New research from North Carolina State University finds that young people who have had mentors are more likely to find work early in their careers that gives them more responsibility and autonomy – ultimately putting them on a path to more financially and personally rewarding careers.

As a manager, you have three options when something needs to be done in your lab:
1. You can do it yourself.
2. You can delegate it to a specific person.
3. You can involve a group of people (two or more) to accomplish the task.

If you don’t have good people working around you, chances are you won’t have good results.

This is one of the most common OSHA violations. Whenever a pulley/belt assembly is within reach, there needs to be an enclosure to prevent fingers, hair, or clothing from being caught.

Aside from safety, saving energy is the trend in fume hoods these days. Hoods are energy hogs that suck thousands of cubic feet of conditioned air per hour, 24 hours per day, out of buildings; replacement air must be heated or cooled depending on the season.

Problem: There has been an explosion in the growth of information. So much growth, that traditional informatics solutions are no longer sufficient. The labs of today, and most certainly the labs of tomorrow, need new tools to gather the data generated, make sense of it and turn it into actionable knowledge.

Problem: PCR is used to detect or quantify nucleic acid sequences in research and diagnostic settings. While high specificity is often achieved, experimental design sometimes necessitates that primers be placed in suboptimal locations. This can lead to problems like the formation of primer dimers or off-target amplification of homologous sequences. The formation of primer dimers consumes primers and other reaction components, which can result in reduced target amplification. These structures can also generate false positive signals in real-time PCR assays that use DNA intercalating dyes to monitor amplification. Off-target amplification is particularly problematic with low copy-number targets because of the high number of cycles required for amplification and in multiplex assays, where many different primers must function well together.

CO2 incubators are the heart of cell-based work in many labs. When they stop, work in the lab stops. Yet, these units are often ignored—until disaster strikes.

With an ever-increasing number of multimode microplate readers on the market, it is more important than ever to choose the right solution for your laboratory and workflow.

Geoffrey Bartholomeusz, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics and director of the siRNA Core Facility at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, talks to contributing editor Tanuja Koppal, PhD, about why there is a growing interest in replacing some 2D cell culture applications with 3D cell cultures. He talks about where and why he uses 3D-based cell cultures in his lab and what lab managers should take into consideration before making the investment in this innovative technology.

Any researcher in the United States who is dependent on government funding knows first-hand the devastation that the sequestration wrought. Some have found ways, temporarily, to do more with less money, while others have had to pack up their research tents for good.

New Vanderbilt University research finds that unsolicited job leads can increase symptoms of depression in some people.