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The mighty centrifuge, with its lid ajar inviting samples to enter (at their own risk)…? The mysterious incubator that hasn’t hit the temperature right since your lab tech left…? If you’ve ever wondered which piece of lab equipment you are, take this quiz to find out! 

QUESTIONS

1. How would you describe your communication style?

• A. My way or the highway
• B. Everything should be laid out clearly; I’d rather talk than let issues simmer
• C. Avoidant 
• D. Not sure 
• E. I just want everyone to be happy, so I don’t always say what I need

2. What’s your ideal Saturday afternoon?

• A. Crushing my to-do list, even if it includes changing cell culture media 
• B. 10 mile hike, brunch with a friend, errands, then flow-state at a cafe 
• C. Wake up whenever and vibe
• D. Going to lab “for just a couple hours”
• E. Baking for my friends 

3. Which gift would you be thrilled to receive?

• A. Something from my carefully curated wish list
• B. A really nice planner
• C. Honestly, anything is amazing 
• D. An avocado, the bigger the better 
• E. Multiple tickets to a show so I can invite some others

4. Best lab duty chore?

• A. They’re all fine, but only if done properly 
• B. Restocking the pipette tips in perfect rows
• C. None of them, thanks
• D. Cleaning everything until it squeaks
• E. Helping someone else with their experiments

5. What’s your biggest fear? 

• A. Someone else digging through my stuff
• B. Missing an appointment I booked weeks in advance
• C. My favorite game going missing 
• D. Forgetting everything 
• E. Losing my loved ones
  

RESULTS

Mostly A’s: Centrifuge

Picky and precise, you like things done your way. You’re the mediator who keeps friend groups in balance, but if one person is acting “off,” you spin in circles about it for days. When life feels slightly unbalanced, you go straight to 14,000 rpm instead of having a calm conversation. That’s why keeping your “lid” open when communicating is important.

Mostly B’s: Confocal Microscope

You are the high-maintenance friend, but in the best possible way. You live by your calendar that gets booked up weeks in advance, and require very specific conditions to function: whether that be low light with at least three alignment steps, or your favorite coffee every morning. You struggle with “big picture: stuff” because you’re busy zooming in on every tiny issue at 60X. 

Mostly C’s: 10 uL pipette

Often overlooked, rarely invited, and chronically underestimated. You “go with the flow” a little too much– like starting to get ready for a concert approximately when doors open. People might get frustrated with you, but when something delicate really matters, you’re the only one detail-oriented enough to handle it.

Mostly D’s: Weighing Scale

You’re not always wrong; you just feel wrong and doubt yourself too much. You overthink every decision, re-weigh every plan, and still suspect that you’re off by 0.01. People trust your judgement more than you think, so it’s okay to finally stop taring and commit.

Mostly E’s: Water Bath

You’re the mom friend: warm, comforting, and always making sure everyone else is okay. You bring snacks, tickets, baked goods, and emotional support. But if your own needs aren’t met, you can go from a “gentle 37 C” to overheating surprisingly fast. Despite being easily overstimulated, you still insist on taking care of everyone.

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After years of high attrition rates in its prestigious Molecular Biology program, Fartlek University has begun a collaboration with Netflix and Mr. Beast to overhaul the way they select incoming graduate students, called Plasmid Games.

“Everyone we admit seems fine on paper,” said Graduate School Dean Dr. Frontman, “but when you put someone in an actual research lab, sometimes the story changes. So now we’ll be selecting new PhD candidates from an actual laboratory-based competition process.”

According to the Dean, 456 initial applicants will be brought to the Fartlek campus for a week of competitive interview exercises or “games.”

“Our first game is called ‘Fire!’” explained Dean Frontman. “Basically we get all of them started on making a buffer or a salt solution and at some point yell ‘Stop, red light, there’s a fire, exit the building!’  Anyone who actually does exit the building is then locked out and the interview continues with those who stayed – because, you know, they behaved like proper grad students and stayed in the lab in a crisis.”

