This video is worth watching for its Hans Zimmer soundtrack (don’t know where it came from, a Batman movie or Pirates of the Carribbean, probably), which introduces a whole new level of drama to pipetting. The un-narrated video runs through some good and bad laboratory practices, and even though we all know good practice is Read More

If you were trying to quantify “Insecticide Resistance in the Tobacco-Adapted Form of the Green Peach Aphid,” you’d want to make heavy use of laboratory incubators to raise the aphids, establishing and maintaining constant environmental conditions under which to evaluate the effects of different insecticides.  If you did that, you’d be following in the footsteps Read More

For thousands of years, one core piece of advice regarding competition is to “know your enemy.” That adage applies even if your “enemy” is a weed infesting cereal grain fields.  So it was that researchers from three institutions in the Pacific Northwest investigated the biology and management of rattail fescue.  Although the weed is nothing new, Read More

In quantum physics, it is an accepted (although sometimes philosophically troubling) fact that measurement influences the state of a system and, thus, the results of an experiment.  A provocative 2000 essay from Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado makes a similar argument about biological experiments.  Specifically, Alvarado argues that biologists have selected their model organisms based upon the Read More

Although evolution is one of the most well-established theories in the history of science, there are still plenty of questions about the details.  For example, populations need a certain amount of genetic diversity to weather environmental changes and retain the ability to adapt, but that needs to be balanced with a certain degree of stability. Read More

It was about 1985 or so that I first read the claim that the 21st century would be the century of biology. With the sequencing of the human genome, the ability to manipulate genetic information, and the potential of pluripotent stem cells, it would be hard to argue. But it is also the information age; Read More

This reprint of a 1998 article on an engineered Klebsiella-planticola bacterium is a bit disturbing. Elaine Ingham, a researcher at Oregon State University, outlines the tests she made on the engineered K. planticola—an organism designed to decompose plant waste into alcohol and a fertilizer-sludge.  Ingham raised wheat plants in a laboratory incubator in three conditions: Read More

A 1963 study of duck feeding habits illustrates one application of laboratory incubators.  The researchers were trying to determine how different wild ducklings fed themselves in the first couple weeks of life.  Of course they made field observations, but for detailed study they needed to make some laboratory measurements.  By hatching the eggs in incubators Read More

The more we learn about mosquitoes, the better we’ll be able to develop effective control measures that still protect the ecological balance.  That’s one reason a team led by Rutgers University researchers examined the connection between evaporation rates and mosquito breeding in different types of containers.  It was news to me that there even were Read More