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I know that buying precast gels is lazy, but these are great. I'm all about the laziness when it comes to getting beautiful data on perfect gradient gels. These gels will allow you to do science without worrying about spilling unpolymerized acrylamide-bis mix on your arm and learning all about neurotoxins. Invitrogen also usually has an ongoing program where if you buy five boxes of gels, you get a free gel apparatus. The gel apparatus rarely leaks due to some nice engineering/design upgrades to the apparatus.

Updated Jan 18, 2007

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Piled Higher and Deeper: comic and comic book

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Piled Higher and Deeper is an online comic strip about being a graduate student in the sciences. One of those incredibly funny and incredibly insightful comics that I keep sending to my science and non-science friends - to laugh at ourselves or to explain myself respectively.

The guy who does these, Jorge Cham, has published two books of this now, they are worth picking up. They are the perfect gift to your friend who is just starting graduate school.

Updated Jan 17, 2007

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SMART: find protein domains

First to recommend

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You have a new protein you want to find out about, but no one has worked on it before. Do you use the Entrez conserved domains thing, or do a Blink or BLAST? Naah, you know that SMART (Simple Modular Architecture Research Tool) is way cooler and will give you the results in an easy to examine format. Just plug in your sequence, hit "Sequence SMART" and go. It will tell you that you have a DEAD box helicase or a SH3 domain and then you're on the road to success. Or something like that.

Updated Jan 17, 2007

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qiagen minipreps

First to recommend

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Qiagen is king of the minipreps. You put 1.5ml of bacterial culture in and you get plasmid DNA out. Reliable, quick, and easy enough to teach to your ten year old kid, as long as they don't try to drink any of the reagents. The DNA that comes out of them is clean enough to sequence immediately, or digest or transform, some people even transfect it.

Updated Jan 16, 2007

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Open Biosystems: custom polyclonal antibodies

First to recommend

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We've used these guys for years to make polyclonal antibodies for our lab. The quality is great, the people who work there are great, and I can't count the number of times I've recommended them to other labs.

Be sure to order at least two antigens because you can't predict what peptide will be most antigenic.

Updated Jan 16, 2007

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Pubmed: bookshelf

First to recommend

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This collection of online textbooks and science literature is an absolute gold mine for students and researchers alike. If your protein of interst turns out to be involved in patterning you can look up Wnt signalling in Developmental Biology. If you need to understand the basics of DNA repair you can see a good overview in Molecular Cell Biology. If you're giving a talk and need a pretty diagram to show how DNA is arranged into chromatin you can search the entire library until you find your favorite (which you will of course reference in your talk).

This collection is often forgotten by scientists because we tend to look in journal articles for our most up to date information. But when you need a refresher on organic chemistry or bacterial nomenclature, sometimes the books are the place to go.

Updated Jan 16, 2007

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New England Biolabs

First to recommend

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I've been using restriction enzymes from New England Biolabs (NEB) for as long as I can remember. There are two reasons to use NEB enzymes: the quality of the enzymes and the quality of the technical information provided. I've known people who worked in R&D for other companies who also made restriction enzymes and they still used NEB's products.

The company philosophy seems to be make good stuff and make it easy to use. They catalog, both online and print, is something I refer to frequently. It has solid information about the enzymes and their peculiarities - something another company wouldn't be so forthcoming about. If an enzyme doesn't have great activity, it might still be in the catalog, but you know that it doesn't have great activity before you buy it.

Updated Dec 19, 2006

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Sanford Sharpie Industrial Markers

First to recommend

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Regular sharpies are great, but industrial sharpies are the best thing ever. They aren't soluble in ethanol, they take longer to wash off of skin, and deal well with extreme temperature. I constantly walk around with one or more of these in my back pocket, probably making people nervous that I'm going to start tagging at any moment.

I use these in lab to label things that are going to be sprayed with 70% ethanol (great for tissue culture), or are going into the liquid nitrogen freezer, or high use items that would get their labels rubbed off easily.

At home you can use them to label just about anything, or draw something cool, or go ahead and tag if you want. Just be careful because the only thing that removes their ink really well is acetone (nail polish remover) and that will melt some kinds of plastic.

Updated Dec 18, 2006

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Rainin - Classic Pipetman

First to recommend

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There are a million ergonomic, sexy looking, super-fancy pipettes out there now. I've bought them for people in the lab only to find that a year later, they've been broken, or been traded or just not used, and the person who originally wanted the nice green pipette that looked comfortable, is back to using a classic Rainin product.

They are relatively indestructible, don't require constant calibration, and you can eject your tips all the way to the trash can on the other side of your bay.

If you're starting a lab, definitely check out their starter sets which give you a P20, a P200 and P1000 for $600 approximately. Individual pipets range from $250 to $300.

Worth every penny.

Updated Dec 18, 2006

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JBL Creature II Speakers

First to recommend

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Well, besides the fact that they look like Darth Vader's head...
We bought these for work a few years ago and I liked them so much I bought myself them last year, and this year bought them for my dad.

They are stylish (come in white, silver and black), have a relatively small footprint (the Darth Vader head is 9in x 9in x 9in approximately) but sound great. That said, I'm not a fancy audiophile and won't pretend to know an infinite amount about sound quality. I can listen to music quietly and loudly and they still sound good, which is all I ask for in speakers.

You can also plug them into your iPod if you're painting your friend's apartment.
In white, they also look somewhat like the ghosts in Pac Man

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