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Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/science/motel-science-dis...
https://archive.is/2026.09.26-101638/https://www.nytimes.com...
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..
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.
I thought they use built up gunk from years in the bathroom to discover new species, so they choose a cheap motel.