So, I don’t know about you, but here in Brazil, some technical high schools require students to complete a final project. The catch? When you choose this track, you’re enrolled in BOTH regular high school and a technical program.

The program I chose was biotechnology—and I’m not gonna lie, I genuinely love it. Some classes weren’t particularly useful, but others were wonderful and helped me grow as a person. We also get access to the lab and all that cool science stuff.

ANYWAY.

Yesterday, I spent NINE HOURS in the lab. From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. And what did we accomplish? The centrifuge went haywire (no idea what happened; it started making this ridiculously loud rumbling noise even though it was still spinning, and nobody properly taught us how to use it), we couldn’t get half the things we needed done, and we ended up making some YPD culture,and THE PEPTONE SMELLED LIKE ACTUAL HELL. I SWEAR TO GOD. That smell followed me for the REST OF THE DAY. I was already upset and a shit, this smell just had me shit and stinky.

AND THEN we found out that yeast extract ISN’T THE SAME THING AS YEAST. So we prepared the medium without the yeast extract because we thought, “Hey, if we put the yeast in the autoclave, it’ll die.” And before anyone comes at me for not looking it up beforehand: WE HAVE MORE THAN FIVE ASSIGNMENTS DUE NEXT WEEK. For BOTH regular high school and technical school. TWO OF THEM ARE MASSIVE AND HAVE A MILLION LITTLE DETAILS.

I AM TIRED.

And the worst part is that I genuinely LOVE science. I think it’s fascinating, important, and fun. But holy shit, it’s exhausting. You’re constantly tired, you end up eating like crap because you barely have time for anything, and everyone expects you to deliver increasingly complicated results, like i am fucking Hedy lammar or Marie curie..........I’m not even old enough to drink alcohol yet, and there I am producing 2 generation ethanol with minimal help.

And don’t even get me STARTED on how unfair the workload distribution feels.

The cosmetics groups—which were supposedly going to be harder—don’t even have half the workload we do. Their advisor said they could buy a ready-made mask base and add their extract, without conducting all the tests, because there wouldn’t be enough time. Fine. Whatever. That’s what I tell myself so I don’t start crying in the shower.

BUT THEN WHY CAN’T WE BUY ETHANOL, USE IT IN OUR PROJECT, HUH!? Or dunno....DUMP SUGAR in this shit to the yeast eat like the group of bioethanol last year?

We don’t have an advisor or co-advisor who can help carry out the work for us. Meanwhile, other groups have professors helping with their experiments. The phenolic extract group? A professor ran their DPPH test—or is going to run it, I don’t give a fuck. A lot of them just had to make the extract! And the bioethanol team? Fuck they, let they do a fucking Hydrolysis with cloridric acid alone!

I KNOW SCIENCE IS HARD. I KNOW EXPERIMENTS FAIL. I KNOW RESEARCH TAKES TIME. I’M NOT EXPECTING EVERYTHING TO BE EASY. BUT THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEARNING HOW TO DO RESEARCH AND BEING EXPECTED TO DO THE WORK OF AN ENTIRE LAB WITH A STUDENT’S SCHEDULE, A STUDENT’S RESOURCES, AND BARELY ANY GUIDANCE, i am like, almost saying fuck you to every teacher who give us work to do.

And as if the final project weren’t enough, I ALSO HAVE A RESEARCH PROGRAM PROJECT TO FINISH. I have a submission due for the science fair NEXT WEEK, and we don’t even have half of it ready.

Our coordinator is completely unhelpful, and there are serious allegations about him that we only heard about after our advisor assigned him to us. There’s also a previous project that he allegedly appropriated, and our advisor STILL put us in a position where we have to work with him. And somehow, we’re still expected to include his name on our work.

I AM SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.

The final project is hell. High school is hell. Technical school is a nightmare. The research program is kicking my ass.

And the worst part? I still love science!

I love learning new things. I love the lab. I love discovering how stuff works. I love the feeling of finally understanding something that seemed impossible. But I hate how much pressure they put on students. I hate how little guidance we sometimes get. I hate that we’re expected to produce professional-level results while juggling a ridiculous number of assignments and deadlines.

I’m so exhausted I can barely cry anymore.

I just want this year to be OVER, I want to go back to my mother's womb 👹👹👹

Hey everyone!

I'm a chemistry student who recently fell into a rabbit hole about archaeometry and I genuinely can't stop thinking about it, it feels like one of the most exciting application of analytical chemistry I've ever come across. But I'm finding it really hard to get a clear picture of what the field actually looks like in practice.

So I wanted to ask people who actually know, is this career worth it or should I specialize in more "classic" sectors?

Hi everyone,

I'm installing an electric furnace inside a glovebox for research experiments. The furnace will operate at temperatures up to 700°C.

