Feb012013February 1, 2013January 25, 20130Commentby L.

Methods of Mayhem

Posted in Uncategorized

I’ve seen this line in a methods section before:
“Experiments were carried out at room temperature (19-29 degrees C).”

Which means: “Our lab is in a building with no A/C and poor heating.”

For more,…

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Jan302013January 30, 2013January 30, 20130Commentby L.

More references

Posted in Tips

Wolfgang Becker just gave a nice talk at the Berkeley Advanced Imaging Methods meeting.

I should add the Becker-Hinkl literature to the list of online references.

Previously
Catalogs as textbooks
Troubleshooting fluorescence microscopy

…

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Jan282013January 28, 2013January 28, 20132Commentsby L.

PubPeer Anonymous

Posted in Uncategorized

You can now post comments on PubPeer completely anonymously. Not even a login is required.

PubPeer has always allowed anonymous comments, but it used to be that you had to log in, so the…

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Jan252013January 25, 2013January 24, 20139Commentsby L.

Markram’s Millions

Posted in Uncategorized

Henry Markram got his wish. He was just awarded 500,000,000 Euros to build a computer model of the brain. In NIH terms, that’s over…

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Jan242013January 24, 2013January 24, 20137Commentsby L.

Electrophysiology software

Posted in Software

Unenthusiastic about spending thousands of dollars on electrophysiology software like pCLAMP? Try the free and open source Strathclyde Electrophysiology Software. It’s a suite of programs for recording and analyzing signals from intracellular electrophysiology…

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Jan222013January 22, 2013January 20, 20134Commentsby L.

Get the computation done

Posted in Software

Programming that happens in labs is typically rushed and sloppy. The goal is to get the job done right, and, almost…

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Jan212013January 21, 2013January 20, 20131Commentby L.

Make MATLAB text you

Posted in Software

Patrick Mineault covered this back in November in his always interesting xcorr…

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Jan182013January 18, 2013January 16, 20131Commentby L.

Online course materials

Posted in Tips

There are a lot of online, open course materials, e.g. MIT’s OpenCourseWare…

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Jan172013January 17, 2013January 16, 20131Commentby L.

Photoswitchable GECI

Posted in Tips

Many red fluorescent proteins go through a green fluorescent stage prior to becoming fully folded into their mature red fluorescent state. In fact, some proteins can be photoswitched in and/or out of their mature…

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Jan162013January 16, 2013January 16, 20131Commentby L.

EMCCD Specs

Posted in Hardware

Editorial preface: Labrigger takes submissions from anyone. We post them if they’re potentially useful. In this case, we received some material from a commercial source. Labrigger is not endorsing their products. But we recognize…

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Dec022012December 2, 2012December 2, 20125Commentsby L.

PubPeer is taking off

Posted in Tips

PubPeer, a site for anonymous (or non-anonymous), post-publication peer review is taking off nicely. Traffic is increasing to the site and there are a lot of interesting comments, including both detailed commentary…

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Nov222012November 22, 2012November 21, 20120Commentby L.

Cellophane as a half-wave plate

Posted in Uncategorized

The last post on cheap optics reminded me of this 2003 paper where they showed that kitchen grade cellophane acts as a half-wave plate.

It was experimentally verified that an ordinary 25-????m-thick cellophane sheet possesses…

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Nov212012November 21, 2012November 21, 20122Commentsby L.

50% off at Edmund Optics

Posted in Hardware

If you’re like most people, you can get the vast majority of your holiday shopping done at Edmund Optics. They’re having a Cyber Monday sale this Monday, November 26th. Use code Cyber12 at checkout.

Here’s…

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Nov142012November 14, 2012November 14, 20120Commentby L.

Death of the impact factor

Posted in Tips

There will probably always be a need for metrics like impact factor so that non-experts can estimate the significance of a scientist’s publications. These metrics are problematic, as we all know.

Interestingly, the relationship between…

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Nov092012November 9, 2012November 9, 20122Commentsby L.

Online Scientific Python: Wakari

Posted in Software

If you like Python, want to analyze data online, and are interested in a standardized environment that can be easily shared, read on:

Continuum Analytics is offering a new beta: Wakari. You can…

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