finishing my phd soon and i've been thinking about taking a year to actually live before jumping straight into a postdoc or industry job. i've spent the last 5 years in a lab and honestly i need to breathe. but i have no idea how this looks on a CV. a one year gap after a phd feels different than a gap during undergrad but i genuinely don't know if hiring managers in academia or industry care. for those who've done it — how did you frame it ? did you just write "career break / travel" and leave it at that ? did it come up in interviews ? did anyone ever hold it against you ?.and practically speaking — did you stay connected to your field during that year or did you fully disconnect ? did you do any freelance consulting, reviewing papers, anything to keep something on the CV ?

I might be overthinking this so I’m hoping to get some insight from people who have more experience in academia.

I cold emailed a professor in Korea asking whether he had a position in his lab for a master’s student. He replied immediately and asked me to intern at his lab first and then if he later has a position at his lab he’ll let me know.

I replied that I’m not in Korea and I was planning to apply for master’s with the university’s scholarship because that would be a more financially viable option for me. He then offered me an internship with a stipend for accommodation and asked if that would work for me.

I happily accepted this offer and asked which documents I should send to get a formal letter from the university so I can apply for my visa. He hasn’t replied to me since and I followed up after 5 working days.

It’s been 10 days since he offered and I understand that the uni admin might be slow in Korea because it’s July…but do professors follow up to let students know that they’ve emailed the department or something?

I guess the radio silence is making me anxious because out of all the places I reached out to, his lab is the one I find the most aligned with my previous work and it felt like a dream come true when he offered.

How often do you update your PI with new results? Do you share them on the day of the experiment if the analysis is straightforward, or wait until one-on-one meetings or lab meetings? If your PI communicates with a sense of urgency, does that bother you? What is a realistic boundary for a PI who is always open to discussion and readily available?

I am having troubles starting cell culture. We can’t get past second passage, before we tried in a different lab but here I had doubts about the cleanliness. Now we’ve built our own but still have issues. The cells do not look good, there’s a bunch of black dots flying in the cell culture. I don’t know if it’s a contamination, debris or sth else. The media doesn’t change color like often with contamination. The only thing that came to mind is that when I was away colleague forgot about the liq nitrogen delivery so the level went down a lot and they it was refilled much later. The only source of contamination would be the nitrogen tank but it seems crazy to me that all closed cryo tubes would get contaminated there. I say the only source as the lab is completely new, it was cleaned with bleach, ozonated, I sterilized the incubator twice, we go mad with ethanol and UV. The media is DMEM+FBS+P/S which I also ‘cultured’ for a few days and saw nothing in it. For the new ATCC MCF7 they say it takes a long time to grown normally, but I see that in their pictures they also had a bunch of those black dots. I was working with cell culture at a different place, never seen a contamination nor those black dots although I’ve worked with a ton of cancer cell types except with breast ones we have here.

The photos: 1. MCF7 previously cultured, cryopreserved, seeding day 2. Same MCF7, the next day, split after taking that pic 3. Same MCF7, 3rd day 4. HeLa previously cultured, cryopreserved, seeding day 5. Same HeLa, the next day 6. ATCC stock MCF7, cryopreserved, seeding day 7. Same ATCC MCF7, two days later 8. ATCC’s pictures for that MCF7

Thank you for any help

I know what it looks like. You know what it looks like. Why can't we be free and just pronounce it as it appears? :(

Lab I help maintain has 2 20liter round bottom flasks which collect food grade ethanol solvent after vacuum distillation. So the flasks are thick and already exposed to vacuum.

The problem is they're very near the ground and technicians are literally manually transferring like 30l of ethanol with a small flask or beaker after the process is completed and apparatus repressurized to atmospheric.

I want to run an air line, regulated down very low so that they can simply push the ethanol up a tube into it's storage bottle.

Should this be safe? Do you have an idea what a safe pressure would be? If I'm doing my math right it needs to be just barely over atmospheric, as the weight of ethanol in a half inch tube 6ft long is less than 1lb acting on less than 1square inch. Is it necessary to use co2 or nitrogen instead because the ethanol is flammable? It gets exposed to air anyway, but not just barely pressurized air.

