Thank you! (Also, haven’t seen this kind of gift link that has the little login requirement, suppose they’re looking to strike a better balance.)

Thank you!

Thank you !!

non-paywall (perm): https://archive.ph/QpBF1

Ugh, I just realised my imagination is too good :)

Probably poetic license. You can look at the pictures and see everything looks very clean.

The jugs are sealed. We can't see any "overflowing" buckets. Looking at some water samples under a microscope is not really that messy.

for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.

someone should inform the orange POTUS of this: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/did-donald-trump-j...

I thought they use built up gunk from years in the bathroom to discover new species, so they choose a cheap motel.

I have an idea on how life could originate in a motel room :D

Right- that's really just a version of a worm pick. I use similar tools (including a mouth pipette... remember kids, in chemistry: don't pipette by mouth, in biology: oops I think I just inhaled something!) working with tardigrade. If it was steampunk there would be some sort of goggles, leather, gears, and a tincture of laudunum.

I think it's mainly to be close to the sample collection area while also having a place to do microscopy in semi-privacy. Looking at their equipment, I think they bought everything out of pocket and pay for the hotel on their own.

All they needed was a blue UV light

This was also interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z

$80/day is a cheap room in most of the US and Canada.

My standards for hotel rooms on road trips are quite low and I will call the crappy motels to avoid the bloated .com booking rates and it’s not very often I find even 1 star hotels under $80/day after taxes.

I am not from US and with that money I could rent a tiny apartment for 2-3 days. However, I prefer cheaper accomodation. $80 is super expensive if you have no other place to live.

It takes ~30 minutes to turn around a nightly hotel room, front desk check-in and other labor can easily make that >1h of labor per room per day.

Even in the budget industry, your nightly utility usage comes close to $10, consumables are $3+.

Hotel stays are typically taxed higher than typical sales tax.

Once you add that in, real estate taxes, and any corporate taxes - you're getting close to the $50 price point...

That's before you factor in the cost of maintaining the building, or the financing to buy the building itself (or any profit).

If you have a decent microscope and want to work on some citizen science that's directly related to the research in this article: https://www.vanettenlab.org/paulinella-consortium