Working in the lab can be both creatively inspiring, allowing you the ultimate freedom to plan, execute, and test your own experimental theories, and extraordinarily restrictive.  Lab space is always an issue, especially for small labs that use large equipment, such as HPLC machines and mass spectrometers.

While thermal printing has been around for decades, there are still many myths surrounding thermal labels. With so much riding on the proper identification of your samples, it’s important to get the facts straight when choosing your labels. Below, we’ve listed some of the most common misconceptions about thermal-transfer printing and addressed why these statements are inherently false.    

Our previous Top 10 Lab Fails Contest was such a hit that we decided to bring it back, just in time for Halloween. This time around, we collected 10 of the SCARIEST lab horror stories around, from ghosts hidden in western blots to actual, real-life body parts! Without any further ado, here are your top 10 lab horror stories:

When working in a lab, you should be as clear as possible with the person you’re communicating with, whether it’s the undergraduate student you’re mentoring or the editors of the journal you wish to publish in. Unfortunately, performing experiments alone on a day-to-day basis isn’t the greatest way to improve your communication skills. Here are several ways we, as scientists, can refine them:

With cannabis now legalized in Canada, research into the beneficial effects of cannabinoids and terpenes is growing across the country. I was recently at Expo Cannabis 2019 in Montreal, Quebec, and in only its second year of existence, the organizers were able to assemble clinicians and industry opinion leaders from all over the country to discuss the benefits and challenges of using cannabis in healthcare.   

Barcodes are integral to your daily workflow, whether you’re a business, laboratory, or healthcare institution. For many businesses, they help track and trace inventory; for labs, they’re also necessary to identify samples and patient specimens. But what happens when the barcode fails to scan? Here are some reasons (and solutions) that might help you navigate through this unwanted situation.

Lab security is critical no matter what kind of lab you work in. Medical labs need to keep patient identities confidential, while pharmaceutical labs and clinical trials face potential risks of theft or tampering. Even academic labs work with sensitive samples that need to be properly secured. Here, we’ll review some of the ways you can safeguard your samples and data from being meddled with by outside parties.

BarTender is the most versatile label printing software available on the market. BarTender 2019, the software’s first full update since 2016, was released this year with changes that yield additional functionality and a more streamlined database creation process. Here, we review the top 4 new additions that will improve how you manage databases and print labels with BarTender.     

Whether you enjoy watching films, listening to music, or painting in your spare time, art plays a major part of our everyday lives. Films today are seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide—let’s be honest, who hasn’t seen Avengers: Endgame?—and are generally critiqued on their artistic merits, whether the reviewer is a trained critic or not. However, the connection between art and its influence on science (and vice versa) isn’t always as apparent. What’s certain is that art shares many similarities to the scientific method, with lessons that can help scientists as they make new discoveries and try to place them in a broader context.    

When working in a lab, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by excessive workloads. Clinical labs are regularly inundated with patient specimens, while biomedical research often requires large-scale experiments involving hundreds to thousands of samples, with multiple steps per assay. Here are some tips to help you cope with high-volume assignments as well as the stress that can come with them.