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

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

I came here looking for this :) like someone has to be making this joke right. Or another direction of making the connection that there must be some life growing from the filth in a motel room

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.

I dunno about the states, but in most parts of the UK, it's considerably cheaper than 80 dollars a day to rent a small workspace.

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.

Motels are not a habitation of last resort by any means. They’re a convenient place to stay while traveling.

I expect the vast majority of motel patrons are additionally paying a rent/mortgage for their main habitation.

From my reading of the article, my understanding is that they’re doing science in the hotel room, not living there long-term.

In most places, you don't pay the day rate for long stays.

Yeah salaries in the US are higher in nominal terms

Where are you from? What would be a normal or comfortable rate for you?

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.

Per diems in the civil engineering union agreement in my Canadian province are 180$ a day to cover lodging and food when you're working away from home. Most people manage to spend less and save the leftover. That's tax free money unrelated to what you're actually getting paid for the work or transport time.

80$ might seem like a lot of money if you're making 60k a year as a biologist. If you're in a field where profit is the reason you work 80$ is peanuts.

What is a “decent microscope”?

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.

Perhaps better to ask here: https://www.reddit.com/r/microscopy/. They get that question a lot.

I'm in the process of building one myself. Take what I'm saying with a massive grain of salt, but I believe you basically need three things - objective, tube lens and a camera module.

If I were you, I would probably buy a normal microscope that supports a microscope camera attachment, instead of specifically looking for USB microscope. There is a lot of misleading marketing around USB microscopes, a lot of them are literally just doing digital zooming in (I have a 30€ "1000x" microscope from Amazon which is nice for soldering and such things, but these fake microscopes appear even at higher price ranges). Treat anything >1000x for light-based microscopes as a red flag.

Some random ones I've encountered (less for PCB work though):

- https://openflexure.org/

- https://www.eurekamicroscope.com/

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.

"He noticed that the scales were overlapping one another in different directions — in one, they overlapped on top of each other in a clockwise pattern, and the other was in reverse. The fresh eyes of a person who hadn’t been staring at Paulinella for hours identified a curious, distinctive trait. Were they looking at two different species?"

I found it reassuring that sketching what you see down the microscope is still part of a scientific practice. Also the 'fresh eyes' could perhaps point the way to a more collegiate organisation of research.

"The first species of Paulinella was discovered on Dec. 24, 1894, in the sediments of a backwater of the Rhine River by the German biologist Robert Lauterborn. He named the genus after his stepmother, Pauline."

How can they say this without providing more background?

They mention this event has only happened handful of times.

This seems unsupported. More likely is it's happened a large number of times, but has only established a lineage a handful of times.