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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 3922 | Comments: 4
Last by Will on Oct 28, 2010, 5:09pm
I've had this one floating around in the back of my mind for a while.

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Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 475 | Comments: 14
Last by Genomic Repairman on Oct 13, 2010, 2:41pm


In the spirit of all of the bribes and contests going on this month for DonorsChoose, I will donate all of the advertising revenue the site generates this month to the DonorsChoose campaign of the blogger who has the most blog views. Last month the site brought in $50 so there's at least $50 up for grabs! Happy blogging and may the best writer win!

The counts start retroactively from October 1st. I assume none of you will cheat and click on your own blog posts a billion and 12 times... Play nice.

To see the projects that we've selected to vet, please visit our donors choose page: HERE

Oh, and it's against the Google TOS for me to ask you to click on ads. So don't just randomly click on a bunch of ads that you wouldn't have clicked on before... Don't want to get in trouble with "the man."

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 936 | Comments: 8
Last by Brandi Badass on Feb 04, 2011, 11:35am


Sometimes treating your employees like crap backfires in your face.

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Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1470 | 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: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1533 | 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: 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: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 3046 | Comments: 5
Last by microbiologist xx on Sep 26, 2010, 8:15am
I'm going to preface this by saying that I am not a medical expert. I don't even begin to pretend I know anything about medicine or how to cure diseases. I do watch those cheesy "Untold stories of the ER" shows on Discovery and TLC though, and sometimes I partially remember things they say about diagnoses.

This story begins back when I was finishing up my PhD at Iowa. I had successfully defended my thesis (thank god) and was out on a drinking excursion with "the boys" the weekend before I was moving down to Florida to start my new job. The evening started out just like any other, we pregamed at my buddy's apartment drinking cheap beer, cooking up some quick dinner and bullshitting about how much being a graduate student sucks. You know, the typical poor graduate student routine.

We finally got a cab and made it down to "downtown" which in Iowa City consists of 3 businesses and 75 bars filled with helplessly drunken co-eds. I swear it wasn't more than 15 minutes into the night when my buddy, who shall be referred to as "Dr. Millner" from here on out, started hiccuping. These weren't your normal "Hiccup for 10 minutes and be done with it" type of hiccups, these things were going to last for hours. Of course, being a medical student an . . . More
Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1792 | Comments: 9
Last by Nikkilina on Sep 21, 2010, 7:58am
I came into lab yesterday to a disaster. I took a look at my quarantine tank and it was filled with a white bacterial bloom, the bottom of the tank was covered in what looked like leftover food and fish poop, and the water smelled like rotting fish. To top it off, the Powder Blue Tang could not right itself, and was swimming upside down and in circles. For those of you that have never owned fish, upside down and in circles is usually referred to as the "death roll." The yellow longnose butterfly fish seemed just fine though. I have absolutely no clue why there were feces and food all over the tank. I'm the only person in lab that messes with the fish and everyone knows that if they touch anything to do with the tanks without asking me, they're liable to get their hands whacked off with the guillotine paper cutter. Both fish were doing just fine when I left them on Saturday and did their daily feeding and tank cleaning. The presence of the amount of food and feces in the tank was very surprising. I do a 25% water change EVERYDAY on this tank AFTER feeding to clean up any uneaten food and feces from the night before. I'm convinced someone messed with it, because there's no other explanation. I rushed to do a massive water change. This involved making . . . More
Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 9188 | Comments: 12
Last by Carniwhore_hater on Apr 02, 2013, 4:11pm
Vegans, please STFU. I'm sick of you preaching to me about what I should and should not eat. I evolved canines for a reason and will eat anything that I damn well please.

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Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 1723 | Comments: 8
Last by David Manly on Sep 13, 2010, 10:37pm
This is kind of stupid, but I thought I'd share a video of my new lab fish. Who knows if they'll survive quarantine, but we can bask in their beauty for a while.

*This entry contains a YouTube video*

The blue-ish one is a powder blue tang approximately 3" long and the yellow one is one of my favorite fish of all time! It's a yellow long nose butterfly fish. The tang is covered in a pretty common parasite so they have to stay in quarantine for a few weeks. The treatment regimen is to lower the salinity by 70% and then let the fish hang out in that for 4 weeks. Amazingly, saltwater fish can survive in very low salinity water, the parasite can't and eventually dies out as all of the eggs hatch. Although, the unfortunate thing is that salinity can be reduce drastically over a one hour period, but the salinity must be raised back up to normal much much more slowly. It usually takes a week and a half to bring the quarantine tank's salinity back up without killing the fish. I'm sure there's some interesting physiology involved there ;) So maybe in 6 weeks I'll post another video of these guys swimming in the main tank!

