It’s today: your first lab meeting. You’ve got your slides together, tested the animations and so long as that one video loads, everything should be smooth sailing. But you’re probably still worrying “What if they realise I’m an imposter?!!”.
Here’s 8 tips to think about and help you calm down
Research is in many ways a subject of debate. Ideas are presented with evidence and through repetition and discussion they are tested and examined. Every discovery or methodology in science is subject to inquiry, dissection and disagreement because that is at the very core, the point of the scientific method. Read more…
Throughout my career in science AI and automation have been things that were ever-improving tools in helping do science quicker and in bulk. AI and machine learning have slowly been improving the rate of data processing and even expanding the kind of data processing that’s possible. Automation has led to Read more…
One of the things we absolutely love is getting photos of our cartoons stuck to walls, fridges, equipment and even chairs but it was a surprise to see our work hurtling in an incalculable number of pieces all over the New Mexico desert.
Given the exotic and exciting things that scientist play with and produce you’d think that waste disposal would be staggeringly complicated. Special buckets for certain kinds of goo, shredders for tentacles and mops specifically for flaming puddles would seem to be the bare minimum an average lab would need. Actually Read more…
Humans are an inventive bunch. We’re not long out of the trees and our brains have already given us literature, art and the sciences. We are a creative species that constantly seeks to invent, create and problem solve. However, as smart as we are Nature is often one of the Read more…
There are lots of reasons that you may need to take a break from working in the lab at some point. Over this year an unprecedented number of people have spent a significant time away from their labs and are only just now starting to go back. This is a Read more…
From my first experiment in primary school (when I dissolved salt in some water and wrote down how long it took) all the way up until the last time I made a saline buffer, I have been writing things down in a lab book. Well I say “writing” obviously most Read more…
In my lifetime as a researcher I have made more buffer solutions than I’ve had hot baths. That is to say that, if all the water from all the baths I’ve ever had was compared to the volume of buffer solutions I’ve made, it would be like comparing a glass Read more…
Health and safety (H&S) inspections are a fun annual tradition in research that we all immensely look forward to in much the same way as I look forward to having my foot stepped on or falling on some sharp wood. A H&S inspection has two aims. The first aim is Read more…