Know where the safety equipment is. Don’t eat or drink on the job. Wear the right clothes. And please don’t casually pour chemicals down the drain. Such precautions may sound elementary, but these important and fundamental lab safety practices must be mastered or quality down the line could suffer.

Life has improved dramatically for 140 diurnal lemurs and the husbandry staff and researchers who care for and study them, as a result of two new state-of-the-art facilities at the Duke Lemur Center (DLC), a refuge owned by Duke University that houses the world’s largest collection of lemurs outside of their native Madagascar.

A 2004 USA Today article said that the professional science masters (PSM) degree promised to be the hot degree no one seems to have heard ofyet. Six years later, 96 institutions now offer recognized PSM programs and approximately 2,700 students have earned this degree.

Limited training budgets pose a challenge for many lab managers. To meet their training needs we need to scrutinize both internal training programs and those offered by consultants and other external suppliers more carefully. Maintaining an effective

In tough economic times many companies slash their training budgets, thinking that training is expendable. This, according to the author, is ill-advised. Training is not an expense to be minimized; it is an investment that pays dividends by helping workers do their jobs more effectively so that they can positively impact a company's bottom line.

With a research facility’s typical mix of research laboratories, instrument rooms, chemical storage, waste handling and busy receiving/loading docks, a wide array of hazards is always present.

When managers think of optimizing laboratory performance, they might think of buying a new instrument. But that would be overlooking something they already have–human performance optimization in the form of cross training.