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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1305 | Comments: 5
Last by Angry Scientist on Jul 27, 2010, 12:10pm

Hedgehog, Forkhead, and Cheap Date are all gene names. Hedgehog is a key developmental regulator, Forkhead describes a family of proteins that all contain a Forkhead box and is important in regulating transcription, and Cheap Date is a fly gene that results in the production of flies that are acutely sensitive to alcohol.

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1282 | Comments: 5
Last by Nikkilina on Oct 14, 2010, 2:01pm


Checking out early in Angry's lab requires extreme circumstances

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1257 | Comments: 3
Last by Mod Scientist on Jul 21, 2010, 6:21pm
Read about the fiasco in detail here or here

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Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1467 | Comments: 10
Last by biochem belle on Oct 10, 2010, 6:30pm
Today is: "What I'd be doing if I wasn't doing science" blog post theme day. The goal of this post theme is to let our readers get to know who we are and what our non-scientific interests are.



1. DamnGoodTechnician says that she'd probably have majored in sociology and become an administrative assistant if it wasn't for her high school sweetheart and his penchant for genetics.

2. Dr. O was involved with every group and club under the sun in high school and really wanted to become a broadway performer and until recently she had her heart set on teaching high school science but research sucked her in.

3. Evie would be everything. First she'd be a ninja kung fu master, then she'd learn how to talk to dolphins, create world peace and turn earth into an atheist utopia. Evie needs to lay off the caffeine pills

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1365 | Comments: 6
Last by Image Goddess on Nov 10, 2010, 3:03pm


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Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1532 | Comments: 14
Last by Brian Krueger, PhD on Apr 10, 2011, 6:49am
I thought about this question probably everyday of my graduate school career. My days usually went like this:

1. Get to lab at 7am
2. Start 12hr experiment
3. 7pm, experiment failed
4. 7:15pm set it all up again for tomorrow

Eventually I got everything to work but that 12hr period in the middle was filled with:

"I bet me engineer friends don't have to deal with this shit, and they're getting paid 6 times as much as me."
"I should have just become a web designer. I have fun doing that AND things usually work the first time."
"I want to run away to the cirus and become a Barker."

My PhD mentor once told me that I was the weirdest person he'd ever met because I have too many hobbies. He didn't think I could be successful in lab if I ran a website, went to the gym for two hours in the middle of the day, maintained my saltwater fish tank etc. I think he saw all of these things as distractions, or more like, "If he spent that energy in lab, he'd have a billion papers by now." Well, Honestly I can only take so much science and I need all of these hobbies to keep me sane. Further, I think I could turn any of my hobbies into careers.

In middle school, my mom worked for a computer training c . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1179 | Comments: 11
Last by Thomas Joseph on Sep 02, 2010, 11:56am
It's time for a contest, and not some lame contest where all you get is a crappily made t-shirt. This contest offers a treasure trove of novelty junk that could surely have bought Manhattan or some other island back in the early days of screwing over American Indians.

There are two prize packages to be had and these will be awarded to the two LabSpaces members who have the highest point totals for the month. Both of them are pretty damn sweet though.

Package #1 contains an IDT Lab notebook, 2 IDT clickable sharpies, an EtonBio Pen, an Invitrogen Pen, and Invitrogen Lanyard, two LabSpaces stickers, AND an freaking sweet LabSpaces coffee mug! I can see you drooling already. If you ask nicely, I might even autograph it for you...





Package #2 has 2 IDT clickable sharpies, an EtonBio Pen, an invitrogen Pen, an Invitrogen Lanyard, 2 LabSpaces stickers, an EtonBio color-changing coffee mug, AND a LabSpaces Bumper sticker!








Finally, you get to choose ONE of 4 different T-shirts (while supplies and sizes last).



I have a bunch of the IDT shirts in small, medium and large. I have various colors of the EtonBio shirts in small, medium and Large, and I have only XL Invitrogen shirts.

How do I e . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1240 | Comments: 18
Last by Brian Krueger, PhD on Oct 26, 2010, 8:54am
There has been a lot of criticism again about why I post press releases on this website and what purpose they serve. PalMD of WhiteCoatUnderground and ComradePhysio Prof have been very vocal about their contempt for this practice on my website.

Let me first start off by saying that I entirely see where PalMD and CPP are coming from, although I think it’s disingenuous to comment about my intentions without first reading my post about why I post press releases. I’m trying to develop a site where the public and experts can come to discuss science. I would love to have experts rate the releases so that visitors can be better informed on their veracity. The fact is that thes . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1148 | Comments: 1
Last by GUEST COMMENT on Nov 12, 2010, 7:43pm
This month's LabSpaces blogging theme is all about mentoring styles. The topic is pretty open ended, so we'll see where everyone ends up! We decided that the basic theme would be mentoring styles and we'd all write on the topic from our chosen perspective as mentee or mentor and then provide some insight on how we think the process can be improved upon. I'll keep updating this summary post as more entries go live! Happy reading.

