Super cool, and I bet housekeeping loved tidying up after turning a motel room into a street biology lab. Honestly, I think I’d prefer to stay in a room previously used to cook meth.
I came here looking for this :) like someone has to be making this joke right. Or another direction of making the connection that there must be some life growing from the filth in a motel room
Right- that's really just a version of a worm pick. I use similar tools (including a mouth pipette... remember kids, in chemistry: don't pipette by mouth, in biology: oops I think I just inhaled something!) working with tardigrade. If it was steampunk there would be some sort of goggles, leather, gears, and a tincture of laudunum.
Why did they work in a motel room? The article kinda implies it had something to do with Trump’s funding cuts, but unless I missed something the connection wasn’t made explicit.
(Monthly/extended stay rates here…) Given housing ought to be 25-30% max of a healthy budget (including taxes), and assuming a monthly rate motel room ought to be some of the cheapest housing around (a big assumption), then 2 to 2 1/2 hours of minimum wage ought to cover costs of a night at a motel (extended stay rate- figure up to 2x this for nightly rate). If it doesn’t, maybe the motel is not viable as is, or is poorly run.
Per diems in the civil engineering union agreement in my Canadian province are 180$ a day to cover lodging and food when you're working away from home. Most people manage to spend less and save the leftover. That's tax free money unrelated to what you're actually getting paid for the work or transport time.
80$ might seem like a lot of money if you're making 60k a year as a biologist. If you're in a field where profit is the reason you work 80$ is peanuts.
+1 on this question, without any snark intended. What's a good, not too expensive beginner's microscope that's capable of this kind of citizen research (and other fun stuff)?
As magnification increases, your main spend requirement is glass. Light is now cheap in the form of LEDs, as are condensers/collimators (which are not strictly required). IMHO at most magnifications you will get better relative image quality enhancement from adjustable through-light and correct focus than from a prospective upgrade to collimated light. Cheapest way in is a mono 'zoom tube' system which incorporates configurable magnification and ties directly to an industrial CCD camera. This is 'digital native' and obviates the need to pay for additional elements including a rigid stand, a stage, a revolving nose piece, and multiple high grade objectives. If you buy online, you can get a lot of value for cheap. However, you then need to fudge a stage, a light source, and a condenser, none of which are hard. These systems are super fun because you can route HDMI or USB to a big screen and share exploration with others. If you find microscopic critters, you can even record videos of them doing their thing. If you want more detail resolution, you can patiently twiddle or automate the focal adjustment then do focus stacked images. However, to get really good results you need to start getting in to things like chemical staining, frozen sample preparation before microtome sample slicing, oil-immersed objectives, and high quality glass, at which point you are really better off with a traditional microscope. Once you have the platform it's the glass that costs money.
The samples were transported to the lab and observed at 100 to 400X magnification using an inverted microscope (IX51, Olympus, Tokyo, Japan).
A source for inexpensive high-quality equipment of questionable working order is whatever auction site your local hospital system uses to dispose of excess equipment.
I'm in the process of building one myself. Take what I'm saying with a massive grain of salt, but I believe you basically need three things - objective, tube lens and a camera module.
If I were you, I would probably buy a normal microscope that supports a microscope camera attachment, instead of specifically looking for USB microscope. There is a lot of misleading marketing around USB microscopes, a lot of them are literally just doing digital zooming in (I have a 30€ "1000x" microscope from Amazon which is nice for soldering and such things, but these fake microscopes appear even at higher price ranges). Treat anything >1000x for light-based microscopes as a red flag.
My household ended up with a couple of ancient binocular dissecting scopes that a university was throwing out. The magnification isn't amazing, but they're fantastic for just grabbing random shit and looking at it, or yes -- things like soldering.
Ours aren't properly set up for photography, but I did manage to finagle this great shot of a bug curled up inside a hole in the side of a lentil: https://gallery.brainonfire.net/v2/image/18906
The objective lenses are just 1.7x and 3.4x so you can see some cells but not really any details in them. But free is a really good price for that.
"The team — brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration’s freezes to federal science funding — then made an exciting discovery."
Apparently this is the new way of life for Scientists under the Trump regime.
> "He noticed that the scales were overlapping one another in different directions — in one, they overlapped on top of each other in a clockwise pattern, and the other was in reverse.
The fresh eyes of a person who hadn’t been staring at Paulinella for hours identified a curious, distinctive trait. Were they looking at two different species?"
I found it reassuring that sketching what you see down the microscope is still part of a scientific practice. Also the 'fresh eyes' could perhaps point the way to a more collegiate organisation of research.
