If life was easy, New Years resolutions would be much easier to keep.

From screening job candidates to benchmarking laboratory performance and energy use, today's lab managers have a cornucopia of online tools to choose from.

As unpleasant as it seems, conflict can be one of a lab manager's best ways of discovering where problems exist among his or her staff and where values, goals, roles, statuses and perceptions are causing problems that need to be dealt with.

What leads individuals to pursue a career in freelancing? What do they find most appealing about free-agent work in the scientific industry? In order to better understand the positives of contract scientific employment, Rich Pennock interviewed four former and current freelance scientists.