Genomic Repairman kicked this one off early. He's off on his honeymoon but gave us a great post on his experiences as both mentee and mentor. Appearances by lazy PI, Awesome PI, and the amazing Genomic Repair Girl.

Dr. Girlfriend thinks that the mentee-mentor relationship should be an open one with mutual respect and the knowledge that the mentor is not all knowing, but there to provide some support and guidance as long as the mentee is willing to put in the effort

GertyZ thinks the mentor is there for support and the relationship . . . More
Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1031 | Comments: 0
Bicarbonate buffering is very important both in your body and in maintaining tissue culture cells. Tissue culture incubators maintain a strict CO2 concentration, except for when people don't check the tanks and they go dry. Normally, tissue culture media is a bright pink color, whereas when the pH increases due to a loss of CO2, the media turns purple.

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Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1201 | Comments: 3
Last by Brian Krueger, PhD on Apr 27, 2011, 2:01pm



The University of Iowa will be holding s science writing symposium tomorrow (April 27th). The symposium will be webcast LIVE at this address from 1PM to 5PM CST:

https://webapps1.healthcare.uiowa.edu/webcast/Default.aspx

There's a login screen now, but that will disappear once the talks start.

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Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1087 | Comments: 14
Last by Thomas Joseph on Nov 23, 2010, 12:01pm






I'm back! And here's an early treat from my photographer and good friend, Todd Adamson

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Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1681 | Comments: 0
This is a guest post by XrayManCoUk about his experiences as mentee and mentor as a crystallographer in the UK.


They say you never forget a good teacher but to be honest this is somewhat, erm, crap, you never forget a bad teacher either. So in short you never forget a teacher. Unless they were wholehearted bland. So this is wholly transferable to you never forget a good mentor or boss. In my somewhat chequered life I can remember the woes and follies of my supervisors and the purity and talents of my bosses. How I tried to learn from them and then put into practise their mistakes and triumphs.

My own experience as an underling

In academia we have always got some sort of hierarchy, the lecturer lectures to us via whichever medium they can utilise to get the job done. In my day blackboard and if lucky photocopied handouts, then OHP transparencies and photocopies of OHP transparency as handouts. Then came powerpoint and photocopies of powerpoint print outs, now a whole world of technology is there to transpose this information.

So whilst my PhD supervisors (I had two) had of course gone through this mellay of learning themselves, no one had really stopped along the way and given them a . . . More
Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1062 | Comments: 2
Last by Brian Krueger, PhD on Mar 17, 2011, 10:17am
Today I noticed my Tomato Clownfish acting a little friskier than usual. A few days ago I saw a white bump under the female's anal fin and thought it might be a fungal infection because it had a goofy gray tinge to it. I figured I'd just wait and see what developed. Well today I noticed that it was much bigger and longer...It was her ovipositor (egg laying tube)!! She also had a big fat round belly, so that really means only one thing. I watched her and the male clownfish do their dance and the ovipositor grew longer while the male started showing signs of arousal too. I guess a video is worth more than my explanation. I started recording after the first egg went down. It's the little orange sac in the middle of the screen. This patch grows much larger over the course of the 10 minute video. Enjoy!

Mass eggs start going down around the 2 minute mark if you don't want to watch the fish dance.

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 891 | Comments: 3
Last by JanedeLartigue on Oct 14, 2010, 1:24pm


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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 887 | Comments: 4
Last by Custom labels on Mar 18, 2011, 12:52am
I've gotten extremely busy lately, and so I decided to start a bumper sticker series for science geeks and politicians. Here's #1 in the series. Maybe I'll convince Brian to Zazzle them if you demand, no promises though. He's kind of up tight. This of course is inspired by all of those ridiculous pro-life/focus on the family unintelligent garbage hillbilly moron bumper stickers I see disgracing our roadways.

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Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1038 | Comments: 7
Last by FunkDoctorX on Aug 03, 2011, 7:27pm
A week or so ago someone forgot to close the door on our enzyme freezer tightly. I had just ordered $1,000 worth of NEB enzymes to make high throughput sequencing libraries too... Before the meltdown, I made a couple of test libraries to be sure that the protocol was worked out.


One of my test libraries with a perfect library smear. We extract the DNA in between the 200 and 300bp bands for sequencing.
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