Fluorescence retrofit

This is a cute little product that lets you retrofit a standard microscope for fluorescence. It contains an LED light source, dichroic, and filters. It may be clumsy to have this big blue cannon jutting…



Reviewer comments



Some bits from others

Similar to the last post, here are some more choice bits from other people:

New vocab

Helpful Vocabulary for Journal Reviewers

The post offers some…



Tips for giving talks

This is just a quick post to point people over to Matt Might’s excellent post full of tips on how to give a good scientific talk. I second his endorsements of Keynote and…



Hopes for the New Year

Here’s the news Labrigger hopes to see in 2011.

New developments with optical indicators

A new, super bright fluorescent protein that blows the doors off of GFP-based proteins.
Bright, far-red dyes with huge 2p cross-sections.
Higher S:N genetically-encoded…



Pubmed limbo

In my experience, PubMed works beautifully the vast majority of the time. It does an excellent job parsing search terms and they’re always adding new features (e.g., you can search using full…



Open source orbital shaker

This is a nicely done (and award-winning) orbital shaker. Orbital shakers can often cost on the order of $1500. This one can be custom built for about $150, with additional units costing about $60 (a single controller and power…



Watts per photon

Fun conversion of the day: photon count to watts. This is high school physics, but it’s a good reminder of…



Shot noise-limited imaging

What is the advantage of imaging fast in population calcium imaging? Here’s a quick qualitative comparison. The prep was mouse visual…



Future Publishing

We used to just tell stories. Then we had monks copy manuscripts by hand. Later, movable type made printing easy. That brings us up to about…



Pulsed laser power

Someone asked me recently how peak power related to average power for pulsed lasers. You can get fancy with this calculation, but people rarely do. 99% of the time,…



Labrigger Xmas Gift List 2010

Here’s the 2010 Labrigger Xmas Gift List.
Care to add anything?

Beam profiler

Measure the divergence of your laser beam, its stability, uniformity– all kinds of good stuff. These are useful metrics for diagnosing problems with the laser and really nailing the…



Igor Pro and Electrophysiology

Igor Pro is a data analysis environment specialized for 1D time series data. It has some nice features: it handles data scaling beautifully, it has good…



Laser safety



Ponoko starts 3D printing

Ponoko is a laser cutting service that recently started offering 3D printing. Their 3D services is similar to what Shapeways offers. It’s nice to see a pair of…