Mara Duncan
@mcduncanlab
Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. I post photos of my cat and garden, and helpful tips for running a lab. Thoughts my own.
After a (oof two month break) I'm back to my write for at least 30 min a day routine. It's so satisfying to check off each day, and I'm really making progress on several projects.
Science peeps, I have a confession to make. I routinely do not balance pcr tubes in the picofuge. How many Hail Mary’s will absolve me of this sin?
But in that alternate universe, would the NP control ever have happened?
The hide and seek portion of the gardening season has officially begun, found some cherry tomatoes hiding on the shady side, and some cayenne on a sickly overwintered pepper.
We saw the craziest things when we imaged Saccharomyces acutely starved of glucose. All of the cells had these finger-like extensions that seemed to be coming from the PM. Markus Babst thinks they are extended eisosomes. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
Probably the digital copy of the third book from the left on this cookbook shelf.
Yeah! NOA day!! But really ERA commons? When the pending grant gets funded you list it as withdrawn on the summary screen. I almost cried when I saw that.
I guess they follow BSKY now, therefore I did just boost your score. Ok I really need to book some travel for my mom and sis that I'm procrastinating on booking.
You know this exists right? Our university profile page lists the social media score of our papers next to the citations
🧪Does anyone else have problems reading MBoC papers online? The frame takes up my 1/2 of the browser screen! Is there any solution beyond downloading the pdf? I have this problem in edge, chrome, and duckduck browsers. @ascbiology.bsky.social
🧪Has anyone ever replaced the upper bearings on an orbital shaker? The upper bearing is bolted to a lower bearing. I need to remove the upper one, but the lower one rotates. Do I just hold the lower one with a wrench and unbolt the upper or is there something I'm missing?
Done. Very much hoping that I can withdraw this one because the previous version gets funded.
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Congratulations!! I think you've been scooped by a twenty year old paper. www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Extension of important results is really the strength of our current system. Remember when +/- data were acceptable? Would have been quite easy to write a - instead? I worry people are making a big deal about the dangers of AI to science when things like insufficient funding are more pressing,
Similarly, you can use 1/2 as many plates for tetrad genotyping by printing two plates onto the same velvet. Just dissect towards the bottom or top of the plate and then once it grows, cut off everything but the tetrads.
You can save agar and plastic by plating transformations on quadrants of plates.
So please, I beg you, if you are teaching anyone in science how to do presentations, show them this comparison so I don't have to sit through another talk with that boring overview slide.
They've just bored the heck out of their audience, and wasted valuable time that they could have used to really give an overview of the talk. Like this one, that actually has all of the bullets of the prior one but gives a sneak peek about the whole talk.
Why do so many new graduate students use this exact slide in their presentations? Where do they find it? Someone must be giving it to them because without fail I see a few of them every year, this exact slide with these exact words.
For my March calendar, I picked a dark blue background and some birds pictures I bought on Etsy.
Write every day, February mission accomplished! Managed to write* at least 30 minutes every workday. Mostly on a pair of manuscripts, one in revision, one to go out this month. *write in my definition includes making figures
Another round of damn, I'm feeling feverish, am I getting sick? Nope, my office is trying to kill me.