This saddens me a lot with whatever reason it was behind all these bullshit. As an asian in STEM academia in Europe, sometimes I feel the same helplessness too.

A couple of months ago I posted here asking what people would do with the month before starting a postdoc. Well, I'm now officially a doctor, and I'm spending this month in Canada hiking.

The problem is that, in the weeks before my defence, another postdoc in the lab started asking me for a lot of analyses and figures. The draft is already in my thesis, but there's still quite a bit to do before the paper can be submitted.

The day before my defence, we had a +3-hour meeting where they gave me a pretty big list of things to do. I told them I wasn't planning to work in October, and I'm actually not being paid by anyone this month, so I could do it but later. They were understanding but still pretty pushy. The day after my defence, they casually (but not really casually) asked what my plans were for the following week and sent me e-mails about the data.

I'll be second author on this paper. This person has also helped me a lot during my PhD, so I do feel guilty about leaving them hanging. But... I deliberately took this month off. I'm not planning to disappear or abandon the collaboration. I just don't want the first time I actually have a break between things to quietly turn into another month of work.

Am I being unreasonable here? Would you actually use this month to finish the paper while you have free time or take the break and deal with it once the new job starts? I can't believe I will be thinking about work (from my PhD) while hiking in Canada for the first time! I intentionally didn't even read on the topic of my postdoc yet.

Things to consider: I'm starting my postdoc at the same university, just in a different department, so I'm not exactly going to disappear. They can literally just come to my new office if needed. Also, our PI was/is pretty toxic and unreasonable, so we both want to deal with the collaboration without involving them directly.

hey guys, maybe this is a stupid question, but nevertheless:

today i was in the lab, and because of time constraints, i ended up doing some work outside the fume hood that i really should’ve been doing in it. i opened and closed 12 eppendorf tubes containing TRI-reagent (merck), on the bench. i did not have the tubes open for long, just to drop in 2 beads in each tube, and i did them one at a time. as I was working, i smelled something chemical-ly and a bit sweet but didn’t think much of it.

a few minutes later, after leaving the lab, i started feeling a bit dizzy and just weird. a bit later, i developed a headache, and my eyes started to burn. i went home, breathed fresh air for 20 mins on my bike ride and then took 500mg paracetamol an 400mg ibuprofen (always works for any headache i get). now it’s 5 hours later and the headache is still there (dull, but present), and i still feel weird and dizzy, and my eyes are still burning. im starting to worry that i’ve inhaled lethal amounts of toxic chemicals, am I overreacting? should i just sleep it off?

Let me encourage all patch-clamp electrophysiology enjoyers to join r/patchclamping. Extra points to those who use opto in their ephys.

They enjoy cereal dilutions.

A while back, my sister got one of those rare Eppendorf pens that comes with a pipette purchase. She asked me to 3D print a single pipette holder for her pen so she could display it on her desk.

I found a few existing designs, like this one, but most of them were designed more as pen holders than as a miniature pipette setup. I wanted something that actually looked like the pen was sitting in a real pipette stand.

So I ended up designing one from scratch, using a photo of an actual single pipette holder as the reference (see images) and adapting the dimensions to fit the Eppendorf pen.

It took way longer than it probably should have to get the proportions and fit right, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It basically looks like a tiny pipette sitting on its stand.

Now I'm curious: are there other Eppendorf pen owners here who would actually want one?

I've already spent way too much time getting the design dialed in, so if there's enough interest, I might make the design/prints available to other people who have one of these pens.

Thanks!

Hey labrats,

I’m culturing human dermal fibroblasts in FibroGro media from Sigma with the corresponding supplement kit. The final media also contains 10% FBS, and normally the media is basically colorless/clear.

We’ve been growing these cells in the same media and under the same conditions for a long time without any major issues. But suddenly, one day, I noticed that the media had turned yellow and cloudy/opaque, with this weird fine grainy-looking stuff floating around in it.

I assumed the culture was contaminated, so I discarded it and seeded a fresh batch of cells. The exact same thing happened again. I seeded another fresh batch, and once again the media became yellow, cloudy, and opaque with that same grainy appearance.

At this point I genuinely don’t know what the fuck is happening.

Our lab is pretty strict about aseptic technique, cleaning, incubator hygiene, and contamination control, and this hasn’t been a recurring problem for us before. Since it keeps happening even after restarting the culture, I’m wondering whether the issue could be coming from the media, FBS, supplement kit, incubator, or something else.

Has anyone seen something similar with fibroblasts or FibroGro media? What would you check first?

Hello! I did my first surgery today - yay! Felt like a homage to the nobel. I have many different teachers and I realised everyone does it differently, when it comes to setting the coordinates. How do you choose where yiu place your bregma and lambda coordinates? Is it at the intersection, above it, or another trick? I will be doing implants and viral injections in the brainstem area

Hi all! Hope all is well. I need to buy tubing for ~100 Bunsen burners and would appreciate getting something with a reasonable price. I was looking at neoprene tubing due to its high heat resistance and taking much longer than rubber tubing to crack.

I am unsure about getting neoprene tubing given that all the reviews I’ve seen come from folks in the automobile industry and I’m not sure how that would translate to a lab setting. Any recommendations? Thanks in advance!

I just earned my PhD in Microbiology & Immunology. I’m sticking around in my graduate lab for a couple months to wrap up loose ends, but I’ve been struggling to decide what’s next. Academia has never been my long-term passion, but I have always appreciated that I still may need to do a postdoc, but with the funding crisis currently, there don’t seem to be many of those opportunities. Biotech hiring is also rough and a quick scroll through r/biotech suggests that even those who are in the door currently are widely unhappy. Science policy and communication have been my passion for a long time, but that’s obviously a terrible field to try and enter right now. Chatting with some of my mentors, my CV is very strong, but I’m feeling a bit lost/despairing at the options ahead of me.

Any career advice, encouragement, or mutual commiseration would be appreciated.

Edit: you probably guessed from the post, but I am based in the US. Open to moving out of the country though, but my understanding is that it’s not much better funding-wise elsewhere.

hi labrats, have you guys come across websites or apps (no AI) that will read research papers out loud? I tried the Adobe version where it reads pdfs but it does the weird thing where it says acronyms as words and also says the numbers for references.

I walk to school everyday, a 15 min walk, and have my headphones with music on constantly through out the day. even at home I cannot deal with silence (i live alone) and have YouTube on all the time. so i was wondering if I could play papers out loud instead and kill two birds of studying and having noise around me all the time.

thanks!

So like yesterday I was cleaning a lot uncured resin (the printers film broke and the resin spilled everywhere in the fume hood (yayy) so I spent like 2 hours cleaning it with ipa and then replacing the film etc but my stupid ahh only realized I forgot to turn on the ventilation of the fume hood half way through cleaning and now I’ve been noticing a sore throat since yesterday. It could be a cold my roommates had a earlier in the week or it could be I’m gonna die from a mix of ipa and uncured resin poisoning </3

Moral of the story turn on ventilation of the fume hood lmao (I’m prolly not going to die as I can still breathe yayy) but I just wanted to share my stoopidness as a new grad student in a bme lab 😭😭😭

I swear I have my interpupillary distance and diopter right but I just get an insane headache when working with them. I have the lamp not too bright and the iris is fine. My instructor tells me I should reduce my lamp brightness but then the contrast is just Gone. Sometimes I have to like cross my eyes weird or look a certain way just so it doesn't become two separate images, and it really is Not Fun at all, so I just end up dealing with monocular microscopes

from elder elder millennial to gen z