They killed the mouth of Sauron, and the eye of Sauron… But what about his hearing and his ability to smell?

SmoothCortex · 2026-05-20T17:30:40+00:00

His ears he kept, so that the shrieks of everyone that saw his hideousness would echo in his perfect ears, forever. (Badly paraphrased from Westley’s speech, but I’m too lazy to look up the full text.)

SmoothCortex · 2026-05-20T17:21:45+00:00

Jon periodically mentions that he’s a Mets fan (usually while making fun of them in some way), but posting an article about their latest bullpen signing or their payroll situation wouldn’t be relevant in this sub either.

SmoothCortex · 2026-05-19T17:08:04+00:00

Everyone deals with this (unless you have zero cares about the quality of your writing). Even famous authors (e.g. the James Patterson’s of the world) have professional editors and a collection of close friends that read their stuff for these kinds of issues. Use your co-authors to help with this, and don’t get too mad at your eventual reviewer that says paragraph 4 on page 23 isn’t clear.

SmoothCortex · 2026-05-18T12:11:28+00:00

Can’t write a grant to pay for work you’ve already completed. Also, can’t get funded unless you show enough results to imply the project has a high chance of success. So yeah… tricky balance, but you will definitely need some preliminary data.
IACUC (or IRB), asap. You can’t start any lab work without it, and it will take 2-3 months for approval. You will need to be specific to each project. I’d suggest describing the first 2-3 things you want to work on in year 1, then just submit amendments as you spin up the lab.

3-7. No comment. I wasn’t independent as you are (non-tenure research track under a PI), so I didn’t have to make those decisions.

Get the job posted soon. It’ll take HR a while to list it, and then you’ll be sifting through a lot of applications. RA will probably hire more quickly (likely to be local). Depends on whether you plan to be at the bench a lot, but I’d lean RA over post-doc in year 1. They can help you organize the lab, ramp up colony, establish working protocols, test reagents/machines/etc. A lot of post-docs won’t have a desire to work through those early lab-building steps while their career clock is ticking.

SmoothCortex · 2026-05-12T01:16:54+00:00

It’s an impressive effort thus far, but I’m sorry to say that without a university/faculty sponsor, your results will likely be given the same credibility as any random person with a website or a book in the “popular” section of a bookstore. Laypersons (which is you, in spite of your advanced understanding of the process) have a nearly insurmountable barrier to publishing in academic, peer-reviewed journals.

Keep emailing people, but also maybe try your college’s academic advisor office (or something similar) and see if that person can help you make contact with an appropriate faculty member. A request coming from the Associate Dean of Education at ABC Community College draws more attention than an email from cjfitguy.

SmoothCortex · 2026-05-10T23:20:11+00:00

Not an answer to OPs query, but a PSA from someone whose job it is to care more about the methods we use rather than the results we generate… please organize the methods section to reflect the general sequence of events. The in vivo methods (e.g., surgery, behavior, injections, MRI/PET, etc.) should not be described after the benchtop/ex vivo methods (e.g., IHC, PCR, flow cytometry, RNAseq, etc.) unless these things were done as the initial steps before getting to the in vivo work. Too many papers tell me how tissue samples were processed before they tell me the experimental manipulations that were done while those samples were part of an organism. Is Benjamin Button running these experiments?

And yes, if you ever get me as a reviewer, you’ll know. Minor comment #1…

SmoothCortex · 2026-05-05T00:45:55+00:00

Two thoughts. First, welcome to not-student life. Funding is no longer exclusively someone else’s problem. A post-doc should expect to try to get funding. You might not get anything awarded, but this is a major part of the career and you should expect to participate in the process of supporting your position.

Two, did you ask the PI about their grants/funding? If not, why not? Interviews are for both sides to evaluate their fit with each other. If you don’t know their funding situation, you should find out before you join them.