*This entry contains a YouTube video* . . . More
Author: Brian Krueger, PhD | Views: 50581 | Comments: 12
Last by Brian Krueger, PhD on Jun 24, 2013, 8:39am
I’m totally late to this party. I spent the morning writing my rebuttal to DrugMonkey and Co, doing the news, and cranking out a few pesky experiments. Ah, to live the life, right? Anyway, I’ve noticed that all of the good topics are now taken so I have to scrub the bottom of the bucket. I think one of the most important decisions I made in my scientific career was when I decided where I wanted to go to graduate school. The factors that play ball in this game are numerous and obviously not the same for everyone, but here’s my rundown of all of the things I wish I knew before heading off to graduate school.

Not to be too bitter about my undergraduate experience or anything, but the graduate school preparation was horrendous. No one told me from the beginning, “If you want to go to graduate school, here’s the X, the Y and the Z.” This may all sound like common sense, but some of it is not and having someone tell me all about X, Y, and Z my freshman year would have been helpful.

Do grades matter?

YES. They matter as much as they do for your annoying pre-med classmates, especially if you want to go to a . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 9946 | Comments: 42
Last by Evie on Sep 21, 2010, 11:12am
Last night, I retweeted Genomic Repairman’s request for the twitterverse to sign up for an account at LabSpaces. He wanted users to join in on the discussions he was having in the group he created. We were greeted moments later by a tweet from DrugMonkey saying that THE Facebook for science is dead. Considering I just wrote a blog post on that exact topic, I found his tweet Ironic. The emphasis in that previous post being that there probably will never be ONE single social hub for scientists, but that doesn’t preclude the formation of multiple niche venues. Please excuse me while I get this out of my system:

(rant)What exactly is a FaceBook for science anyway? Is any site with a science spin, groups, a forum, and/or user profiles a “FaceBook.” If that’s the case, then there are hundreds of FaceBooks for science out there. I’d argue that the term is deprecated. Many sites employ social tool . . . More
Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 824 | Comments: 2
Last by Angry Scientist on Sep 04, 2010, 6:42pm
Revenge is sweet. (This is not how science really works...)

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Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 5882 | Comments: 21
Last by JanedeLartigue on Oct 15, 2010, 12:49pm
I recently got an e-mail from David Bradley asking my opinion of Web 2.0 as it relates to science, where it’s heading, and how we can get scientists more involved in web 2.0 / data sharing / and the semantic web. I thought this would be a great topic for me to write a real post on since I’ve been involved in this field and trying to promote the ideas of web 2.0 in the sciences for the last 5 years.

For starters, I really have no idea what it will take to get scientists to be fully engaged with the on-line world. It's hard enough to get them engaged in the real world (I wish that was a joke…). I think for most scientists to get involved with a network, we're going to have to develop something that significantly increases scientific productivity, and I'm not talking just a free reference management site or being able to post lab retreat pictures to a profile. The last 4-5 years have showed us that scientists really are not interested in FaceBooks for science. The marginal success of ResearchGate, NatureNetwork, and LabSpaces can't be cited as triumphs because very little of wh . . . More
Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 891 | Comments: 3
Last by JanedeLartigue on Oct 14, 2010, 1:24pm


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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: Angry Scientist | Views: 5307 | Comments: 6
Last by JanedeLartigue on Oct 15, 2010, 12:42pm
24hrs or less to live. Gotta make the most of it!

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1349 | Comments: 3
Last by Thomas Joseph on Aug 30, 2010, 8:44am
This one looked way funnier in my brain, I swear...

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 888 | 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: LabSpaces.net | Views: 284 | Comments: 0
I spent some time last night and today fixing up some high resolution images to upload to a Zazzle store. The bloggers have been nagging me for a junk shop pretty much since they started, so I figured it was important to them. I don't know about you all, but I'm definitely getting a mug or two and at least one shirt. Stop by the store and see the rest of the junk!

Zazzle Store

The 3 designs available are shown below. I'll add more later. I'm sure some LabSpaces Memes will show up in there too!

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