By Jennifer Redig Would you eat your spaghetti dinner without a plate? No, of course not! It would make a big mess and be ugly to look at. Instead you NEED something to put that spaghetti on, to contain it, to keep it clean, to make it look nice – a bowl, a Read Full…
By Dave McGarry “You think you know, but you don’t know and you never will, okay?” was the response an irate Jim Mora, head coach of the New Orleans Saints, gave to an unwitting journalist questioning his management – his point being that unless you’ve actually been in a professional sports team, you Read Full…
By Kristin Harper The NIH grant that you are working on only gives you five pages to describe your research strategy. You’re wrestling with a research report for Science that has a maximum word limit of 2500. And the abstract for the conference you’d like to speak at this spring only Read Full Article Here…
By Melanie Laederich As scientists we love nothing more than quantitative data! Oh ya! But if you don’t quantify your Western blots correctly you’ll find yourself in an unpleasant, unrepeatable and totally meaningless place. And while some scientists are okay dwelling in a meaningless place, I hope you are not. Review these important Read Full…
By Martin Wilson Do you know why immersion oil and objectives are used for high power magnification? Do you know how to use an immersion objective correctly? Then review with me the why and how of immersion objectives. The quality of your image depends on your Numerical Aperture (NA) and resolution. To very briefly Read…
By Niki Athanasiadou It was not long since the commercialization of NGS (a little more than ten years ago) that scientists went beyond the basics and got creative with the new technology to study much more than just the sequence of DNA. In this article we highlight some of the different NGS technologies Read Full…
By Olwen Reina Science is an expensive business and those who use high energy-demanding techniques may not even realize just how expensive they are. The Cost of PCR Let’s looks at PCR. You need to pay for the machine, all the ingredients including expensive enzymes, a freezer and a fridge for your ingredients, tubes and…
By Aunt Yersinia Dear Aunt Yersinia, A very annoying postdoc in our group keeps telling me off for spinning E.coli at 13K in a tabletop centrifuge. The postdoc claims that high speed damages cytoskeleton and this will reduce my transformation frequency. But I don’t believe her as the cells are cushioned by water during Read…
By Derek Davies No matter how we make measurements, there will be variation (a spread of data). Take 100 people and ask them to guess your age and you will get a range of results: some will be too low (excellent!), some too high (not so good!). It is the same with any of Read…