Hur filtreras och analyseras datan?
När programmet körs hämtar det data från de riktiga källorna (om det finns internet och URLs), men om källan saknas (eller vid nätverksfel) kör den en intern fallback-funktion (asymmetric_live_filter).
Programmet letar efter vissa nyckelord i datan (triggers):
key, exploit, zero-day, leak, alpha, arbitrage, quantum, liquid, anomaly, magnitude, usd, code, repo
Om dessa ord hittas (eller om fallbacken används)
>"The first species of Paulinella was discovered on Dec. 24, 1894, in the sediments of a backwater of the Rhine River by the German biologist Robert Lauterborn. He named the genus after his stepmother, Pauline."
How can they say this without providing more background?
principle of sparcity. for mutations, we assume it only happened once considering how highly unlikely it is to happen. it is what helps us determine how species are related. if notable differences are detected, like in that case or for example in the case of wings (bird wings vs bat wings), we do an exception.
Reading this article with a bittersweet feeling. This is exactly the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life while in Biology class at uni 15 years ago. But I dropped out and ended up in a completely different field (Design). But I still have that fondness of Biology in me all these years later.
> Dr. Van Etten didn’t expect much from the water she had scooped from a random dock next to the highway
There are stories of companies asking their employees to bring back soil and water samples from wherever the employees go on vacation.
The idea is that this is a somewhat random sampling of locations that the company wouldn't have thought of on their own. Plus, it's possible that one of the samples has some novel chemical or biological compound that could lead to a breakthrough discovery.
That's a neat form of accidental crowdsourcing. Instead of trying to predict where something interesting might be, you let people's travel plans generate the sampling distribution for you.
100 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadTLDR version: organelles called chloroplasts apparently evolved twice. Scientists investigating this reduced to working in cheap rented room.
Even in the budget industry, your nightly utility usage comes close to $10, consumables are $3+.
Hotel stays are typically taxed higher than typical sales tax.
Once you add that in, real estate taxes, and any corporate taxes - you're getting close to the $50 price point...
That's before you factor in the cost of maintaining the building, or the financing to buy the building itself (or any profit).
80$ might seem like a lot of money if you're making 60k a year as a biologist. If you're in a field where profit is the reason you work 80$ is peanuts.
She actually made some specific recommendations on the microscopy sub-reddit but they're a bit pricier ($600). (scroll to last comment by Jay211TF):
https://www.reddit.com/r/microscopy/comments/1dhagyr/entry_l...
The samples were transported to the lab and observed at 100 to 400X magnification using an inverted microscope (IX51, Olympus, Tokyo, Japan).
A source for inexpensive high-quality equipment of questionable working order is whatever auction site your local hospital system uses to dispose of excess equipment.
a few hundred bucks
able to look at microbes
also able to look at less micro level stuff, like maybe the thing i'm trying to solder or fix
is it wrong to solicit comments/recommendations here?
If I were you, I would probably buy a normal microscope that supports a microscope camera attachment, instead of specifically looking for USB microscope. There is a lot of misleading marketing around USB microscopes, a lot of them are literally just doing digital zooming in (I have a 30€ "1000x" microscope from Amazon which is nice for soldering and such things, but these fake microscopes appear even at higher price ranges). Treat anything >1000x for light-based microscopes as a red flag.
- https://openflexure.org/
- https://www.eurekamicroscope.com/
Ours aren't properly set up for photography, but I did manage to finagle this great shot of a bug curled up inside a hole in the side of a lentil: https://gallery.brainonfire.net/v2/image/18906
The objective lenses are just 1.7x and 3.4x so you can see some cells but not really any details in them. But free is a really good price for that.
"The team — brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration’s freezes to federal science funding — then made an exciting discovery."
Apparently this is the new way of life for Scientists under the Trump regime.
Sad.
I found it reassuring that sketching what you see down the microscope is still part of a scientific practice. Also the 'fresh eyes' could perhaps point the way to a more collegiate organisation of research.
How can they say this without providing more background?
This seems unsupported. More likely is it's happened a large number of times, but has only established a lineage a handful of times.
wtf is happening to internet these days...
https://www.vanettenlab.org/paulinella-consortium
There are stories of companies asking their employees to bring back soil and water samples from wherever the employees go on vacation.
The idea is that this is a somewhat random sampling of locations that the company wouldn't have thought of on their own. Plus, it's possible that one of the samples has some novel chemical or biological compound that could lead to a breakthrough discovery.