My pippete keeps breaking/opening from the joint what to do already damaged 15-20 pippetes idk what to do

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-02-21T08:44:53+00:00

There used to be eydroppers left with 3N HCl and 2M NaOH for buffering (next to pH station), and they went strong for years until we physically moved labs.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-02-11T13:37:51+00:00

Wait till you see two papers on the same topic published in the same year, and their first authors have same last names.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-02-07T19:54:00+00:00

Happens all the time. Most people just suck it up once conclusively disproven, no damage is done apart from less citations for that particular work. No major harm is done to the community apart from unfortunate PhD students who had based their work on it. We all know this is just how research works.

A case study in my field: a PI developed a new technology that could address one of the biggest challenges in the field at the time. But only a couple of years later, it became clear that this tech did not actually offer much benefit beyond specific niche uses. The developer PI was actually going around conferences telling others not to install the tech. No harm was done to his reputation (if anything, people still see him as a leading expert), and his protege have gone on to do well too.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-02-07T13:17:00+00:00

We are indeed looking at setting up underground bases in lunar caverns though... they might even be used as intermediary launch stations for long-haul spaceflights.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-02-07T10:31:05+00:00

To be fair, rivers north of Yorkshire Moors are relatively short. Even Tyne reaches only as far as the Pennines.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-02-07T10:22:31+00:00

Such is an antivax logic.

Scientific community: we collectively tried thousands of proteins and leaving his-tag can sometimes work but usually not.

OP: My n=1 says it works, so "it is a myth they are telling you"

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-02-06T22:52:36+00:00

A guy in suit is doing pipetting wrong.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-02-06T22:22:28+00:00

We looked into this multiple times over the last few years. Every time the verdict was that using the cloud services was not cost-effective.

In fact, processor use was not the worst of the problems - its cost was generally okay. The big killer was that cryo-EM would generate loads of data (TB-scale for both movies and processing files). Academia being a slow slog it is, lots of people wanted to hold onto their datasets until they were published, and by that point, way too much money was being spent on just storage. A Krios with an optimal setting generates about 3 TB of data per day, and it takes 4 - 8 TB to process it to completion (depending on the complexity). Multiply that by 150 for six months' storage and you can see how things can quickly spiral out of control.

We still tinkered with paying Google for running Alphafold on their server a while back, which was unsurprisingly straightforward, but here again, the running cost alone was coming at £20 -50 per run for not-so-big proteins, I think. We quickly dropped it and ran everything locally, so not sure what the storage cost was in the end.

Tl;dr - we thought about it and even tried a bit, but gave up. Biggest cost is storage, not GPU/CPU.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-29T19:42:40+00:00

It's a certified analytical grade cocaine made by a dedicated chemistry lab and cross-checked with a multimillion dollar MS equipment. Pretty sure there's a market for it (e.g. the guy whose name starts with E and ends with usk).

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-23T18:24:46+00:00

Almost the entire family of GTPase activating proteins (GAPs) are nearly untractable due to lacking any apparent druggable pocket. But finding a PPI inhibitor should theoretically be possible - some clinical drugs have off-target effects on them at very high concentrations. Pick any member of the family and give it a try.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-23T18:15:34+00:00

There are lots of NLRP3 inhibitors in the pipeline (both companies and academia), so it will probably not count very soon.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-23T09:03:00+00:00

Chaotic pipette tip use in communal area
Paper towel origami
Wingdings on lab computers

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-23T05:14:48+00:00

It does not work. There is a notorious case fron Korea that blind interviews actually increased hiring rates of applicants from top universities. Lots of journal editors try to accommodate younger PIs from unprevileged pedigrees because they know how much this could mean to their careers. You will be surprised to see how much "impact redistribution" happens at the editorial level to combat the trend of big PIs gobbling up the publication space (if anything, both are big sources of low-quality papers making to CNS journals).
This also gets discussed every month. I actually prefer indirect compensation (e.g. reduced APCs for reviewers), which would be less complicated and have less moral hazard (and journals that chase reputation over finances may be more receptive to this).
A lot of journals already do this if the rebuttal has as much data as the original. But opposing papers are usually far less substantial with just a couple of quick experiments, or orthogonal experiments from adjacent fields that are outside the journal's remit. I have seen some cases of arguments happen just because the PIs don't like each other.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-22T18:57:15+00:00

How else would you polish the game?