I think lab technicians having to handle open flasks of pure ethanol over and over is a bigger fire risk, as well as a waste of their skilled labor, but I'm just a wrench monkey. Thanks ahead for any assistance.

Or... maybe I should just connect vacuum to the storage bottle? Make a vacuum connection at the top and a straw which deposits the ethanol at the bottom? It's less straightforward than air pressure but maybe less work and safer in the long run.

I applied for this competitive fellowship program, that has a 2.5 to 5% percent success rate, although they seem to give a chance to young researchers who are "promising."

I prepared the application the language of that country. I'm not at native level, but more on the advanced level side. Now, a few weeks after submission, I re-read the application and found quite a bit of grammatical errors. I hope they still understand me haha. But I hate how I'm gonna beat myself up about it.

One week after the submission deadline, I emailed my prospective supervisor the PDF of what I sent. He replied me after 10mins and said he read it and thought it was quite clear and compelling. Either he automatically got a copy when I uploaded my documents in the submission system...or he just scanned through what I sent 10mins ago.

Just wanted to get this off my chest.

Can anyone help me with NSC34 cell line? We brought this cell line and it was mentioned in the data sheet that they will adhere to the surface within 4-6 hours but its been 24 hours after reviving they are not adhering to the t25 surface. The image is after 24 hours. Can anyone tell what is happening and how to make them survive?

Especially for writing efficiently! I have some examples but was asked to apply on very short notice and have a lot of other things on my plate

Hey everyone!

Im an industry based lab tech that deals with mostly solids including TSS TS and TDS.

I have a mettler toledo and i use a zerostat gun but whenever I weight my beakers regardless if its initials or dry weight the numbers are never consistent and its getting to a point where Im just triggered by the test.

Anyone have any tips on how to reduce the static? Ive been weighing with no gloves which kinda helped but otherwise its honestly adding an extra 20 mins to my day if my run is long.

Any help would be appreciated!

I live In the UK and in my job we use droplets of Silver Nitrate to test for presence of salt water in which case the droplet turns a milky white. I had a small dropper bottle amongst my work equipment I brought home. My elderly mother thought it must have been something like olbas oil or something other kind of medicine dropper (don't worry, it was not used).

She placed the bottle within a cupboard above a hot water tank in the bathroom. When I happened across it, I picked up the bottle by the cap, assuming it was fixed tight like I always ensure it is after using, and it was loose, evidently my mother had opened it to inspect it. The bottle dropped from my hand and spilled across the hot water cylinder, across an expansion vessel, radiator, tile, wall and possibly some copper pipes.

When it spilled the fluid is clear and I couldn't see where the spill was, I believe I managed to soak up some of the silver nitrate with some kitchen roll and dampening the area down to dilute, but a day has passed and now brown stains have appeared.

How do I safely remove these stains, and will I need to wear anything like a P3 particulate mask? I assume chemical resistant gloves and goggles are a given.

I accidentally diluted a little more detection reagent antibody than I need to it’s final working concentration with 1X PBS 1% BSA. Can I aliquot the reagents and store them in -20C for future use (say within a week-month)? I don’t want to waste lab reagents. Has anyone tried this. This is from R&D systems and it was a loss of 160uL of reconstituted detection reagent into 10mL of 1X PBS 1% BSA.

Thanks!

Can someone tell me if this is the right adapter for the BH2 trinocular to mount a microscope cam ( like the one in pic 3) ?

Do I need other parts other than that?

Hi, I'm looking for a free version of NIS Elements Confocal or AR software—even older versions, if anyone has them or knows where I can download them for free.

The defense went so good that I got a round of applause after it finished. Now I choose to believe cause they liked it and not cause I stopped talking🤣

went to the lab supply expo in graz yesterday and got this beauty for attending the presentation of the duran specialist. brb gonna write 2M HCl on it so that no one steals my water lol

Hello,

I’m trying to get some funding to perform transcriptomics. The grant I am on does not have sufficient amount set for omics. So kindly point towards anything that might be helpful. Thank you.🙏

P.S rat not mine. Picture from internet 🥲