Dean Frontman, who also goes by the name “Administrator 001”, explained that there are several other challenges the group must then attempt. The number of surviving interviewees systematically decreases after each challenge by ruthlessly eliminating those who fail each time. 

Other “games” include: 

1) making a highly toxic solution with no protective gear or PPE;

2) group tug-of-war for the only working magnetic stirrer in lab (points off if the power cord gets ripped out);

3) attempting to cut tubing, filter paper, and glass plates with nothing but your own fingernails;

4) finding a DNA plasmid that has been lost in the lab freezer since 2010;

5) curing a major disease by the end of the week.

The Dean further remarked, “We hope this new ‘Plasmid Game’ process will help us select students who will get all the way through their PhD program, and simultaneously will crush the dreams of the rest of them so that they stop applying to grad school for fuck’s sake.”

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After a landmark investigation into their funding sources, MoTech Labs Ltd has been accused of cashing in on life insurance policies purchased on their lab rats in order to afford equipment and executive bonuses. 

“Suspicion was raised after the organization had enough PPE and beakers to run like a normal, functioning lab,” said lead detective Arnold Harrison. “Also, they replaced all their lab coats with fur coats. That was a pretty big red flag.”

But what really broke the case? Investigating the insurance policies themselves. 

“All the paperwork was all filed under names such as ‘Charles E. Cheese,’ ‘Mr. Rat, Esquire,’ and ‘Lab Rat #37,’” explained Harrison. “And in each case, the cause of death was listed as “given cancer to see what that does to a rat.”

It was even revealed that MoTech Labs altered experiments to ensure higher insurance payouts. After discovering that accident payouts are higher than those for illness related deaths, the scientists started researching questions such as “Can Rats Base Jump?”, “Can Rats Breathe Underwater?”, “What Happens To Rat Societies When We Give Them Little Guns?”, and “Will Hungry Chimpanzees Be Nice To Rats?” 

The final straw was when the lab privately announced that they had exchanged all their glass beakers for solid gold beakers. “It doesn’t even make sense” said Dr.Gupta, a chemist consulting on the case. “Gold isn’t a good beaker material. Your results would be confusing and terrible.”

When contacted by DNAtured, the head of MoTech Labs, wearing Swarovski crystal lab gloves, screamed “don’t ever ask me about my business. Don’t EVER ask me about my business.”

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While searching the local environment proximate to their university for dinosaur fossils, a paleontology lab stumbled upon what appears to be a housing facility for graduate students in a local cave, indicating that this species has expanded its habitat as a result of high rents in the area. 

“Although no dinosaur bones were discovered in the cave, we found 3 old couches, a working television, 6 beds and several thesis manuscripts in various states of completion,” said supervisor Dr. Rachel Turnborough, “which contributes to our theory that the cave is occupied by graduate students rather than dinosaur bones, so we passed it off to the university’s conservation team.”

The conservation team immediately installed a motion-sensing camera, though it appears that it’s already been detected by the inhabitants, who apparently want to remain hidden.

“Anyone entering the cave immediately throws a coat over the camera,” said conservation expert Dr. Gregory Kant, who studies habitat loss, “which makes identification of the graduate students all the more more difficult.”

Dr. Kant believes that the new habitat may be a territorial expansion due to rising rent costs near the university.

“The cave is less than a mile from campus, where most graduate students on our campus couldn’t afford such a prime location given the wages of teaching assistantships. We found significant evidence of STEM graduate student occupation,” said Dr. Kant. 

“Old copies of both Nature and Science are scattered around the cave, along with reprints of a wide variety of other scientific publications,” Dr. Kant explained. “The coffee found in the cave is gourmet, and a number of administrative forms for teaching assistants and graduate assistants were also found scattered about.” 

“Also, there was a dog in the cave wearing a collar made to look like a strand of DNA, and it became quite excited when asked “Who wants to go to lab?”  said Dr. Kant

There were also a wide variety of phone and laptop chargers scattered throughout the cave, although they were not assayed for functionality.

