We’ve all been there…the experiment didn’t work for the 87^th time, and the feeling of dread and impostor syndrome surrounds the mind as the seminar or thesis committee meeting looms. It’s easy to dwell on everything that isn’t working right at that moment, but there are scientific discoveries to be made, and someone has to do it, and it might as well be you! That’s easier said than done, but with the proper support mechanisms and some confidence boosts, your goals will be achievable.

Like many of you out there, I used to pass the incubation periods for my experiments by scouring YouTube for videos, both of the educational and entertaining variety. While the bulk of this was admittedly cat and animal videos and human misfortunes (that normally did not result in debilitating injuries or death, mind you), I did prefer the channels that were a combination of educational and entertaining, which is a philosophy I adopted as a teacher and mentor. So today, I'd like to share some of my favorite channels that might help you de-stress from a hard day at work, and also probably teach you something! You can click the headers to go to their main channel as well as check out the example videos.

One of the first things my K-12 science teachers taught me was to write a formal laboratory report. While comparatively crude, the basic structure of the middle/high school lab report is similar to what you might see in an article you read in Cell or Science. I've helped write numerous grant applications and journal articles as well as my own dissertation, and I even helped teach a course at the University of Chicago that emphasized grant writing, so I've been intimately familiar with how the process goes. Additionally, as various lecturers have told me, a good scientist is also a good storyteller, so it made sense that their message stayed with me all these years because they told very good stories about their work that were embedded into my memories (and my memory is honestly not that good). I thought I'd take this time to help you all develop your writing structure and consider how best to deliver your message, whether it is in your own grant application, a new journal article submission to present your findings to the world, or a speaking engagement that, well, keeps the audience of your very well-informed peers engaged!

As we try to come back to some level of normalcy after a couple of long, stressful years of pandemic, science has been continuing to chug along to improve the human condition. In celebration of this, we had silly achievements that made us laugh, then think, in the form of the Ig Nobel prizes, and this week, the cream of the crop was recognized with the three science Nobel Prizes. We wanted to highlight the Physiology and Medicine prize separately since ABclonal is a bioscience reagents company, but as we said before, every field of science is important to the pursuit of not just biological advancement, but the betterment of all humanity. So while you can also read about the achievements of the Medicine winner, Dr. Svante Pääbo, in the previous entry, here are the science prize winners in all the glory we can give them in this blog space!