I need help selecting the correct wire inside the glovebox, specifically to connect the furnace's electrical terminals to the internal side of a Kurt J. Lesker power feedthrough.

Could anyone recommend what type of wire would be suitable for this setup?

I've also attached some photos for reference.

Thanks in advance!

I did this experiment over a few months ago in which I had to treat every row in a 24 well plate differently over 6 days.

Now I can’t sleep because I remembered one day I accidentally flipped the plate and I caught myself after taking out the culture medium of the first well (thankfully, before I treated anything).

I was sooooo tired and burnt out but it’s basically all I have for my thesis. I ran two plates on two different occasions; I assume that in the first case I didn’t make any other mistakes because when I did I obviously caught myself. In the second plate, though, I don’t remember doing that which can only mean I did everything by the book or didnt realize anything was amiss. Someone was “with me” in the lab but not really paying attention.

Help - what’s the probability I made a mistake? I have OCD so this is actually keeping me up at night. What if I mistakenly committed fraud? The results look incredible and I’m scared they’re just “fake” :(

Hi everyone. I have an interesting situation regarding a manuscript I am working on and I wanted to get some second opinions before I revisit the discussion with my PI.

Background - The project was done during my PI's postdoc years ago. He'll obviously be the senior author. A Grad student who helped on the project did the data analysis and was supposed to write the manuscript. Ultimately though, the student graduated, working on/off the manuscript for a couple of years, then decided they no longer wanted to continue writing/working on it. They finished the data analysis (it was done incorrectly) and wrote a sort of introduction, methods, and results.

That's where I come in. My PI originally asked me to redo the data analysis and to help finish up the manuscript by editing the methods, rewriting the results, and writing the discussion. At the time we agreed upon 3rd author (1st was still the Grad student, 2nd was someone who did a lot of the heavy lifting when executing the project).

Now, it has turned into me redoing the data analysis (very time consuming), rewriting the entire manuscript (every section), generating the figures, and dealing with any eventual revisions needed.

My question is: Is it appropriate for me to push for first author or co-first author on this paper? Generally I feel like it would be a no brainer, but with 1) me not being originally involved and 2) the original 1st author doing the data analysis and writing part of the paper (even though both endeavors were not finished or done correctly and are being redone), I am just unsure.

I am going to discuss this with my PI at our upcoming meeting, but I wanted to see what other people think and see if I'm being unreasonable before I go pushing.

Any advice helps, thanks!

Hi, I'm a 1st year master's student rotating in a biology lab that I really like so far, but some of my PI's lab practices seem a little bit too relaxed, and it makes me nervous that I will have to share stuff when I start my project. For context, I have around 3 years of lab experience from undergrad and research internships, so I've seen a lot of variations of the same techniques like cell culture. However, I understand I am still newish to research and he has obviously been doing this a lot longer than me. But here are some things I saw that made me very nervous (with mammalian cells):

- grabbed cell dishes/plates from incubator with no gloves on

- touches everything (reagents, media, pipettes, stuff in fridge) with no gloves until he is ready to actually start working

- took out ~20 different plates from incubator at the same time to image them one by one, which left all the cells out at RT for over an hour

- Sprayed EtOH on media bottle after putting it in the BSC instead of before

- keeps cells he knows have been contaminated with yeast in the same incubator as healthy, uncontaminated cells (he is trying to treat them with an antifungal)

- working with cells he knows are contaminated with yeast in the same BSC that he uses for everything else

Maybe these are little things that don't really matter, but it just seems to go against a lot of what I have been taught over the years. Am I overreacting?

When I say “create”, I mean go to the lefty tool section of
the site and add items one by one to create a dream lefty tool kit. FST has kits only for righties between $1200-1700. My diy kit came out to about that much , but time wasted being indecisive over which tools to include that will cover various procedures

Any on-line resource preferably videos to how to quantify fluorescence by i mage j , this is uterus stained for dapi and lgr5 ,ignore green channel

Y’all, I just wanna graduate, and these BMDMs are making it very difficult for me. Here’s the situation:

I need a non-enzymatic (no trypsin, no Accutase) GENTLE method (so, likely no scraping) to remove BMDMs from a flat-bottom 96-well plate… while the plate is either on ice or at 4 degrees. I have tried non-tissue culture treated plates but my IL-4-polarized (“M2-like”) BMDMs still hang on like it’s their one job.

I have a 10 mM EDTA recipe (see image) that works like a dream at 37 degrees, but for this experiment I can’t have them warmer than 4 degrees. I don’t know how long I can reasonably keep them in the fridge. 1 hour? 2 hours? The longer I leave them in the fridge, the more rounding I see, but I don’t know what is experimentally acceptable. I plan to run flow as my readout.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks Reddit!