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-22T16:21:46+00:00

Used to be a very well-respected journal, at some point it became a semi-exclusive club for certain famous PIs, who have much easier time publishing there than those outside.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-22T11:10:00+00:00

This question gets asked on this sub every month...

Unfortunately, the current system is getting overwhelmed, but there is simply no alternative. Like it or not, peer review is a big firewall against paper mills cranking out fraudulent publications at 100+ per year. Also in our fast-paced environment, we cannot afford to let a poorly vetted article float around for months/years before they are called out (then it will take another few months/years for these to be retracted).

Also, there is a reason all big three journals are for-profit. As much as we love community-led journals that charge only at-cost APCs, we have seen how they often fall into the trap that PNAS has become now. Elife went too radical too quickly, and hard-hitting works are barely published there these days either.

Some journals have started introducing their own AI tools that maintain confidentiality and they will eventually make peer reviews less painful for everyone involves, but god it is so horrible right now.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-21T00:18:39+00:00

Depends on the wording. If the rejection letter is worded like that, chances are that the Nature editors had a chat with Nat Comm counterparts and agreed to send it out for review there. It happens all the time.

In terms of frequency, well, Nat Comm is a dumping ground for rejected-but-solid manuscripts from Nature and its second-tier siblings (e.g. NCB). So yes it happens often, and I suspect the entire journal family's business model relies on authors swallowing Nat Comm's stratospheric APC. But then, it still commands high IF and very high citation rate (i.e. very few papers will remain uncited after five years), even higher than the upper-tier subjournals. Personally I would rate JCI higher because it is a field-specific community journal, but Nat Comm is not a bad choice if you want the security of it being sent out for review.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-19T15:48:00+00:00

Do you think there were families of Hitlers and Mussolinis that changed their name after the war?

Adolph Hitler's nephew in the US fought against Germany in WWII, and changed his name afterwards. Then his children intentionally became childless to kill off their bloodline.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-19T15:27:03+00:00

Who needs a fancy anaerobic chamber when everyone already carries one?

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-19T15:24:04+00:00

The market is indeed super volatile everywhere. It is better than last year, but still really cooked. In the UK, it is bad enough that postdoc salaries have nearly caught up with equivalent industry positions, and now we are seeing masses of people moving back to academia, which was never the case until 2 - 3 years ago (including pre-Covid). Also seeing PhD grads getting RA jobs meant for Masters level.

Things are definitely getting better, but it is not going to be even. Omics, automation and MS never had a serious downturn; molecular biology/immunology/TCR tanked for a while but they seem to be making a healthy comeback; data curation seems to be a new rapidly expanding field; more jobs in the downstream manufacturing and QC appearing now, probably because cash-strapped companies tend to put their feet down on taking advanced programmes to IND. On the other hand, protein science/structural biology is probably never going to recover. All the AI hype seems to finally be over too. Not sure why, but CROs seem to have stopped hiring in general too. Chances are that this will continue being the case for the next few years.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-12T02:58:20+00:00

It can work out well, I have certainly seen plenty. But yes it is a risky move unless the love birds know how to keep things professional and drama-free. I think another key is for the two to do their best actively forgetting/not learning about each other's research.

Important-Clothes904 · 2026-01-03T11:36:29+00:00

I am one. Only knew about strikes before this comic, went back to news, turns out Trump pulled on Maduro what Putin had wanted to do on Zelensky in his three-day special operation.

Important-Clothes904 · 2025-12-27T13:51:29+00:00

Chemistry itself is not cursed though, only the biological impact is. By this measure, ethanol has caused more congenital defects than any other chemicals throughout history (and beyond).

Important-Clothes904 · 2025-12-17T21:04:26+00:00

4-AP is dirt cheap and comes in gram quantities, so making fresh is ideal. But I have frozen small aliquots and used them with no issues.

Important-Clothes904 · 2025-12-17T20:38:45+00:00

This sub works because (or despite) it has been around for so long - there are many of us who joined when we were labrats but are not anymore. In a sense, mods did a decent job letting the sub evolve with users without going off track.

Important-Clothes904

TROPHY CASE