Scientific research equipment is expensive. Partly because the markets are often small, so product development budgets and manufacturing set up costs have to be split over a comparatively small number of units. In addition, the customers are typically more concerned about reliability and service, rather than price.
However, there are other markets where these issues are…
Lasers for 2-photon microscopy are special in that they deliver all of their photons in a short period of time. Take a standard Ti:Sapph with an 80 MHz pulse rate and 100 fs pulses….
My Ph.D. program had a more traditional, comprehensive written qualifying exam following the coursework. However, many of my contemporaries in different programs had the new…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Fun conversion of the day: photon count to watts. This is high school physics, but it’s a good reminder of…
What is the advantage of imaging fast in population calcium imaging? Here’s a quick qualitative comparison. The prep was mouse visual…
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…
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,…
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…
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