It’s a new year and a fine new time for me to resume blogging here at LabSpaces. 2010 was a good year for me in more ways than one. I finished my Ph.D. and graduated (I plan on blogging here about my defense). But 2011 promises to be even better.  I started my brand new postdoc yesterday in an entirely different field than my graduate work and that promises to be very cool. 

However, for some reason, it struck me and my PI as a fantastic idea for me to write a fellowship application right as I’m starting the postdoc. As I’m settling in to start writing, I realize how silly of an idea this was.  I’m not kidding when I say that my postdoc is in an entirely different area of research.  The only connection between my graduate work and this is that they both can be defined as in the biochemistry and molecular biology field.

I think switching fields like this is good for me for a couple of reasons.  There’s the not inconsequential reason that I find this area more interesting than my graduate work.  It’s also wide open area to study as there has been very little done to study the molecular biology of this area. So there are a ton of interesting questions that can be asked and investigated.  Also, from what I understand, learning new skills is a . . . More

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to speak with Chiren Boumaaza, aka Athene, who you may know as the extravagant internet celebrity, and professional gamer.

If you haven't heard of him, he's a record holder in World of Warcraft and online poker, and plays the main character in a series of videos on a popular youtube channel with well over 340,000 subscribers.

'Athene' is known for crashing gaming servers, with the aid of his massive army of followers, who just love to be part of the controversy and trouble Athene is so well known for.

Over the past year, we haven't heard much from him, and it seemed as though he had fallen off the grid. Recently Chiren broke his silence, and announced that his disappearance was due to being very busy, conducting new research in the fields of quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, and neuroscience. He continued to say that this research is culminating in significant new discoveries that will be presented in a documentary named 'Athene's Theory of Everything'. This was definitely an unexpected turn, and caused quite a stir, and some confusion within his fan . . . More

Recently, a fellow graduate student defended his master’s thesis. He set the record for the shortest time to degree in our College with a nice job lined up afterwards. But that also meant he never presented his work at a conference, or a department/college seminar. This was his first- and most important “big talk”. What follows are the top 10 tips I gave him at one point or another as he was preparing that should be a help to anyone getting ready for a “big talk”.

Planning Your Talk

1) Know Your Audience
Everyone will tell you to know your audience, which couldn’t be truer when you’re planning the introduction to your talk. Sure, there is a big difference between talking to high school students and presenting at a conference, but try to think: who is coming to my talk? If they are all cellular biologists like you, then skip the central dogma slide. But if you have a mix of disciplines you need to be able to explain your work to a biologist, as well as an electrical engineer. Imagine you’re giving the talk to one person with each potential background. Would each person be able to follow it? Sometimes you need to sacrifice some specific details in order to explain the important stuff to everybody. (But you should be able to talk extempora . . . More

With the launch of this year’s “Rock Stars of Science” campaign, there’s been a lot of talk about how to best promote science. I’m no marketing guru, but I am a scientist. This latest campaign is better than last years', only because it’s more diverse, but I think it really misses the boat. Is the public really going to be inspired by a couple of pictures in GQ of scientists looking uncomfortable and over dressed in the presence of Rock Stars? The most appalling aspect of this campaign is that there is no highlight of the researchers or their science. There truly are some science all stars in this group, many of which are well spoken.

However, the Rock Stars of science pages in GQ only list the scientist’s name and title, while the “Rock stars” get a one or two sentence summary of how awesome they are for standing in on these pictures. What’s the real focus of this campaign? To promote Bret Michaels’ latest reality TV dreck? If a reader wants to actually understand why these scientists were chosen and what they’re doing to cure disease, they have to visit the website. I find it hard to believ . . . More

This week’s guest blogger is Debbie Knight, a research associate at The Ohio State University. She shares her research thoughts and experiences in her blog (biologyze.com) and tweets about all things science (@acousticgravity). In her spare time, she plays mandolin in a local band and takes journalism classes at OSU.

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When someone asked me what I wanted to be in high school, I would say a “biomedical researcher.” I put those words in quotes here because at that time I had absolutely no idea what it meant (or even what a researcher did), but I knew it sounded like a really cool thing to be.

I also asked my parents for luggage as a graduation gift.

Little did I know these two things would one day merge.

