Up until now, paleontologists have been dating fossils using three methods- comparing the location of specimens within layers of earth, radioactive ion techniques and using mitochondrial DNA to estimate linkages and associations between groups of people. When geneticists and fossil hunters meet Now, armed with next-generation sequencing techniques, the intrepid fossil hunters are teaming up [...]

Common lab reagents may appear innocuous, but don’t be fooled! Sometimes even the most-used lab chemicals are hazardous to your health. It is important to make sure you have an understanding of the dangers a reagent can present before you use it. Which common chemicals should you look out for? Here is a brief look [...]

What Does Oil Red O Stain? Oil Red O (‘ORO’) is used to demonstrate the presence of fat or lipids in fresh, frozen tissue sections. Introduced by French in 1926, ORO is a fat-soluble diazo dye, and is classified as one of the Sudan dyes which have been in use since the late 1800s. Like [...]

Last week we discussed Papers, which is a well-known reference manager used by many academics. Today I am focusing on what might be the most well-known reference manager – EndNote. Thomson Reuters’ EndNote is often available free through Universities. And if you have this opportunity, you should definitely take advantage of it!  If you want [...]

By mining pulp from the teeth of people who died of the Black Death during the Middle Ages, researchers have been able to sequence the whole genome of the Yersinia pestis strain that killed them. Similarly, from a tiny finger bone fragment tens of thousands of years old, investigators were able to obtain the entire genome of [...]

The canonical motto in Toxicology is ‘the dose makes the poison.’ That is, enough of anything can kill you. But, as Deborah Blum notes in the end of her book, “poison by water doesn’t unnerve us. The real scare comes from those elements and compounds whose toxicity is measured in drips and drops.” In The [...]

I have a dear friend and collaborator whose image file names follow this format: aaaa5kk.tif, aaaa5kkk.tif, aaaa5kkkk.tif, aaaa6p3kkkkkkk.tif, etc. We have collaborated together on several projects, and I dread the days I have to go back through the files and look for a particular image. I am sure that these names have some meaning to [...]

In my last post on reference managers I discussed Mendeley, a well-established reference manager and the one I’m most familiar with. Today I am going to tell you about ReadCube, a more recent addition to the referencing software market brought to you from Labtiva. ReadCube was created by two Harvard students, Siniša Hrvatin and Robert [...]

For the past six decades, HeLa cells have been vital to making groundbreaking research in science. Scientists have made countless passages from them and shipped them worldwide, but did not put much thought into how they originally established. Scientific discovery and faith healing Rebecca Skloot gave the cells a life and a history in her [...]

Have you ever needed an enzyme but not had an ice bucket?  Have you been tempted to just grab the enzyme out of the freezer, take what you need and quickly return the tube to the freezer?  Do enzymes really need to be kept on ice all of the time?  I would say, Yes! Enzymes [...]