waiquoo

I'm in lab automation, we've come a long way from paper schedules (although those still get plenty of use :) )

US residency funding has not increased since 1997, and residency spots is the real chokepoint

Mark Behlke's group at IDT is the force behind a LOT of the development of CRISPR, but they are relatively unknown

There's a level where institutions are separate from the people that make them move. If your boss can get replaced without destroying your department, then that institutional layer exists.

What I have been thinking a lot about lately is that the focus should not be on the work. The focus should be on the handoff. If you build something, the goal is to have someone else use it. The work should focus on easing that transition. If it's a technology, what do you need to characterize so that the product people can work with it? If it's a product, how do you make it easy for your customers to get it? If it's an internal tool, what context and familiarity does the user group have?

This is awesome! I have some serial devices (RS 232) that I've wished I could make wireless. Are there any similar projects to bluetooth serial comms?

dropping packets would be a much bigger deal...

It does happen like that, lot's of departments within big companies have R&D focus with time dedicated to development/discovery. The problem is that the output is captured. If it doesn't end up in a product, the general public will never know

'All light causes evaporation' is not really true. IR heating works because the wavelength resonates with the vibration modes of the intramolecular bonds. Water has low absorption of visible wavelengths, so you would not expect light absorption in the visible spectrum to provide enough energy to knock individual water molecules free. Water is an interesting substance and a lot of the properties of water come from intermolecular hydrogen bonding and polarity. Even though it's a liquid, there are transient molecular structures that spontaneously occur in bulk due to hydrogen bonding between water molecules. The polarity of water causes interesting effect at interfaces (surface tension, electrical double layer, etc). It's possible that the water in the hydrogel is forming some hydrogen bonded structure that interacts with green light. Where the individual water molecules won't strongly interact, the larger structure does. That could lead to the ejection of 'packets' of water molecules as discussed in the paper. Why and what these multi-molecular structures are? No idea. But this is a very interesting effect.