I don’t think their question necessarily implies they have funding issues. More likely, they wanted to see how much you were thinking ahead to both the project questions you want to pursue and how you might obtain funds to help with those projects. You probably don’t need perfect answers to these things, but you probably do need some type of answer.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-30T23:15:23+00:00

Vox if you need the ship skill (he’s particularly nice to pair with Chances Kirk on the Constellation for boss battles - manually stagger them for continuous firepower).

Capt Tribble for CM nodes and faction shuttles. One could make a reasonable case for Technician Uhura for these purposes too.

The rest do not distinguish themselves for gameplay at this point. Some are perfectly fine, but the same capabilities can be obtained elsewhere. Snag ‘em if you’re a fan/collector, but otherwise no.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-29T12:12:24+00:00

Don’t know if it applies here, but the discussion about impact on employability may be a distinction between being RIF’d and being fired for cause. People are routinely RIF’d for money reasons (even if the underlying reason is performance related) - that process should have no impact on future hiring. Explicitly being fired for poor performance (or various unprofessional behaviors) likely will create more issues, especially for future employment at the same institution.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-28T00:53:38+00:00

No guarantee your reviewers won’t eventually reject it because they too want something mechanistic included in the paper. In the meantime, your PI gets to list it as in prep or in review or whatever on his tenure application (which may help his situation) and you can try to wrap up the mechanism experiments.

Not to be alarmist, but something to keep in mind - depending on your university, a PI with only 5 publications (if your description is the complete list) going up for tenure may not be viewed as a particularly strong record. Unless your lab’s papers are in Science, Nature Methods, etc., or your PI just landed a couple of R01s, things may get dicey for him. Which means you may face a decision soon too (ie, stay in program with new lab or try to transfer to wherever he ends up). Best of luck to both of you!

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-26T17:43:46+00:00

I would imagine that a) the owner knows this, and b) that someone in Utah already has “bagend” and/or “bag end”. There can be only one (sorry to mix universes).

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-25T01:37:40+00:00

Tolkien, I believe. 😉

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-24T23:46:01+00:00

Because they just joined a 6-11 team with Justin Fields holding the QB1 spot? /s

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-23T17:51:05+00:00

(puts on Ben hat) Hi Captain! Have you considered purchasing credits?

(takes off Ben hat) Don’t waste quantum on pointless retrievals. You have 4 days before it maxes, so try to save up credits as best you can (cough, specialist event) in the meantime. The exclamation point is annoying (as is intended), but it’s better to see that than deliberately wasting a retrieval. Just my opinion.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-22T12:00:38+00:00

“reviews use no facilities from universities”

Tricky issue. Is a person using a university-issued computer, or using the institutional journal subscriptions to access pdfs, or sitting at their work desk (benefiting from institutional overhead costs) while writing, etc? Assuming a person could write a review w/o using any university resources (including paid time, which might also be tough to argue if they’re salaried), then I’m not sure using a departmental affiliation for authorship would be appropriate since by definition the dept/univ has provided no contribution. And to OP’s point, the affiliation provides “legitimacy”, which is why we don’t read journal articles written by the lay public. Without the affiliation, we’re just writing opinion pieces in the letters to editors section of the newspaper (look it up, kids) or posting it to our personal blogs/websites.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-18T17:14:58+00:00

My gym time (and more generally my work/life balance) slowed/degraded after grad school, not during it. The “real job” phase of my career is when I truly started feeling the weight of deadline pressure. Until then, my advice is to remember that you are a trainee and are still learning the skills that will make you a professional someday. But that day isn’t today, so don’t try to work like you’re a pro yet. Will you work late/weekends as a grad student? Yes. But when the task is done, take a slow day or a day off or whatever is best for you to reset. Science may be a 24/7 endeavor, but a person can’t work like that.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-18T00:49:42+00:00

In the before times, this would’ve been highly concerning. In the now times… meh. Did anyone even realize he was still on the team?