I would like to note that around my junior year of college, I finally did figure out what a researcher does when I volunteered to work in a lab and that research has been my passion for the past two decades.

What I did not know then was that becoming a researcher would lead to travel and adventure.

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"This is the one thing you never want to mess around with. You'll wake up in the middle of the night crying like a baby and you'll have no idea why." These were the sage words of my undergraduate advisor, it's too bad they got discarded with everything else that I learned in undergrad.

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My scientific career has been filled with plenty of misadventures and screw ups. Most of them are really boring mistakes that didn't involve bodily harm, and only resulted in weeks of repeated work or extended nights in the lab re-preparing samples. Though, every good scientist has an epic fail story locked away in their skeleton closet. I think many of us go into science in the beginning thinking that we're unstoppable know it alls. That is until some event punches us in the gut to tell us, "Open your eyes and pay attention or else next time I'm going to aim a little lower and negatively affect your chances of reproduction."

When I was in undergrad, I worked on a bunch of projects ranging from ecology field studies to molecular biology projects in plants and fish. One of the last projects I worked on was one where we were trying to determine if fish bacterial infections could be transferred from mother to egg. This project involved c . . . More

An interesting spin off of my previous post about Dinosaur Science Camp was a was in regards to kids clothing and how I don't often see things like bugs, dinosaurs, rockets etc. on clothes marketed to girls (at least not frequently).

Becca pointed out in her comment that there are insects like butterflies and ladybugs associated with little girls, but I stood by my belief that the "creepy crawly" ones like spiders, centipedes and scorpions tended to be reserved for the boys section. The same is true for rockets, dinosaurs, trucks and other typically masculine icons. In general, they are hard to find amongst the racks and racks of pink Princess, Dora, and Hanna Montana adorned girls clothing.

Now yes, in all fairness I could shop in the boys section, but honestly my 4 year old wants to wear the princesses, fairies, ponies and unicorns (Hanna Montana is banned in the LabMom household.) She likes the real 'girlie' stuff. I am not going to fight it.

So imagine my surprise when this little number showed up in my twitter feed this morning, courtesy of . . . More

I have finally added blogs to the website. Now you can write your own blogs that relate to the news stories on this site.

In the future (like later this week):

add RSS feeds for all bloggers blogs
Add blogger links to link to outside sources

When I get more time (and more server space):
Allow picture uploads and image hosting

Test out the blogs for me and let me know if you find any bugs. I'm always looking for good suggestions for improving the site!

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Back in my early days of college I was in a long distance relationship. Yes, we were silly, young, in love.. Aww how sweet.. (I think I'm gonna hurl).

We were also broke college kids who worked really hard and scrounged up everything we could to pay for plane tickets. I was always on the lookout for cheap last minute flights. I was living in Gainesville, Florida at the time.

Not exactly a major airline hub, to say the least. The closest major airports were Jacksonville and Orlando, which were each about a 2-2.5 hour drive, plus parking, gas, the occasional speeding ticket.. you get the picture.

You can imagine my excitement when I awoke one morning to find an incredible super cheap flight offer in my inbox. And it was out of the Gainesville airport no less

The flight left THAT DAY. It was too good of an offer to pass up. I booked that shit faster than Gerty-Z can trigger the flood control system on LabSpaces, and proceeded to do the happy dance.

Like I said I was a broke college kid living in a low tech apartment. No washer dryer, no d . . . More

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Michele Bachmann is a bigot and a hypocrite. She’s culturally inept and politically unsophisticated: Her thinking on many social issues (abortion and gay marriage, for starters) fall well outside the mainstream of Western Civilization, and she is demonstrably lacking in a fundamental understanding of the legal and historical framework underpinning the nation she was somehow elected to serve. She’s what I like to call a dumbass, or, in other parlance, a Republican. But it may well be that Bachmann, or some Republican like her, holds the key to the survival of our existence as we know it. Or, at least somewhat as we know it, because it’s pretty clear to anyone watching closely that “as we know it” is careening toward its expiration date.

