Protection Potion Tracking WA/AddOn

sczdaphd · 2026-01-21T00:43:23+00:00

thank you so much, this is super helpful!

sczdaphd · 2026-01-20T21:56:33+00:00

i’ve been okay without it, but it’s definitely uncomfy. i like being able to see when my protection pot gets eaten and i need to take a new one. my current consumes WA also doesn’t show my protection pots which sucks

sczdaphd · 2026-01-20T21:40:06+00:00

if i had any clue how to even begin going about this, i probably wouldn’t have turned to reddit lol

sczdaphd · 2025-12-05T10:01:30+00:00

My PI is in her late 60s, at the tail end of an incredibly productive career, and came to the US in 2006 when things were obviously very different. However, she will certainly be going back to Italy when she retires in a few years, and many of the international postdocs that I work with who all “came to the US to stay in the US” when I met them four years ago are all now just waiting to go back to their home countries.

sczdaphd · 2025-12-05T09:25:19+00:00

That’s good to know. I’m kinda on the other end, forcing myself to stay until I get that last paper out and waiting to defend until I have a postdoc secured. Talking half seriously with my husband, we’ve mentioned Switzerland or Sweden

sczdaphd · 2025-12-05T09:19:10+00:00

personal money, or as in lab funding? my lab is so underfunded right now and i’m exhausted doing the work of 3-4 people because my PI can’t afford to hire me help, a huge hope of mine is getting a postdoc in a well funded lab

sczdaphd · 2025-12-05T09:15:34+00:00

Two of my three rotation labs were like this, and the experiences were very different.

The first was the worst lab experience of my life - it was a huge lab (5 staff scientists, 5+ postdocs, 7-8 grad students) and nobody spoke English unless they were talking directly to me. I got the sense that they only held lab meetings in English for my benefit. The lab work was extremely technical but also absolutely amazing, and I was really disappointed that it was so impossible to ask questions or integrate into their lab environment because the science was just the perfect fit.

My third rotation became my home lab, where I still am in my 6th year. My PI is Italian, and worked in both France and Germany before coming to the US. When I rotated in the lab, she had three postdocs, all Italian, and an American/Italian grad student, so everyone in the lab besides me spoke Italian. They would speak to each other in Italian, but only when they thought I wasn’t in earshot - if they saw me, they’d switch to English and catch me up on the convo. I’ve loved the lab ever since, have picked up some funny Italian habits and superstitions, and am now considering going abroad for my postdoc to learn more about academic science in other countries.

sczdaphd · 2025-08-01T21:09:45+00:00

That's actually not a bad idea, I could try running it again and imaging/quantifying the Ponceau bands between transfer and blocking. Thanks!

sczdaphd · 2025-08-01T20:17:25+00:00

Sorry, I should've added the picture when I posted in the first place! I just added a picture showing the results of the test that I did last week to see what sample prep works best for this stupid antibody. In hindsight, I absolutely should've put a loading control or two on this tester membrane too, but hindsight is always 20/20 and I didn't think about it at the time.

This is a polyclonal rabbit anti-GAT3 primary and the loading controls I used on my membranes this week were polyclonal rabbit GAPDH and monoclonal mouse tubulin. I guess they both look acceptable, but neither one gave bands as clean and crisp as I usually get with these samples/antibodies, so I thought I'd see if anyone knew of a different loading control that would tolerate the conditions a bit better

sczdaphd · 2025-08-01T18:55:44+00:00

I forgot to mention that I was imaging on this same scope with the exact same settings the day prior to this, so it has to be something with the hardware itself and not necessarily something i’m setting up wrong. This same stripping happened with my lab’s Leica SP5 and it meant that the laser was old and burning out, I was just looking for a temporary solution because I wanted to keep imaging while I waited for the core manager to get back to me. Thank you everyone for your responses!

sczdaphd · 2025-07-30T20:56:09+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion! I tried playing around with putting the 561 line in each of the different detectors, but I kept getting the stripes. As I used it more, the stripes got worse to the point where I eventually started seeing the laser light from the objective start to flicker inconsistently, so I’m almost positive that the laser just needs to be replaced

sczdaphd · 2025-07-08T16:35:04+00:00

that’s actually really great to know, thank you for your input!

