Chairs provide great support during long meetings, but they may also be holding us back.

U. Illinois/Penn study sheds light on activity levels based on one’s attitude disposition

When it comes to managing boundaries between work and home life, technology is neither all good nor all bad, according to ongoing research from the University of Cincinnati.

Being in a group makes some people lose touch with their personal moral beliefs, researchers find.

How candor determines performance and results.

Last year we reported a distressing decline in nearly every area of laboratory safety practices among the nearly 600 respondents who participated in the survey.

Running out of time or money is something most of us strive to avoid. In business, as in life, the goal is to save as much of both as you can. This month we look at a few ways to achieve that goal in your lab. Let’s start with time.

In order to increase efficiency, many companies today are under pressure to improve their time management practices.

Ike Harper, director for laboratory innovation at Johnson & Johnson, talks to contributing editor Tanuja Koppal, PhD, about the advantages of consolidating lab services with one provider. He explains in great
detail the steps taken at J&J to ensure that the right process and vendor were put in place in order to give the program the time and opportunity it needed to succeed. He emphasizes the need for external validation as well as internal communication and collaboration to get the necessary buy-in and support from the key people involved.

Prohibiting the storage of food in chemical refrigerators is another one of the basic rules of good practice.

Problem: Molecular biology relies on the ability to precisely target and amplify nucleic acids, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and cloning reactions benefit from precise size selection and analytical characterization of samples. For decades, researchers have used electrophoresis with agarose gels for both size selection and fragment-length distribution assessment of DNA samples for downstream assays.

Problem: Researchers and scientists generate and collect vast amounts of data in their work, whether they are running experiments in the lab or surveying and interviewing people on the street. Researchers typically don’t deal with their research outputs until towards the end of the research cycle, when poor organization and data management can be difficult to manage and address, but causes the most problems. Poor data management results in experiments that are harder to replicate and findings that may be called into question. Papers can be retracted, careers impacted and ultimately science can suffer. When researchers move on they may pass their work to others in their research group, where poor data management results in the group inheriting indecipherable written notes they cannot use.