Future work will include additional efforts to obtain photographic evidence of graduate students in the cave, along with attempts to find the electrical power source for the cave, which was still unknown as of this writing but is suspected to be solar panels hidden somewhere in the vicinity.  Although it is possible that graduate students only visit the cave occasionally, and naturally spend the bulk of their time in lab, the presence of so many beds and bed-like clumps of pillows and blankets does suggest that the cave is actually a residential dwelling rather than a graduate student “break room”.  The absence of a foosball table supports this hypothesis.

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At the end of 2019, PhD student Alex Dreyer was on track to finish grad school early, and they had just gotten engaged to their partner and met a fun new group of friends. They considered all of this to be enough evidence to confidently formulate a hypothesis and publish it on Twitter; “2020 will totally be my year!”. In 7 months of data-collection, Alex has not found any evidence to support this hypothesis. Below they share their results.

Figure 1. PhD completion will be delayed

Alex was set to finish their PhD ahead of schedule as long as they had a few productive months at the bench. One week after finally having their mice approved for testing, the lab shut down due to COVID-19. One mouse, not sure what to do without Alex’s helicopter parenting, ate several of its cage mates, leaving them without a viable amount of animals for their experiment. 

Figure 2a. Engagement fell apart

Chronic stress (like the kind that people might feel during a global health crisis) negatively impacts relationships in any context, let alone when people are unable to blow off steam away from their partners. The isolation became too much for Alex and their partner, who split up and are now stuck living together post-breakup. One surprising finding was that something as small as “improper use of the toaster” could kick off the fight that would spiral into the untimely death of their love. They recorded in their notebook that young lovers should be warned to NEVER try the toaster grilled cheese trick. Alex now has to deal with the end of a relationship, living with an ex, and cancelling a wedding. 

Figure 2b. 82-year-old COVID-denying grandma lives in Florida

Alex was especially happy to be getting married soon because their beloved grandmother is in her 80s and Alex always wanted for her to be able to attend their wedding. Unfortunately, on so many levels, Alex’s easily influenced grandmother has been convinced by her atrocious Facebook feed that COVID-19 is a government conspiracy, so she is refusing to take appropriate measures to stay safe. She was last seen on Facebook, posing maskless with her fellow faded Floridians in a crowded restaurant. 

Figure 3. Cool new friends turned out to be not so cool about this whole pandemic thing 

Alex wasn’t keen on going out much until they met a fun and seemingly smart group of friends last year who helped them break out of their shell. Unfortunately, their levels of social and physical distancing were not reduced in the midst of a global pandemic. Analysis of their Instagram pages showed no statistical difference between drink-clinking brunch boomerangs between 2019 and 2020. 

Figure 4. Their scientific research hypothesis may also be, unsurprisingly, wrong 

Now that they are finally back in the lab and had a few weeks to get their mouse experiments up and running again, Alex has been rigorously testing their cell-culture-based findings in the animals. Thus far, they have not been able to find any evidence to support their hypothesis outside of those flasks with little hyper-mutated completely-biologically-non-representative cells in them. Their whole thesis was completely refuted by an inability to reproduce their findings in the animal model, even when using the most cherry-picked statistics. Go figure!

Discussion and Conclusion

The results speak for themselves, no discussion necessary. 2020 sucks! Alex does report, however, that the COVID-19 pandemic was perhaps the greatest confounding variable to ever impact the investigation of a hypothesis.

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The tension was palpable at Asimina Observatory last Tuesday night, as astronomers gathered in hopes of witnessing a rare cosmic event: a graduate student packing their “papers to read” folder with so much dense literature that it would collapse into a black hole.

“An event of this magnitude has only happened a handful of times before,” said astronomer Dr. Terence Haynes. “Sure, plenty of grad students have folders of research papers they will never read dense enough to have nuclear fusion occurring at its core, but to have accumulated so many papers in a single place that the folder deforms spacetime itself… it’s a truly remarkable feat.”