I’m a junior studying EE working in an optics lab. I joined over the summer and was very passionate about doing a PhD. The passion I feel for this stuff is still there, I’m eternally grateful for all that I get to work on, but I’m so tired of being the stupidest person in the room 24/7.

I work with a 3rd year PhD student and another undergrad my year who joined the same time as me and who has extensive research experience (first author publication) in a different field than optics. I just feel like I’m barely staying afloat, and that everyone is running intellectual laps around me. My PI also believes that undergrads should have the responsibilities of a full time PhD student, so constant individual contribution is expected. Despite his somewhat toxic nature, I joined the lab so that I can work on something that was very interesting to me and gain extensive research experience (in my school, undergrads are mainly used to do simple data analysis or lab infrastructure development)

I genuinely don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this thing, if I’m just stuck in a lab that expects too much from me, or if it’s a combination of both. I do my best to show up everyday but during discussions I’m just quiet because I’m trying to process what’s being said last. I really need some help here.

How are you fairing the war on science?

So my boss asked me to hunt for something in the-80 freezer (thermoscientific TSX) , and ofc (since neither of us knew where the samples were) the door was open overall quite a long time (I shut it periodically so it wasn’t alarming but still overall open quite a bit). I was also looking in another freezer, a phcbi VIP ECO. It’s been a few hours and the other freezer is back up to -80 but the thermofisher is stuck at -64. The touchpad says the health is all good etc etc but it’s odd to me it’s taking so much longer than the other freezer… should I be worried? Is it time to call a mechanic? I have heard the TSX freezers are worse, is this a feature of that?

EDIT: checked back in and it’s within the -70 and above range #phew. But good to know about freezer diving techniques— my boss has been out for a few leeks and just told me to find something without much direction (new to lab life) so I definitely didn’t know what I was doing. Also I don’t think this freezer has ever been defrosted….

This is not the first time this happens. Back in 2009 six people became ill at Harvard after drinking coffee from a communal espresso machine that was contaminated with sodium azide.

Oh and let's not forget the Berkeley cadmium poisoning.

Edit: I'm going to compile other cases I wasn't aware of that you guys mentioned in the comments

• 1970 ascariasis poisoning incident: research parasites added to food - ruled as poisoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_ascariasis_poisoning_incident

• 1994 Rockefeller University NY: attempted poisoning - coffee https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1994/07/27/779377.html?pageNumber=23

• 1997 UC San Diego: acrylamide in coffee pot https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.278.5344.1704b?referrer=android-app%3A%2F%2Fcom.reddit.frontpage%2F

• 2014 Gustave-Roussy Institute case in France: sodium azide in a coffee kettle https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2014/04/26/la-vengeance-d-un-stagiaire-vire-a-la-tentative-d-empoisonnement_4407857_3224.html

• 2015 Stanford University case: paraformaldehyde in water bottles https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/01/16/former-stanford-student-sentenced-in-poisoning-case/

• 2017 Yale University case: sodium azide in an office coffee machine https://yaledailynews.com/articles/police-launch-inquiry-after-toxin-sickens-four

• 2023 Florida chemistry student poisoning family case: hydrocodone and methadone poisoning by pumping the chemicals on the front door of the house https://www.the-independent.com/tv/news/chemistry-student-filmed-poisoning-family-by-injecting-chemicals-into-their-front-door-b2401121.html

• 2026 UW Madison case: chloroform poisoning in a water bottle https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/university-wisconsin-scientist-allegedly-tired-kill-lab-colleague-pois-rcna341216

Original cases I mentioned:

• 2009 Harvard poisoning case: communal coffee spiked with sodium azide https://abcnews.com/amp/US/poisoned-harvard-researcher-spiked-coffee-fatal/story?id=8918291

• 2017 Berkeley case: cadmium poisoning in a water bottle https://abc7news.com/amp/post/bay-area-woman-poisoned-worker-david-xu-speaks-1st-time-felony-conviction-expunged-judge/19933507/

• 2026 University of Wyoming case: acrylamide poisoning in tea https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/s/q74na4eoXm

So I am relatively new and starting a project. I’m ordering tonnes of stuff. I don’t know how exactly to keep track of everything. Any tips and tricks to make it less painful than just keeping an excel sheet? Any management software or apps and such or anything.

Gloves are bit short for me. We have standard length nitrile gloves. They are 240 mm (9.45 inches) long. They do go over the cuffs of my lab coat, but come off easy as there is not enough overlap. So I am looking at longer gloves, but they cost way too much. The current ones we get are microflex n273 which cost us ~$10 per 100 gloves. Also the extended cuff ones which are 300 mm (12 inches) feel too along, and of course expensive. I do see that different brands and skus have different length but there are so many to check. Does anyone have a recommendation which I should look for? Hopefully not too expensive.

I did a DNA extraction and then used a Nanodrop to quantify my product and these results don’t look good. What likely happened? Was it the extraction or the nanodrop?

