Soft raw materials
Posted in Tips
A UK postdoc came to our lab in the US and was surprised that we didn’t have any Blu-Tack in the lab. His old lab wasn’t the only UK lab that goes through…
Category: Tips
Structured illumination
Structured illumination can be used to increase the resolution of wide field fluorescence imaging. The idea is best motivated by thinking about Moire fringes. In panel (a) below, if you stand away from the…
Some OSX programs & tips
This is just a quick post to highlight a few Mac OSX programs & tips that you might find useful.
Programs
Default Folder – This is how all save file dialogs should work. Watch the…
Troubleshooting Fluorescence Microscopy
Posted in Tips
Jim Pawley upgraded the 39 Steps from a simple MacGuffin to a classic checklist for troubleshooting fluorescent microscopy images. Now 10 years old, it remains very relevant. It covers thirty-nine different parameters to…
Shapeways – Cheap 3D printing
Posted in Tips
Shapeways is geared towards the arts and crafts crowd, so they don’t offer the professional options a place like Quickparts does. But they do offer very competitive prices. In particular, if you want…
Color-code terms in equations
Posted in Tips
This is such a simple and powerful trick, I don’t know why I hardly ever see it used. When giving an equation during a talk or in a paper, typically that equation is best understood as a series of terms. Those in your audience who are familiar with the terms, like yourself, will instantly recognize…
Open Science Summit: This weekend
Posted in Tips
Thursday through Saturday this week, there is an Open Science Summit in Berkeley. The schedule includes Josh Perfetto from the OpenPCR group I’ve mentioned before, Martha Bagnell from The Third Reviewer…
Street fighting mathematics
Posted in Tips
Physicists have a very unsentimental way of manhandling mathematics. In addition to setting up dimensionally inconsistent equations for order-of-magnitude estimations, they like to take lots of short cuts that make computations fast and easy….
Daltonize your figures for the colorblind audience members
Posted in Tips
I’m revising figures for a paper right now and the editors suggested I avoid red-green color schemes. In the US, 7% of men are colorblind, usually red-green colorblind. The editors suggested this…
Cleaning objectives and other optics
Posted in Tips
Microscope objectives, in particular, the water-dipping variety so common in physiology and imaging labs, get dirty. Salts build up on them, traces of drugs stick to them, and biological membranes accumulate. It’s best to…
Intrinsic imaging tips
Posted in Tips
Intrinsic signal optical imaging is a functional imaging modality where the reflectance of red light indicates active portions of cortex. It is used for many applications, including imaging individual barrels in rodent somatosensory…
Catalogs as textbooks
Posted in Tips
Many manufacturers distribute catalogs that include extensive tutorial sections. You could really teach a pretty extensive engineering course on optics using nothing more than the front pages of the CVI Melles Griot catalog. In this post I’ll point you to some of…
Tips for 3D printing
Posted in Tips
When you want a custom plastic piece fast (and the design isn’t amenable to being made out of multiple flat laser cut pieces) then 3D printing is the way to go.
3D printing is actually a whole family of different processes: SLS,…
Tips for laser cutting
Posted in Tips
It’s not too hard to find a laser cutting firm that will do small orders and offer very rapid turn around. The precision, quick turn around, and the ability to work without proper CAD…
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