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

This morning, enjoying having a day off from work, and thinking about all the friends I shared gifts with this year, I was suddenly hit by a feeling of ...something between pain, absence, and sorrow. I remembered my friend who is not here any longer.

I became friends with *Greg through acquaintances at work about 3 years ago and we hit it off instantly.  Meeting Greg was like finding a long lost best friend and just as if we had known each other our whole lives, we were fully at peace when together. Or so I thought.

A wonderful man and father, a talented musician and one of the sweetest souls I'd ever met, for a while, at least in that first year after he committed suicide, a day did not go by when I didn't think of him. My kindred spirit vanished from the planet without a goodbye or even a sign. Well, there were signs. I just didn't open my eyes to see them.

Greg and I talked about everything that was going on- and a lot of things were going on in his life. He was in the midst of personal turmoil with his marriage, serious financial issues, and on top of it all, had lost his job because the company he worked for went out of business.  At the time, all of his problems seemed manageable and not that serious. I felt he had everything under control. . . . More

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Checking out early in Angry's lab requires extreme circumstances

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Hello gentle readers… or something. So I know I have been very, very quiet as of late, on twitter, on labspaces, etc. Well, I have had a rough few months, and sort of reclused myself from the world to deal with it all. I had to put everything else on hold and take care of business. My physical friends have seen very little of me as well, but I think I have everything under control now, and have time once again to delve into the world. So here is the low down on my insane life:

I’ve been having a hard time in my lab group. Miss Jade has been more help than I could ever say; I owe her huge thanks because she has been a great sounding board for advice, and I am happy to say I took it and am in a much better place because of it. So first, things in my lab group were getting rough. I know there is snide politics everywhere, but - I wasn’t shielded from any of it (to put it lightly). The work became rather uninteresting, and my capacity as PhD student rode on the line of technician. Plus, we did all research on one instrument and there were 5 of us vying for time on it. No data could be done except on that instrument, and each experiment run to set up etc. would take between 8-12 hours… I am sure at this point you are seeing some of the problems we were having.
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I have to stop working to address this very important issue. This isn't the first time I've seen what appears to be people of intelligence promoting the hate and persecution of another religion. And then more questionably intelligent people jump on the bigot bandwagon and fuel the messages of hate and intolerance to others.

What is going on here? Have people lost their minds?

This is no different than hating people for their skin color, sexual orientation, or gender. It's all prejudice. Don't think for one second that the same person who hates another religious group doesn't have the same bias against other groups that are different from themselves.  A person who has the audacity to, in public, make themselves feel superior by attempting to make others feel inferior doesn't limit this to only one particular race or creed. It is part of one's beingness.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, well I'm not going to direct you to the blog where a certain person asked their "followers" to make a rude tweet about a particular religion today.

As scientists, we have to be open-minded. That doesn't mean we agree with what other people think or believe and we don't have to even listen. I don't pay any attention to my friends' love for the fly . . . More

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

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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

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The following article is a pretty good read, and once you comprehend how embedded this technology is in our lives, and in turn how simple it is to disrupt, it's also pretty scary.

Why would a GPS outage cause such disruption? These satellite signals now do a lot more than inform your car's satnav. GPS has become an "invisible utility" that we rely on without realising. Cellphone companies use GPS time signals to coordinate how your phone talks to their towers. Energy suppliers turn to GPS for synchronising electricity grids when connecting them together. And banks and stock exchanges use the satellites for time-stamps that prevent fraud. Meanwhile, our societies' reliance on GPS navigation is growing by the year.

Not that GPS technology is "new" (the full system has been up and running since 1994), but it's amazing at how many people have glommed onto it and integrated it into systems that GPS was never intended (nor designed) for. All of which reminded me of work, and how we can fall into the trap of leaning too heavily on a single technique for our research endeavors.

When I first arrived at the institution I now . . . More

I thought long and hard about the blog topic today because really, when you think about the subject of "what would I be doing now, if I could be doing something else" well, that's a complicated question.

There's the thing you could have been doing if you had chosen a completely different path a long, long time ago. That's totally different from what I would like to be doing now if I could do something different. And the answer would be very different if asked, what would I do if I could do anything in the universe. And the answers to all of these change based on where you are in life too as well as, say, if I hit the lottery tomorrow, what would I do instead of what I do now, if money didn't matter.

So I was thinking about what else I would have liked to study if I could study something else. Still be a scientist but studying something else. And I know what the answer is.

I would make it my life's mission to cure multiple sclerosis. If I could quit my job right now and work for free in any lab I wanted, fully funded, I'd find an MS lab and work on that. Because MS bother me. It bothers me that this disease is still so mysterious and u . . . More

Albert Einstein will be remembered for many contributions before this one, but this quote has been resonating with me recently:

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

Einstein was probably being more self-deprecating than necessary – he knew what he was doing to a greater extent than most scientists of his era, and likely of any era. Perhaps he was just making a joke. Honestly, I haven’t been able to find out much about the origin of this quote – if anyone has more insight, do let me know.

In the absence of additional context, however, I’m going to take Einstein’s words at face value. The obvious interpretation is: we do science because we’re not sure. This is an important thing for science communicators to remember. Scientists may have predictions about how an experiment will turn out, and we think about how various outcomes will support or cast doubt on the hypotheses we’re testing. But we never know for sure what’s going to happen – that’s why we do the experiment!

This uncertainty is part of what makes science exciting, and the thrill of discovery is not an experience that goes unappreciated outside of academia. The best science media give viewers or readers an oppo . . . More

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

I was having trouble coming up with a topic for this one. Not that I don’t have tons of ‘what I wish I knew before’ scenarios, I do. But I’m not done learning from most of them just yet. I don’t have a pretty and neatly wrapped box set of advice with a bow on top that I could pass on to you at this time.





I asked my good college bud Boonsri Dickinson (check out her latest post on SmartPlanet) what she thought. She said she wished she knew that grades didn’t matter. I very much agree on this one. So that’s the wisdom I am imparting upon you today.

I can only speak from my own experience when I say this. Grades are not everything. They’re just not. It seems that the only time they come into play is if you’re after a very official type government job. And even then, there are ways around the GPA barrier.

Everyone I know from my work life, the people I respect the most there, the people I know that went on to start their own successful businesses, the ones who are more creative and intuitive than the . . . More

Sometimes treating your employees like crap backfires in your face.

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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

Is it just me or does one's affinity for science extend beyond the lab and office? I realized the other day, as I was browsing the bookstore for a new fiction book to read on a long plane ride, that my love of all things nerdy has permeated into my entire life. I don't know why it is, but I can't get enough.

I have mentioned before that of my favorite sitcoms is Big Bang Theory,and I am into [loosely] science-based programming like Mythbusters (controls? Who needs stinkin controls?), Mystery Diagnosis (I LOVE that show if I could just get past my hypochondria), House (I learned it is NEVER Lupus), E.R./Grey's Anatomy (where there is clearly a "sex appeal" screening before being hired as a physician), and Dr.G: Medical Examiner (which reminds us that "every body has a story.")

No, I am not so much a fan of science fiction (think space travel or robotics) but more medical thrillers and scientifi . . . 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