Science was cooler when you had to use a screwdriver.
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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*very expensive beige box
Gun! Where we shoot the people who break the beige box where the magic happens.
beige box where the magic happens
You'll need a PhD to be allowed to push the "on" button though.
And then go back to the office to write grant applications for a month.
To buy the next beige box.
I fix software on these things! No one ever quite gets what I do for work, it's nice to run across in the wild.
I feel seen lol
What do they do?
Top left is a thermal cycler. Basically it heats and cools samples at a given rate. This is primarily used for generic PCR, and certain enzymatic reactions. Top right is the fancier version of this, it is for qPCR, so it can do the heating and cooling and has a laser/detector for the dye or probe that reacts to generating more dna with each PCR cycle so you can quantify approximately how much of the target DNA you had.
Bottom right is a luminex. This uses detection of fluorophore signals to measure multiple analyates, usually different proteins.
Idk what bottom left is.
Top left is the CFX96/384, which is also a qPCR instrument.
Bottom left is the 3500 Genetic Analyzer, as someone identified. It's used for sanger sequencing I believe. My last lab had one but I was never trained on it.
I thought it was just their T100, the CFX96s I've used don't have the touchscreen but yeah the bigger "lid" does look like for the CFX.
The bases and hot blocks are interchangable with that series. We recently upgraded to the Opus but our previous CFX96 had the T1000 touch base.
Wow, I know some of those words.
Allow me to translate:
Top left is a thermal cycler. Basically it heats and cools samples at a given rate. This is primarily used for magic. Top right is the fancier version of this, it is for qMagic, so it can do the heating and cooling and has a magic detector for magic components that reacts to magic happening so you can quantify approximately how much magic is going on in the beige box.
Bottom right is a luminex. This uses detection of magic signals to measure magic.
Bottom left is the beige box where magic happens.
This guy sciences.
Also username checks out.
PCR, aka pipette, cry, repeat
I know nothing about this kind of lab equipment but Google says the bottom left device is a human DNA sequencer, ABI model 3500.
Thank you, they sound really specialized!
Some kinda lab work, maybe blood chem or urinalysis. I should clarify that since I'm a software person I don't even know what they do, really, I just fix it when they stop transmitting lab test results to the database.
Getting the magic back to the magic analysis database got it
We had a bright orange magic box that was connected to a beige windows 95 box that you were never allowed to turn off because nobody knew if it would survive a reboot and there was no software for the orange box for a more modern setup. Almost felt an like arcane ritual, typing in the command lines to get it to work.
Could honestly try a virtual machine or an emulator at that point. Would be worth a shot.
No power outages?
Probably plugged into some sort of UPS or the building has backup power.
But do you have magic box where the beige happens?
That's at home Depot.
This used to be IT in the early 2000s
Beige as far as the eye could see (in a data centre)
Yeah, I came here to air my hypothesis that lab hardware trends lag behind consumer computers by about 25-30 years.
So it's almost time for teal, orange et other fun colors, mixed with translucent plastic lab équipement?
In 5 years hardcore researchers will be modding their lab equipment and installing plexiglass glass sides. Just like I did to my PC in 1999-2000ish
Are you saying there used to be woodgrain lab hardware?
There definitely was. I've seen it.
I'm waiting for it come back in to style. I've pitched getting beige racks with this on the side https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(design)
Nowadays it's a lot more of dark mode, which is a shame (especially since our software still doesn't have it)
Honestly, I think it was so ugly it was beautiful.
There is also this particular tone of light brownish green which is on so many industrial tools like drill presses, table top saws and so on. I kinda dig it
Ooh, never thought of that as so ugly it's pretty but I can kinda see it now
Were we still using 3.5” floppies in the early 2000s?
Oh yes, I was using a 3.5" floppy disk drive with a USB connector in 2007 to kick off imaging on desktop machines as no one could get the ghost boot server working.
Why not just use a thumb drive at that point?
I can't remember specifically, I think it might have just been that the ghost image on the floppy was confirmed to work, and all the desktops were allowed to boot from floppy already and not necessarily via USB.
Which beige box will turn me into a femboy?
This one
Leave the bottle...
Available in the Thermo Fisher catalog for $39,900,800.00 each.
Most of ours used to be white!
Johnny Ives would have gotten rid of all those nasty bevels.