Incu-Stream: Inverted Bright-Field Microscopy and Automated Mechanical Scanning for just $184

Incu-Stream is an open-hardware microscopy setup designed for bright-field cell imaging of incubated microplates. The design is all laid out in a paper written by Güray Gürkan and Koray Gürkan, with nothing hidden in a supplementary packet this time. The system is specifically aimed at creating a microplate compatible inverted bright-field microscope system that can […]

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Ytterbium laser for $13,000.

One of the largest obstacles to two-photon DIY microscopy is the acquisition of a pulsed laser system, which generally hits the $100,000 range. Evan Perillo, Justin McCracken, Daniel Fernée, John Goldak, Flor Medina, David Miller, Hsin-Chih Yeh, and Andrew Dunn have a 2016 paper detailing the construction and characterization of a Ytterbium laser at  1060 […]

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An AIP Tool to help you negotiate salary.

Not sure where to start salary negotiations for a US institution? The American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center has created a Salary Calculator tool to calculate the mean salary, and it’s standard deviation, given a set of factors such as location, experience, and gender. The tool is based on a survey of 1700 faculty members […]

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Computers on The Cheap

It’s a Technical Tuesday! Today we are going down the rapids of computer purchasing. This is a primer on purchasing computers on the cheap. We start with prebuilt computers (1), then cover acquiring peripherals (2,3), and finally talk about building your own computers (4,5). This is a living document about a volatile topic, so write […]

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