Astronomers first began watching the folder of PhD student Lucy Porter as she was preparing for her preliminary exam. “I had never witnessed the gathering of so many 1000 page review articles before. We were repeatedly forced to revise our models to explain how a single folder of unread papers could be so dense without collapsing into a black hole [1]”

When asked what the consequences of the folder turning into a black hole might be, Dr. Haynes said, “Shit, I hadn’t really thought about it. The black hole would consume everything around it, so adjacent folders like ‘healthy recipes’ and ‘novel ideas’ are gone for sure. Could be the end of life on Earth I guess? Jeez, that one’s kind of a downer.”

Porter, however, suggested that risk was low on account of vague plans to remove papers from the folder as she read them at an unspecified future date. “I’ll definitely work through the folder as I’m preparing for my defense. Once I get through this final experiment for my paper, I’ll have a lot more free time.”

While experts applaud her plans, they note that this is often the exact point at which PhD students enter a Netflix black hole.

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First-year engineering student Coral Gilmore, 17, was stunned after realizing she was required to use a 3D Sublimation Heat Press Machine, a device valued at 2.3 million dollars, on just her third day of class.

“I only read the pre-lab five minutes ago, I don’t know how this thing works at all. It’s the size of a rhino and apparently pretty fragile,” said Gilmore, nervously rotating an unmarked dial.

Gilmore says that although she understands the general concepts of sublimation, no one went over the specifics of the machine. Her professor promised that the TA would explain how to use it, but on the day of the lab, the TA assured them that it had been covered it in the professor’s lecture.

“All the pre-lab says is that if I compress the gas too quickly, everything will shatter,” said Gilmore. “I really hope they have insurance.”

Lab TA Malcolm Ellis remains unconcerned, having supervised this same lab five times this week.

“This lab is always scheduled during frosh week; we actually tell them the sticker price of the machine to sober them up,” explained Ellis. “They figure it out eventually.”

During the lab, Gilmore realized that this misplaced trust wasn’t actually new for her.

“I mean, the bank seems pretty confident loaning a small fortune to a teenager with no job history. Hopefully both will work out fine.”

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The Turing Test – asking whether one can distinguish between a computer program and a human in a “blind” comparison, has long been an iconic “litmus test” for artificial intelligence (AI) programs.  In a head-to-head challenge, scientists at the Phulofit Institute for Computational Research have found that a biochemical research lab run entirely by a generative AI, without any human intervention or leadership, was universally and unanimously identified as “non-human” and “non-realistic” by every graduate student involved in the research after students at the AI lab had suspiciously optimistic responses.

Graduate students were sorted into 2 groups: the control group was placed in a normal, human-run biochemistry lab while the experimental group was placed in a lab run by an AI-lab head which directed the research.  Neither group was told the identity of their lab-head, and only interacted with their lab-head online. After less than a month, the students could easily tell the difference.

Remarks from interviews with students and in the lab run by AI included:  “I love working here.”  “This is the nicest place I’ve ever worked.”  “I feel like my suggestions are taken seriously.”  “This is like a fairy tale.”  “I’ve never felt so happy.”  “This is what I dreamed science was like.”  “There is simply no way this is a real lab.”  “I brought my dog to the lab and it was fine.”  “Please don’t make me leave when this experiment is over.”

In contrast, the control group, working in a productive and highly competitive lab with a human lab-head reported reactions including:  “I hate my life.”  “I don’t really understand the point of what we’re doing.”  “I’m so tired my skin hurts.”  “I don’t understand why my advisor hates me.”  “I suggested the same experiment to my advisor for three weeks in a row, and he just now suggested it to me as his new idea.”  “I feel so lost.” “I may have messed up some of my experiments when my tears fell into the samples.”

Institute researchers further noted that all of the biochemical data from the AI-run laboratory appears to be irreproducible, and that some of it seems physically impossible. In addition, they noted that the figures associated with the research group had strange, non-realistic distortions such as mice with large moustaches and giant testicles and phospholipid bilayers with dancing hotdog channels, among other irregularities. Despite this rather striking findings, however, and even more suspiciously, it appeared that none of the students in the AI run lab wanted to leave.

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