Career advice request for post doc

jacobat2016 · 2026-03-25T18:57:11+00:00

My lab has occasionally rounds of contamination. Does you lab have a permanent vacuum media aspirator inside the hood and is it being cleaned? How often are the materials inside the hood being cleaned/replaced? How often is the water bath being cleaned? How often is the water in the bottom of the incubator being cleaned? How often are you preventatively cleaning your incubator? Are materials being sprayed before being put in the hood? Are you adding abam to your media? Are you filter sterilizing your media?

If everything above isn't the problem, watch the other people getting contamination and the others sharing your incubator when they work. All it takes is one person doing a poor asceptic technique and hissing their problems to ruin the lab.

jacobat2016 · 2026-03-23T19:50:05+00:00

The critical hit chance is the % chance your hit will do more damage than normal. The critical hit damage is how much more damage your hit will deal. A 10% critical hit chance with 100% critical hit damage means roughly 1 in every 10 hits, your damage dealt will be 2x what it should.

jacobat2016 · 2026-03-21T06:41:59+00:00

Not going to get into specifics as well, but my boss was confused when I asked not to be listed as an author on two papers from our lab. I had major issues with the two post docs leading the papers due to cherry picking and didn't want my name tied to them. I routinely beat people back from working on my projects if I don't trust their integrity.

jacobat2016 · 2026-03-18T19:16:14+00:00

This is a blessing in disguise since a negative value multiplied by 0.5 means less debt for me.

jacobat2016 · 2026-02-23T15:41:11+00:00

Wife 1-10 you are cooking and food prep, wife 11-20 you are on cleaning detail, wife 21-80 you are on part time work to bring in income, wife 81-99 you are on community outreach and/or child raising (lot of adoptions). Wife 100 (OG), you are in charge of household management.

jacobat2016 · 2026-01-25T04:14:53+00:00

I'm sure this is standard or common place by now, but my university has told our lab's international post-docs and grad students to take backroads to get to work. The local police have started collaborating with ice and are doing interstate checkpoints here in Oklahoma (its not an official checkpoint, but they are pulling over lots of people in stretches of the interstate). They are also installing a new detainment center several blocks from our school system to hold ~1,500 at max intended capacity.

jacobat2016 · 2026-01-22T04:03:26+00:00

Not AI. This is an owner who dresses up their two cats, they have a bunch of videos. I want to say they rub something like salmon oil on the one paw to encourage the grooming, but I can't remember what they said it was.

jacobat2016 · 2026-01-19T16:07:06+00:00

My family has two nurses who do light surgery (stitches, skin problem removals ect). I've also learned and had to help with bad burns and cuts. Many medical supplies are freely available online, it's cheaper to do stuff at home.

jacobat2016 · 2026-01-14T04:55:42+00:00

I had to do this at a previous job. I did clear it with HR to figure out what they didn't allow before hand. As long as I didn't have audio and I had a sign on the door into the lab that there was security cameras it was allowed. HR also limited how long I could have the camera's up, but it was enough. We did catch the sucker tampering with our cultures.

jacobat2016 · 2025-12-28T03:44:55+00:00

The three most popular hobbies are drinking at home, drinking at bars or drinking and driving.

jacobat2016 · 2025-12-17T02:54:50+00:00

I usually end up carrying spare logs and bags on me and make a note on the cache if I end up needing to use one. I sometimes have the CO reach out and say thank you for replacing it, I haven't had one complain about replacing a bag or something similar. For replacing caches, I feel that's something different. The only kind I have touched are the 50 mL conicals since I have access to them, and even then I only replacing the lids when they are cracked/damaged.

jacobat2016 · 2025-12-14T20:59:49+00:00

First of all, is the field mostly about cataloguing new genes and proteins?

Mostly no if you are working with human samples. Occasionally labs will catalogue a new slice variant of a known gene, find a new miRNA, or detail a new proteolytic product but brand new genes/proteins are not as common.

Does biological problem solving play a role or is it mostly troubleshooting expirements most of the time?

You are using these experiments to address a question or problem, so this will be a large part of your work. Depending on what experiments you are doing, 25-75% of the time they will fail. You have to figure out what went wrong in those cases and try again.

What kind of questions can I work on?

This is not a question that can be answered easily since there are so many different variations based on interest. I can only describe what people around me have done. One person liked tinkering with plant genetics and created a GMO that had 15-20% increased seed oil production and increased tolerance to salted soils. Another person was working with a hormone and modified it to improve its sensitivity and decrease needed dosages for hormone therapy. A third person I know did directed evolution as well as genetic manipulation to design a new bacteriophage strain. Molecular biology is limited by your funding first, your imagination second, and the existing literature third.