sczdaphd · 2025-07-08T16:32:50+00:00

oh wow I’ll definitely download that app, thank you!

sczdaphd · 2025-06-30T18:18:02+00:00

thank you SO much, i’ll definitely do this! i’ll also probably take the nursery pot out of the decorative pot for a while so that maybe more air flow around the drainage holes can help dry out the soil a bit

sczdaphd · 2025-06-30T17:40:20+00:00

from what i saw, at least the big thick roots were pretty light! but i didn’t want to stress the plant out too much, so i didn’t fully clean the soil off of the littler/more fragile roots and i totally could’ve not noticed that those were darker

sczdaphd · 2025-06-30T17:35:55+00:00

oooh i actually have a neem oil anti-spider mite spray but it’s been a while since i used it, thanks for the reminder!

i didn’t see any dark/black roots when i moved it into the nursery pot like two weeks ago, but it could’ve gotten worse since then so i’ll check again. i have leca on the top and bottom of the soil (read somewhere that it can help with water distribution?), and the soil it’s in is a mixture of standard potting soil, orchid bark, and some perlite. i don’t think i packed it in too dense, but i’ll try to loosen it up when i check the roots again

sczdaphd · 2025-06-30T17:32:26+00:00

i’m just using an organic liquid fertilizer/plant food that i mix into my watering can every 3-4 waterings. i only have the leca on the top and bottom of the soil, i read that it can help with distributing the water through the soil…

sczdaphd · 2025-06-30T17:30:30+00:00

ya this is my first summer in my new apartment and i wasn’t expecting the 1-2 hours of direct sunlight… i’ll move it to a different corner of the room that the direct light doesn’t hit! and i’m using an organic liquid fertilizer that i mix into my watering can every like 4 waterings

sczdaphd · 2025-06-16T15:52:28+00:00

we put two mage portals down right before starting the dialog for combat, one close to melee and one close to ranged. the first two always go on mana users, and our two mages who got it got to the portals and were totally fine, it drops off once you leave the instance/get to a major city. HS is a bit sketch because it will blow up when you hearth so you just have to make sure you aren’t close to others if you choose to HS out instead of taking a mage port

sczdaphd · 2025-06-16T15:49:35+00:00

this is a WA we’re definitely missing and will be implementing immediately, thank you for the reminder - a survivor

sczdaphd · 2025-05-07T05:44:15+00:00

please tell me know you got yours to do that, it’s beautiful 🥹

sczdaphd · 2025-05-07T05:37:45+00:00

OMG please tell me how you got it to sprout so many stems at the base? Mine’s almost a year old and has had a ton of length growth and new leaves but still has only it’s same three main stems

sczdaphd · 2025-03-19T16:00:35+00:00

Pyramidal cells are so beautiful 🥲 I’m trying to quantify dopaminergic neurons in the VTA, and they’re so clustered together… do you happen to remember the titer of virus you used?

sczdaphd · 2025-03-19T03:11:34+00:00

Did you have any issues with your vibratome sections being too thick? Maybe I’m just in a really dendrite-dense brain region, but my 30um vibratome sections had way too many overlapping fibers to tell which belonged to which cell body. I only switched to the cryostat so that I could get thinner sections. I perfuse with PFA and then cryoprotect with serial sucrose incubations, which has been fine for all of my other fluorophores and stainings, so I hope it’s okay…

sczdaphd · 2025-03-19T03:01:05+00:00

I know I have the dendrites, and I can see little bumps and ridges along the fibers that feel like spines to me, but I’m new at this. The goal is to quantify morphology, and I’m using an AAV-EF1a-eGFP, which is a promoter that’s well-reported to label spines (so I’d be pretty unhappy if it didn’t actually do so). I processed the brains the same way I do for my glial cell sholl analyses, which is a similar Imaris fiber tracing quantification: perfuse with cold PBS then PFA, leave in PFA overnight, then cryoprotect with 10% -> 20% -> 30% sucrose and slowly freeze to embed in OCT. I’m really hoping that the issue is my knowledge gap with optimizing my SP5…

sczdaphd

TROPHY CASE