Still Just a Rat in a Cage - Laboratory Chat!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Still Just a Rat in a Cage - Laboratory Chat!

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

From the bio thread, worth trying.

Zudgemud posted:

We don't have the one that you have but one of our older bigger incubators had a CO2 sensor fail a couple of times and our maintenance guy, which came the first time, just pulled it out tapped it a bit and it started to work again. As a way for us to save like 2000 dollars he recommended us to try that again if it failed again (which it did, and the tapping worked then too). However, I recalled it being a bit unintuitive to actually pull out the sensor, and had he not shown us the first time we would have had no clue how to pull it out ourselves.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2021 20:44

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 05:12

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

Mustached Demon posted:

Instrument software across the board is garbage from an end user perspective. I think agilents ICP expert is probably the best I've used and I give it a "just ok."

Worst is probably some mettler stuff we have.

Well, our more recent ÄKTA Unicorn software is at least nice and user-friendly for both new and experienced users. And our western quantification software works nicely, they even let one use free versions of the software on your own laptop so you don't have to hog the machine to analyze your data. They are of course seemingly removing support for that software in favor of a costly licenced replacement software with a tacked on statistics suite... Our plate reader software is however a buggy turd with a user-unfriendly interface from the late 90s.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2021 21:33

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

mycomancy posted:

I say this as I literally am walking to lab to dunk cold cells into warm water like a ~~loving caveman~~ noble savage.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2021 21:48

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

Epitope posted:

They say things like "~~craft a testable hypothesis" and don't go on~~ sure, try a fishing expedition" but beyond that "oh ya looks good, try all of that" (go away I'm busy). ~~During rotation~~ I got handed a question and a vague untested experimental path to probe it. After 6 18 months of hammering mostly without supervision I got the results, and the response was basically "oh, you got that? huh, ~~I don't know if that's worth anything~~ that's a bummer, also this paper has scooped our project and our lead that you worked on was totally off." So I went off and floundered ~~until I bumbled into something with more follow on promise~~ and just worked on other people's projects instead of my own. I think this taught me that academia sucks and I am happy to not be there any more. ~~I think I had it better than a lot of people in my cohort.~~ Glad Dobbs_Head had a better experience!

I got this variant. Can not recommend.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2021 11:26

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

global tetrahedron posted:

Any posts/goon-recommended resources concerning leaving academia forever with a PhD and related job prospects/ideas for careers?

My partner recently finished her evolutionary biology degree and cannot stand academia and wants out. She has a temporary visiting professorship position currently, and perhaps a postdoc if she wanted to continue to commit, but at this point it's all very clearly deleterious to her mental health so she's basically saying "gently caress it". All her friends in her department are trying to get out as well, i know she can't be alone since the politics and working conditions of academia seem absolutely appalling.

She has some coding experience, and is vaguely interested in science communication, but that doesn't seem like a field that you can break into easily. A lot of what's coming up are corporate data analysis jobs, which she isn't completely adverse to, she's just open to any creative or non-intuitive ideas, and still would like to do something vaguely 'pro social' which a job with a bio med company probably wouldn't provide.

She hadn't thought she'd be in this position even a couple years ago and feels a little stuck. It really sucks to watch her struggle! I don't think I could ever internalize what spending years of your life on something for what ends up feeling like nothing would do to your psyche.

e: she also likes teaching a lot! if the field were just educating the Youth she would love it, it's the cutthroat bullshit and publishing she can't stand

Larger universities usually have core facilities for specialized work, that might also be a way out. In these positions you are still usually technically associated with academia but it's a normal 9-5 job without the academia politics, some teaching is also pretty common. As an example, our (European) university is currently recruiting multiple researchers in molecular biology, chemistry and bioinformatics for setting up a core facility for oligonucleotide related research. That core facility will have regular courses for students and researchers that are interested in utilizing the infrastructure too so some teaching will be done there too.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2022 09:54

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

AfricanBootyShine posted:

We just got permission to work with pathogens in our lab after months of paperwork and back and forth. Meaning I finally have the OK to blow money on a TC incubator. Anyone have recommendations for brands? Last lab I was in had a couple of aliexpress rebrands sold by some local supplier and they wound up being huge pieces of poo poo that need to be recalibrated weekly.