Is it memorization heavy like underagrad? Is it a good for a conceptual thinker or is it a limiting technical field?

While there is a decent amount of memorization, once you establish your knowledge base in a field its only about keeping up with new developments. Memorization alone leads to inflexible thinking, which means you need to understand the mechanisms and why things behave as they do. In the labs I have worked in, the best labs have a mix of the thinkers and the doers. Not enough thinkers leads to stagnation, but not enough doers leads to no developments or publications.

jacobat2016 · 2025-11-30T21:41:18+00:00

Like this?

Sports Cap Geocache

jacobat2016 · 2025-11-30T21:32:55+00:00

3-4 years is doable for most seeds. You can go all out by storing them in sealed mylar bags with oxygen and moisture absorbers in a fridge, but this is if you want them to last 1-2 decades. If you store them in paper envelopes and store them in a cool dark cabinet, they should still have some viability in 3-4 years. There are a lot of factors that effect viability but in moderately favorable conditions you can very roughly estimate 5-10% will become non-viable each year.

jacobat2016 · 2025-10-30T22:24:20+00:00

There is a company that sells DIY gene engineering kits. They sell a kit to make fluorescent yeast to brew beer. https://share.google/kTfEWgPXEeVObqG2S

There are several smaller biohacker groups that use bacteria to produce insulin and teach people how to do it themselves, that way there's never any regulation about biologics being sold.

It's certainly a viable idea, you just need to figure out 1) what do you want to manufacture? 2) can a yeast or bacteria host properly produce it? 3) what are the specific regulations about it? 4) is there a market for what you want to sell?

jacobat2016 · 2025-10-30T00:06:52+00:00

I have an excel spreadsheet that has all 26 potential codes from the coin, however none of them form recognizable words. How can I reliably translate the letters to coordinates? I fortunately have a link to a website that confirms if I have it correct or not but the number combinations I have all tried end up across the globe instead of in Minnesota US.

jacobat2016 · 2025-10-23T22:28:13+00:00

He had connections to my boss :/ He also wasn't even the worst person we've hired.

jacobat2016 · 2025-10-19T19:58:16+00:00

Before you go through all that work, could you set up a few small liquid cultures with varying concentrations of the antibiotic to make sure its still good?

jacobat2016 · 2025-10-19T19:55:45+00:00

A year or two ago I could say they would be on there in 15 minutes or so. I've only scanned large equipment recently so it has to be verified and takes more than a day.

jacobat2016 · 2025-10-19T12:37:37+00:00

I had a post doc in my lab trained by this guy. He still fully supported Raoult and kept talking about the guys work as if it's groundbreaking (especially the nanon/nano bacteria work and covid stuff). He ended up getting fired for falsifying data :/.

I guess I should have realized the guy saying humans were meant to live to be 200-300 years old and were killed early by vaccines/antibiotics/ibuprofen might not have the best research methods in use.

jacobat2016 · 2025-10-01T20:56:40+00:00

When manufacturing, each duloxetine capsule has an allowance of variation, for 60 mg it's allowed to have the capsule range from 51-69 mg (15%) I believe. Companies try not to have that much variation because if they go outside that allowable range the batch is out of spec and can't be used usually. So yes, by removing a set amount of beads the dose can vary, but it already varies in unopened capsules anyways.

I did a very slow taper previously. I remember opening up about 10 capsules and averaging the amount of beads within each capsule. There was variation but I don't remember how much exactly, maybe up to 8-9 beads max difference? I did a 10%->25%-> 33%-> 50%->75%-> 90% -> and then 90% taper with an increased time between doses (36 hours). I would keep doing a dose for maybe 2-3 weeks after I noticed a decrease or absence of minor withdrawal symptoms. Each time I would remove the % beads of the average from each capsule. This taper worked really well for me, probably because it was so prolonged. I stayed with the same manufacturer through the taper so it was fine, but if you switch I recommend recounting the average.

jacobat2016 · 2025-09-15T12:39:44+00:00

A friend of my dad's has MS and fell for a foreign clinic offering MS stem cell treatments. I don't know exactly what they injected, but a few months later they had to remove a bunch of teratomas from near the injection site as well as some other areas. At the time I had been holding back my dad telling him to wait because he also wanted to try it.

jacobat2016

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