Super cool, and I bet housekeeping loved tidying up after turning a motel room into a street biology lab. Honestly, I think I’d prefer to stay in a room previously used to cook meth.
Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass.
I don’t know, that goes a little above and beyond IMO. One typically doesn’t do science in a house-type setting, for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.
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.
Why did they work in a motel room? The article kinda implies it had something to do with Trump’s funding cuts, but unless I missed something the connection wasn’t made explicit.
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.
$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).
Are we supposed to live in a world where everyone's entitled to be able to stay in hotel rooms for 1 hour of minimum wage labor? Because, until we have far more automation, I don't see how that makes any possible sense.
"The team — brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration’s freezes to federal science funding — then made an exciting discovery."
Apparently this is the new way of life for Scientists under the Trump regime.
Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/science/motel-science-dis...
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!
https://archive.is/2026.09.26-101638/https://www.nytimes.com...
Thank you !!
non-paywall (perm): https://archive.ph/QpBF1
Super cool, and I bet housekeeping loved tidying up after turning a motel room into a street biology lab. Honestly, I think I’d prefer to stay in a room previously used to cook meth.
You think pond water is the worst thing an $80 motel room has seen?
I don’t know, that goes a little above and beyond IMO. One typically doesn’t do science in a house-type setting, for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.
For some reason this is a commonplace in the UK.
Yeah....
I had a colleague who walked the tiled floor in front of pissoirs in socks..
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.
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
I wonder what the author thinks steampunk means
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.
Why did they work in a motel room? The article kinda implies it had something to do with Trump’s funding cuts, but unless I missed something the connection wasn’t made explicit.
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
So $80 is considered a "cheap room"? How is a person supposed to earn $80 a day to pay for it and have something left?
Also, cells can have scales? Amazing.
$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.
Have you stayed at hotels? Most people that work don’t stay at hotels and pay the hotel out of pocket.
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).
Are we supposed to live in a world where everyone's entitled to be able to stay in hotel rooms for 1 hour of minimum wage labor? Because, until we have far more automation, I don't see how that makes any possible sense.
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
I don't know what I should've expected, but I am a bit disappointed that they in fact did not find these organisms in the motel room.
this revives my recurring desire to get a good USB microscope. Good, to me, in this context:
a few hundred bucks
able to look at microbes
also able to look at less micro level stuff, like maybe the thing i'm trying to solder or fix
is it wrong to solicit comments/recommendations here?
Quoting the article:
"The team — brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration’s freezes to federal science funding — then made an exciting discovery."
Apparently this is the new way of life for Scientists under the Trump regime.
Sad.