I know Thermo is of iffy quality, but is Sigma any good? Or should I just spring for an eppendorf? I need something stackable and that would also have room for a roller apparatus.

What sizes are you aiming for and what exactly are you going to use it for, only tissue culture? Shake flask cultures? Roller bottles? Spinner cultures?

We have big Infors HT Multitrons for shake flask cultures and Thermo incubators for the rest. We threw away our roller bottle incubator because there is little use for them with better options available.
One could in theory use the Infors HT Multitrons for culture flasks too but I don't know if they have good shelving systems or so as we have never used them for that.

We have had very few problems with our Thermo incubators over the years, at most our big Thermo incubator have had their gas sensor break/glitch, which is costly with service etc but apparently one can often just tap that sucker and it will work again, problem is knowing where and how to find it. Our small Thermo incubators have never had any problems over 18 years.

Our Infors shakers are only a couple of years but we have never had any problems with them and before we bought them we had multiple other large labs and core facilities recommend them and their reliability. Only possible downside is that they tend to drink a lot of water.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2022 11:08

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

married but discreet posted:

I'll be starting my own (microbiology) lab soon and really want to move away from the physical lab notebooks that I've been keeping for ages. Dusting off old folders and trying to find past procedures/results from my own chickenscratch notes, let alone someone else's, is such a pain. Any experience/recommendations with that?

I don't need anything fancy, ideally I'd like a situation where everyone's lab notebook is easily accessible online to me and other lab members (although that might stress out people?), and that keeps track of changes so that nobody can just go back and change their results. The simples solution would probably be google docs, but I think that's very easily editable. I've heard of people using Benchling, no idea how good it is.

Any input appreciated, even just to tell me it's a horrible idea.

If you will work with and need to keep track of a bunch of plasmid/primer/oligonucleotide data then benchling has a good sequence handling interface.

# ¿ May 24, 2022 22:39

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

Cardiac posted:

You use Benchling? What is your impression?
I guess there is an academic license?
I have been in communication with Benchling employees, but the cloud only is something I dislike.

I only use benchling for sequence handling so far, which it does very well for my work. Managing data access for projects is also quite easy. I switched over because my old sequence handling software is an old buggy POS (Serial Cloner). Our facility might move over to benchling for other things too though, but nothing is decided and I have not really used the other features not directly involved in sequence handling.

# ¿ May 26, 2022 13:57

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

Johnny Truant posted:

This was half of the equipment in my first lab, lol

Did you also have to save your instrument data to floppy disks and move it to a slightly younger intermediary computer that was compatible with both floppy drives and USB sticka?

# ¿ Aug 26, 2022 06:13

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

Repeating an old experiment for a user now and our values fluctuate a lot creating very noisy data compared to the last run. Turns out it is because the tubes we use for sampling are of a different brand since last time because our procurement supplier changed it, likely for cost reasons. So now the tubes vary in weight up to 30 milligrams per tube and the stated dimensions are probably also differing slightly from reality because some tubes can't fit our freeze racks which fit the old tubes of ostensibly the same dimensions :mad:

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 08:58

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

mycomancy posted:

Washing pipette tips is the maddest loving thing I've heard about in a while.

I had a couple of screening projects where I had to repeatedly pipette variants of the whole S.cerevisiae deletion collection. I think that was 52 x 96 well plates per collection. I washed tips then because otherwise it would be like 500 boxes worth of tips a week and that was simply not appreciated by the lab manager. Luckily the wash procedure was just three different trays of water and autoclaving.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2023 15:35

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

CuddleCryptid posted:

Why did they break into your freezer? What were they even expecting to find in there?

I read it as that the burglar probably had their own freezer fail and broke into That Works freezer to try and save their own thawed samples. Thereby causing the failure of that -80 too.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2023 15:13

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 05:12

Zudgemud: Mar 1, 2009; Grimey Drawer

Colleague 1: Our MS data searches grind to a halt over night when nobody is at the computer due to some windows powersave function that can't be disabled by IT.

Colleague 2: Say no more.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2024 21:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Still Just a Rat in a Cage - Laboratory Chat!