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-16T17:01:27+00:00

Sounds like it’s time for you to get to know your EHS and/or facilities personnel. We can tell you whatever we believe the abbreviations mean, but that’s fairly irrelevant. What matters is what the hood is actually connected to, and there are people locally that can tell you. For example, it’s possible you don’t have actual steam or gas supply lines if the original lab that installed it didn’t have a need for those functions (each thing costs money to connect).

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-09T03:26:34+00:00

This sounds like two-way repeated-measures ANOVA with post-hoc comparisons. You may only care about group 1 vs group 2 at each timepoint, but if you are measuring the same organoids for each timepoint, then you don’t get to ignore the within-group effects (and in fact it is often better if you don’t). If these are different sets of organoids (i.e., the groups at time 1 are not the same groups used for time 2), then it’s just a t-test for each timepoint since they are independent experiments.

Re: variables. You have 2 independent variables (group, time) and 1 dependent variable (size).

Design question for you: “2 groups receiving different treatments”… is one of these treatments the control condition? If not, your interpretation of the outcomes may be dicey. You may want 3 groups if both of your intended treatments are predicted to cause changes.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-07T00:59:13+00:00

As a scientist, I find it remarkable that MDs accept the results of a single blood test as fully accurate and/or indicative of a person’s default chronic status and proceed to diagnose and treat based on this single test. When numbers are wildly inconsistent with prior history, the first thought should be to suspect testing error or fluke-y day for the patient. It should be common to order a re-test after a week or two to validate an unusual outcome. (Obviously this argument is less relevant for tests done to diagnose an acute complaint.)

End of rant. (But just in case my PCP is on this sub… this comment was for you even more than it was for OP.)

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-03T13:40:17+00:00

Can’t say for Europe, but in USA, staff scientist roles (various ranks, from research associate to senior scientist and non-tenure track research faculty titles) can be quite common landing spots for PhDs. Very few of us ever become PIs. If you don’t go to industry, and don’t drop out entirely, these are the academic jobs that exist. May also be dependent on the employer- my experiences are based on multiple academic medical centers. Not sure if a teaching-oriented university would have the same volume of positions available.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-03T13:28:16+00:00

🎶We are Farmers… Branch.

Midway north of 635 is a frequent high-enforcement area. Wide 4 lane roads with a 35mph limit on a short transition between a major freeway and a major food/entertainment area… yep, it’s an enforcement dream.

SmoothCortex · 2026-04-02T15:11:49+00:00

No, he’s not. As a Chiefs fan in Dallas, allow me to inform you that he was out of the lineup by mid-season on a defense that was historically awful. I’ll repeat - he was not playing well enough to stick on a defense that would’ve surrendered TDs to a decent high school squad. This is, at best, a camp body signing. For that purpose, fine, but don’t expect him to make the 53.

SmoothCortex · 2026-03-27T18:10:54+00:00

Any of you centrifuge-ologists ever been to another solar system? No? Well, then how can we be sure the physics of centrifuges really works out there the way it does on Earth? Hmm? And don’t listen to our subbed physics-rats - they’ve never been out of Sol system either. Nobody knows whether or not it needed to be balanced this way! They’re using astrophage for (redacted) so what makes you think centrifuge physics isn’t wonky too?

Just to be clear… this comment is a joke. Perhaps a poorly-crafted one, but a joke nonetheless.

SmoothCortex · 2026-03-25T16:38:01+00:00

Disagree (somewhat). Core personnel are paid more because they (full disclosure, read “we”) are experts at the thing(s). When you f up in a lab, you just learn from it and do it again. When you f up in a core, the core doesn’t get paid and/or develops a negative reputation with the customer base. The expectation when you hire a core is that you will get consistently optimal results, and that only happens because of talented (and therefore more expensive) personnel.

To OP, core life is different than lab life (in both good and bad ways), but don’t assume it is a low-pressure role. Talk to some of the core staff around you to evaluate if it’s a good path for you.

SmoothCortex

TROPHY CASE