At work we have a scale sensitive to the 1/10,000 of a gram. 4 decimal digits. It’s so sensitive it needs to be encased in a box so tiny connection currents don’t make it go frantic! Even in the box the number changes a lot. 15 0s is nutty.
Mine can tell if I’m sitting next to it’s desk or not. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s the deformation of the ground the desk is sitting on.
It’s really a silly amount of precision for what I use it for. But It’s so fun to lock g on .0000, even if only for a few seconds. Anyone who has a target of a specific amount of 0s can do it themselves. After the first 2 shits pretty random.
This meme didn’t show the revolving lab door, the giant corporate foot over the biochems head and the minimum wage employee who makes more money than them.
I don’t know, there are lots of PhD programs in the U.S. where you’re a research assistant, which basically means your tuition is free and you’re paid a stipend for the research. In my experience, I’ve only met US PhD students who were fully funded.
I think people think that having to TA means they’re not being funded or something like that. If you’re getting into a program that doesn’t fully fund you, then that program doesn’t want you or it’s not a good research program. All reputable PhD programs fully fund across disciplines.
Yeah, I got paid to do gradschool. Not much cuz I didn’t shop around and just stayed where I did undergrad, but yeah, once you’re doing research, they should be paying you.
Then you find out that the lack of an ingredient results in the microbes producing the product lol.
Certain algae for example, need to be “starved” in a way that results in them switching from conventional photosynthesis that produces glucose to photosynthesis that functions to generate Hydrogen and Oxygen alone. The Oxygen is used for respiration and the Hydrogen is essentially dumped as a waste product. They can only sustain this for relatively short periods before their stockpile of carbohydrates is sufficiently depleted. Which means these bioreactors need to be cycled through a fattening phase where the algae stockpile fuel and a starvation phase where they exhaust that stockpile while producing Hydrogen.
Ive been trying to keep tabs on the literature in biochemistry, chemistry and other fields for decades. I inevitably come accross things like this from time to time. These particular articles I just googled because I dont have the bookmark for the original paper discussing Hydrogen production back in 2000.
People in the comments are complaining about how some of the words in this post are misspelled… buddy I have bad news for you about the website where it came from
You get that level of precision in a standard “double” floating point number. So that’s basically the normal level of precision you get without trying.
So, is it literally just repeatedly creating the necessary conditions and hoping the stuff will react the right way? Or is it a strict process that needs to be done just so or it’ll ruin the whole thing? Or both?
Yeah, kind of a little bit of both. Assuming that this is about bacterial transformation, it kind of goes like this in the lab. It’s from 2012 so there are probably easier techniques with fewer steps.
Biochem is incredibly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in conditions or procedure. A former coworker of mine had to change careers after the procedure she had to follow to run the assays for her master’s thesis gave her severe RSI. She couldn’t alter the procedure for ergonomics, though, because even something like changing the angle that she held the pipettor at could throw off the results.
In biopharma work, it’s not at all uncommon when trying to manufacture a biologic to find a process that works reliably in the lab but doesn’t give the same results when scaled up to production-size bioreactors, such that there’s often a whole stage of R&D devoted to taking a procedure from the lab and reproducing it on successively larger pieces of equipment, while working out all the tweaks and adjustments needed to make things work and optimize production.
Alas, my knowledge on the topic is limited – I work as a lab planner, and what I wrote above is most of what I’ve gleaned over the years of designing process development and scale-up labs. Past a point I just ooh and aah appreciatively at the big robotized bioreactor arrays my clients are putting in. Hopefully someone with a deeper background can point you in the right direction!
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