I work in a human genomics lab where I do library prep and sequencing. I don't work with starting materials like blood, plasma, or tissue. It's about time for me to buy new clothes and I kind of want to just start wearing scrubs. I'm a dress and skirt wearer and my work clothes rotate the same 8 or 9 outfits that are lab safe pants that aren't jeans.

There are research fellows in other departments who are MD PhD's and they often wear scrubs, but they also do surgeries where scrubs are needed. There isn't a direct need for me to wear scrubs based on the lab work I do, but I'm just kind of tired of the clothes and outfits that I do have and feel like scrubs might just be easier.

My department is one person (me) so it's not like I'd have a colleague saying I'm wearing the wrong thing. I often go an entire week without someone checking in on my lab so I don't really see the reason of wearing an actual outfit when I could just wear scrubs.

Looking to see how much of this is normal. My PI is incredibly slow to communicate the science of our group. After the final data are collected, it takes about 1-2 years on average of the lead researcher meeting the PI every week while they write together. This ‘writing together’ consists of the lead scientist writing the paper solo, then the PI looking over the work and suggesting things get moved around, arguments get re-framed, etc. Often, this flip flops and goes in cycles, where the PI requests major changes, then further major changes that revert the manuscript back to how it was before. No matter how much writing work the lead scientist does, it always needs to be read over in this way, which takes a year or more. The PI can only carry out this process for at most 2 manuscripts at a time. We have 20+ people in our lab. Consequently, most will never have their lead work published, as PhD/postdoc terms are typically < 4 years in the UK. Once a person leaves, their work will never be published because they can no longer meet regularly with the PI, so if you don’t complete this dance in time, you will not have anything to show for your work. We work in human health-related biotech, so by not publishing our findings, we squander the money given to the lab to work on our particular disease that would certainly be better spent elsewhere.

There is no way around it. It means that if a PhD student reaches 3 years, and is just wrapping up the data collection side of their project, they will not have anything to show for their work by the time of their postdoc applications, and likely ever. It penalizes slow, accurate, bold science, and favors churning out something passable but incremental, then dressing it up as something fantastic over the two years spent writing. My colleagues have understandably taken this route repeatedly, doing good but incremental science that is then publishable during their time in the lab. Others who did not take this approach left empty-handed.

Does anyone have experience with situations like this - how normal is the environment I’ve just described, and does anyone have advice on how to navigate it?

entry level lab roles in the UK are hard to find because most postings say "scientist" and want a phd or 5 years. this list only has entry level R&D: placement years, graduate programmes, associate scientist, lab technician and research roles.

https://github.com/mehek-builds/UK-Entry-Level-Pharma-Biotech-RD-Jobs

- 31 roles at 12 employers (GSK, Lonza, Pfizer, Moderna, Vertex, Roche, Labcorp, Elanco, IQVIA, Avantor)

- placement years, graduate programmes, associate scientist and lab roles, discovery and chemistry

- 12 posted in the last week

pulled from employers' own careers pages. senior, principal and manager titles are left out. rebuilt every monday.

comment which area you're looking for and i'll send you a list for it.

Hi fellow rats

So I applied a couple of weeks ago to this postdoc position in the EU (I am in EU myself but in another country) on the day of the deadline. And the PI reached out the very next day to schedule an interview on zoom the very next week. Fantastic; it is a great group, multiple CNS publications, very ambitious, industrial linkages, PI looks like a great vibe based on the youtube videos I could find of them, relates to my previous work too.

Fast forward to next week and I joined the call on zoom and was there for a good hour and a half BUT was ghosted. They never connected. I stayed home from work that day, cleared my schedule, fine whatever. Sent an email reminding them of the meeting 15 minutes into the call, but nothing. The PI emails about two hours after the fact, apologizing and blaming a delayed flight and offers to reschedule the next week. And I agree.

Fast forward to the next week (today) and the same thing happens. Ghosted. Mind you, it is the PI who is sending me te zoom links and setting the date and all. As of writing this, I still have not gotten any email or explanation from them so far. I sent a reminder like before, 15 minutes after the call was to be, and then even called their office number but no response whatsoever.

Now I know this is the EU academia where most positions are already fixed, but why go through all this just to ghost me? If they have someone for the position, just tell me outright. I am just baffled because this is the absolute first time this has happened to me, and let alone from a very senior prof in the field.

Thoughts?

Oh and if someone can tell me what to write in the next email I send them, thank you.

i just started my first semester of nursing school at yorku. i am thinking of transferring schools and majors into something that can get me into pharm r&d. however am unsure of whether or not it is a good choice because of the rapid advancement of ai recently and just generally because job markets seem to be down. thinking of medchem at uwaterloo or life science at uoft and specializing in toxicology. thoughts and advice?