Ask yourself: what are the truly critical issues facing humanity today? Abortion; the Sanctity of Marriage; gun ownership; the War on Drugs? Haha. No. The Debt Ceiling? Terrorism (or, more equitably, religious extremism)? Nope. Global Climate Change? OK, now we’re getting somewhere. But even terminology so broad as Global Climate Change** tends to oversimplify what’s happened, and make it seem like a separate “thing.” But it’s not just an item on a checklist, something to which we may allow ourselves . . . More

Open science is a wonderful concept, but what happens when reporters start writing stories on data that has not been properly reviewed and vetted by the scientific establishment? Before this week, I had never really considered this question. Open science at its core is a wonderful utopian idea where scientists do their work in the open and publish their notebooks in real time on the web for everyone to see. The idea is that with this kind of transparency, better science will be done and scientists can collaborate more easily. Because all of the data will be on the internet and searchable, more scientists will be able to benefit from the open resource. Of course, there are numerous criticisms of open science. One being that it will be extremely easy for researchers in highly competitive fields to be scooped by competitors who have bigger labs or more resources at their disposal. However, it didn't occur to me until I saw stories popping up that open science could be abused by the media.

Almost a year ago, NASA held a press conference touting that it had found "alien" life. A group of researchers reported that they had found a bacteria (GFAJ-1) in Mono Lake that incorporated arsenic in place of phosphate in its DNA backbone. This press conference and the sub . . . More

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Have you ever messed up at work? Did it happen when you were still a n00b? Did it cause you to fear losing your job? Well, if you’re asking me, I’d have to say, Yes, Yes, and Yes.

It all started as an ordinary day, there I was at the cube farm, looking over some data I had been gathering from previous experiments. I was in the midst of running some tests that I came up with myself. The goal was finding new and improved fuel formulations for the hybrid motors. I was excited. The planning and initial testing were done, and it was time for some real messy hands on lab work. I grabbed my stuff and drove down to the rocket making facility.

Unlike the cube farm, which was a pretty bustling place, the testing area was only busy during actual testing, and before 4pm when the machinists went home. By the time I got there, I had the whole (freezing) warehouse to myself. I liked working alone. I could dance around when I wanted to, have my music going, and laugh out loud randomly (as I often do) for no reason, without getting those pesky stares.

That day, I had selected a number of candidate fuel formulations to be tested. Well, not yet tested as in firing them. That came later, and that required a whole team of people, video cameras, safety briefings, and a number . . . More

Standard deviation. Error bars. Significance. Confidence interval. No matter what you call it, or how you calculate it, science is about more than numerical results. It’s about context. What do those numbers MEAN? (Statistics pun intended.)

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I initially got 300 extra clicks from my $200 investment. That's about $1 a click or a really bad day with google Adwords. I guess I shouldn't have expected a whole lot out of the release, but I was hoping it'd be picked up by at least a few science blogs or something.

The next phase of my advertising campaign is going to be a little more local I think. I e-mailed my press release to all of the area newspapers. I remember a few weeks back the Des Moines Register ran a story about some guy's car washing business. Hopefully they'll be interested in some graduate student's internet business :) I'm also looking to do some table spamming on Monday all over the medical campus. Look for my signs. My latest plan is to get a local following from Iowa on the site and then maybe that will attract other users to stop by and comment or sign up for an account.

Looks like it's back to Yahoo!, Google, and Fark ads :(

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I got an e-mail from the director of EurekAlert on Friday, Patrick McGinness. I was inquiring about advertising on their website and as it turns out, the lady who runs the advertising was out of town. Patrick answered my e-mail instead and informed me that he thought I was in violation of their site usage. Here's his e-mail to me:

I took a minute to visit your website, however, and came away a little confused as to what it is. On the surface, it looks like a science news site, which is something we typically wouldn't accept advertising for, given that we're a science news service ourselves. If that's not the case, and if you can explain the site a little more to me, that might be helpful.

I also noticed that you are using EurekAlert! as a news source for your science news headlines. This is certainly allowed, as long as it complies with our usage policy. The way you are currently using our content doesn't fully comply, though. Specifically, we require that you link to our content directly, like your site currently does for other news sources, instead of cutting-and-pasting our content into your pages. In addition, the credit should be listed everywhere as "EurekAlert!, a service of the American Association for the Advancement of . . . More

AARP put out a commercial a few months ago deriding wasteful spending in Washington. Unfortunately, the soundbytes don't accurately represent the full story behind the spending. Have a watch before continuing.

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