Slowly but surely, the tablet and smartphone revolution is taking over the global technological arena, filling our days with a high speed connection to the world wide web. This connection around-the-clock has resulted in the transferring of much of our data from our personal hard drive to the cloud. How will this revolution affect our daily work at the bench?

Why tablets?
First, why should a lab tech or researcher consider using tablets? Well, while smartphones are comfortable for small calculations and checking your Facebook status, tablets are of more comfort for lab work owing to their bigger screen (workspace) and their faster CPU without compromising commuting between the lab and the student’s room. Tablets have several added values such that they take less space on the bench in comparison even to a netbook, they have built-in connectivity via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and have a very short off-on-off time lag. With more than 40 million iPad sold since the first model out, it is one of the most favorite tablets on the market today. As time goes by, the prices of tablets are expected to go down, and with that a rise in sales. Will the tablet replace the lab notebook? With time I believe it will.

As a follow-up to our recent Documenting Specimen Storage post, here are some key specimen storage tips:

Do:

1.  Keep cross-contamination in mind when storing your specimen samples.  If you work in a lab where researchers are going to be working with acombination of bacteria, yeast, cell cultures and viruses, make sure to store each so that cross-contamination is not a possibility in incubators, freezers, and tissue culture hoods.  Use a labeling system to dedicate specific lab areas.
2.  Use an electronic management system for tracking and managing specimen to streamline collections throughout your lab.  Use a centralized web-based system, such as Labguru’s cloud management system, to create a uniform database for all researchers to upload, track, change and label samples.

If there is something that students quarrel passionately about it is over shared resources. Now, “resource” is a BIG term covering everything from tips for your pipettes to your PI’s time. Today I will talk about shared equipment and how to try and manage the lab in such a way that your machines will serve you efficiently.

The problem and its solution
So the problem is quite obvious – in almost all cases there are more users than copies of the same device which means that some sort of queuing or scheduling is required.