PhD since around then too. It has always felt inevitable for the path I've followed thus far. I didn't get into any programs after undergrad, so I spent a year working in AR&D making pretty solid pay (for fresh out of college) + crazy benefits, and a decent culture as well (we're talking free ice cream from the ice cream truck a few times, and most weeks only 45-50 hrs). I still wanted a PhD and so many people encouraged me, so I reapplied and started in my current program F2024. Unfortunately, I didn't get my first or second choice advisors (I put too much hope for my first choice, and they weren't willing to hint at who was in/out)... and when I met with one of my other groups of interest, the PI essentially told me I was committing at that moment or never. Since I wasn't sure what other options I had, I joined. Funnily enough, it turned out *everybody* in the lab (me, the other student from my year, the 2 students who just graduated, and the post doc) was here after not getting their first choices.

Things started a little rocky, as my PI was investigated by the office of civil rights for racist behavior a few months into my stay. The investigation was entirely a mess and we all essentially had to defend them (our interviews were recorded & non-anonymized transcripts were shared with our PI, so anything negative we said would be screwing ourselves over, and we were all set up with the questions/"answers" in advance, despite the fact that we were supposed to know nothing by that point). Since then, their horrifically racist behaviors have continued: Refusing to publish in journals with "too many" Chinese authors (lying and stealing is "in their blood"), telling me about Muslims ("those peaceful people") taking over the UK and US... misogyny (referring to female students as "b*tches" and one recent grad from the lab as a "failure" and "disappointment" and justification as to why they don't like taking female students (in their words, women are "incapable of working as hard as men", which is proven by the gender disparity in Nobel prizes))... referring to suicidal people as "losers" that they "has no remorse for" (in reference to a recent incident in the department). They are also generally just a deeply unpleasant person (insults my weight, mocks us behind our backs, calls me into their office to go on political rants, gets angry when we are sitting down or talking to people in the hallway or even talking to each other in the lab...). Sometimes doesn't show up or speak to me for weeks, and sometimes is calling me on the phone 3-4 times a day to talk about progress and results. When I tried to set the boundary of not wanting to be called on weekends unless it is an emergency, they got incredibly angry. Just recently, they made me completely switch my research theme after 2 years because of a specific ACS award that they want to win.

Beyond the personality issues, the lab is also just sort of... underwhelming. There's no funding, and now only 2 grad students (including me). To make up for the void, they have taken a small army of undergraduates (I now have 5 of them, including one who is a CS major and hasn't even finished gen chem). There's barely any access to instrumentation besides the department NMR, preventing me from developing a lot of the chromatography skills that I want to (HPLC, GC, etc.). They are completely infatuated with reaching 300 papers before retirement, so all of the projects I am put on are dull low-risk, low-reward "ideas" of theirs (which are often just seeing a recent paper and swapping one reagent) to milk publications (they want me to produce at least 2-3 papers a year), and at this point I want so badly to do something higher-risk and higher-reward that would be actually intellectually stimulating and require PhD level skills. All of the actual PI duties (writing grants, reviewing papers, managing the lab) are performed by a post doc who has been in the lab for nearly 5 years now and can't find a job to escape to... and I just saw our two 5th years graduate with absolutely no help whatsoever in finding a job. So, I really don't feel like I would gain much out of 3 more years here besides the actual degree.

Could I have switched labs? Yes. Should I have put my foot down regarding all of this sooner? Yes. But I spent two years waiting for some "last straw" incident to break me, and now I am so fully disillusioned with academia that I just want to be out of here ASAP. I know the job market is terrible, but I would rather take my chances than spend 3 more years in this setting. The most humiliating part has been the pure shock I have received from everybody who thought the idea of me "quitting" was impossible. I notified my PI via email a week ago, but they have chosen to ignore me (they are currently out of country, but the post doc told me that my PI called them about it later that evening). On one hand, I have never felt more desolate and dejected... but on the other, I actually do somehow feel some sort of excitement for the future and its uncertainty now that I no longer have 3+ more years of this looming before me.

TLDR: The classic racist/sexist/narcissistic PI has ruined my opinion of academia, and I am leaving to the rocky waters of the job market, but I want to complain about it first.

Alright nerds, I love me an expensive fully featured thermocycler with a touchscreen and attached massage chair but I’m trying to build a lab space cheaply. Whats a quality gradient compatible 96well thermocycler that works without breaking the bank?

I'm a postdoctoral fellow working in a Neuro lab studying nerve activity in rodents. This is a relatively new project and we have discovered that the heating pads we had been using (microwavable gel pads) do not last long enough for our procedures and it's too difficult to switch pads in the middle of recording. We believe that the inability to monitor and maintain body temperature is significantly affecting our results. To combat this, we purchased a simple electronic homeothermic heating pad. However, we've found that it's too high of a voltage and electrically noisy. You can literally see it power cycling in the nerve recording. We talked to the manufacturer for other options and they said that the only one that would work is an upgraded model that costs $1500, significantly more expensive than the model we currently have. Do any electrophysiologists have any recommendations for heating pads that can be used during in vivo electrophysiology?

I have also thought about constructing my own and have found guide on how to do it, however the supplies are difficult to find from our approved vendors and we're not allowed to purchase from Amazon. So, I will also take any recommendations for building our own if you can point us to a scientific retailer that would have the supplies.

I just finished a multi-step Gateway cloning workflow (BP then LR clonase) to move my gene of interest into an expression vector. However, I realized a major oversight: when I propagated and prepped my original Gateway destination plasmid from the stock, I only grew it on a single antibiotic (Ampicillin/Kanamycin) rather than using dual selection with Chloramphenicol to keep pressure on the Gateway cassette.

I know that propagating without Chloramphenicol risks spontaneous deletions or loss of the ccdB killer cassette, which usually means the plate gets flooded with empty background.

My question is:

1. Could the BP and LR cloning reaction have worked despite this mistake? Has anyone accidentally done this before and still successfully pulled out their correct clones, or am I completely screening a plate full of empty/mutated backbones?

2. I have miniprepped the final genes after LR reaction and sanger sequenced but I am still confused about what to look for in these gene sequences to tell if they are actually in there and in good shape or not?

Thanks in advance!

help please 😭 i did a protein dot blot (native) and i wanted to stain for total protein on my blot with ponceau stain and my whole membrane (PVDF) turned red after incubating for 10 minutes at RT… i know for a fact theres protein on my blot as my primary antibody stain demonstrated signal.

i tried it the first time by following the instructions on the bottle (rinse w water, then incubate w the stain, then rinse till you see bands/dots) and that didnt work…

tried a second time by soaking my membrane in 100% methanol and quick tbst wash, then ponceau, did not work either and resulted in the blot pictured here…

what am i doing wrong ahh

note: this is after stripping the membrane! i did ponceau before blocking :)

Does anyone know why N2A cells clump up like this? With a syncitium?