Even Lab Researchers have their WOW! Moments “Labs-Around-Me” is a sharing economy concept for the world of research laboratories. Such labs can share chemicals, antibodies, plasmids and more, with other labs around them. As LabSuit's concept of “Labs-Around-Me” has evolved, more and more researchers have experienced  amazing WOW! moments when they begin to understand the benefit of our platform. True Story This is a story of something experienced by a LabSuit subscriber not so long ago. As we all know, “Labs-Around-Me” allow facilities and researchers to participate in a special LabSuit community. The community includes hundreds of labs - and, through a simple interface, allows them all to collaborate in locating and exchanging chemical reagents. Events begin in December 2015 Every day LabSuit delivers hundreds of messages between universities - as well as internally, within the same campus. Researchers ask questions about chemicals, buffers, ...

  LabSuit has rolled out a new feature that helps labs control their budgets! Which in its turn, makes budget balancing easier. Every lab has funds related to different budgets/grants. Sometimes, the grant money is dedicated to specific research, which means that every expense made for this research has to be logged and attributed by its grant number. And LabSuit makes sure no hassle is incurred! Every time a lab manager receives an order request he verifies the grant number. In case the item needs different budget/grant or it's missing, the grant number can be updated with a single click! Thus, at the end of the day/month/quartile it becomes very easy to see the total amount spent for every budget/grant. LabSuit accurately sums up the amounts spent, while the items with no grant/budget specified will be categorized under " Unspecified Grant ". In the second column  we can see a number of items procured from respective budget. In addition, you can ...

Update, Jan 2017: This feature is replaced by Order Discussions .

Tell your lab manager what you want to order by submitting new order requests in your group. Once you build up an order history, you can search through it and request items you've ordered before. 1. In “Orders Request” tab. Click the green button: “+Order Request” 2. Fill in the necessary fields, and click “Submit Request”. Your lab manager can receive a mail notification about your request and start process your order immediately. 3. Congratulation! Your order request is submitted! Now, wait until your lab manager approves it and place actual order for you.

Sub-locations is a convenient way to keep account of your items. Your lab may have numerous inventory locations such as closets, liquid nitrogen racks, desiccators and so on.  How do we keep track of all items inside? Tracking by one location field is just not enough!  Often location has several dimensions, for example: "The bottle is located in 1) yellow closet (location field) 2) top shelf (sub-location field)"  In this case, "sub-location" concept becomes very useful Labeling biological samples In case of biological samples, which are stored in racks, sub-locations become crucial. The sub-location may look look that box5-4-7, which stands for box number 5, 4th row, and 7th column. Sub-location drop-down is sorted, therefore it's very easy to find the next free slot inside the box. The rack identifier may be stored in location field. Labeling chemicals Often, chemical bottles and containers are marked  with A-123, A-124, A-125, when the su...

After hearing some feedbacks from LabSuit users, we took a plunge and made email notifications versatile and accurate regarding the trigger events. From now on, a lab manager (other lab members also) can have better control over which actions on LabSuit trigger email notifications. Today, all "Orders Management" events, such "Approve", "Mark as Delivered", etc. are grouped by a person that is acting as a lab manager. That means that I can prefer to get notifications from my lab manager. Or if I'm a lab manager, I would rather not receive email from my own actions on LabSuit. By default,  a lab member gets the notifications from his lab manager.

A well-known proverb states that “Walls have ears”, meaning, eavesdropping can occur when you least expect it. But how many times have you found yourself wondering about the stories different object could tell us, if they could only talk? Take, for example, this red fire hydrant. I recently became aware of this cool startup that enables water pipes to listen to themselves, analyze the sounds retrospectively and figure out useful things. Take a look at this hydrant: it’s red, neat, and does nothing to indicate what is going on beneath the surface of the sidewalk, for example - a leak! A leak from water pipes is problematic to say the least, but it some areas of the globe it can be dangerous and extremely costly. A startup called aquarius-spectrum has invented the technology to allow any pipe outlet to literally listen inside, and the results can be very surprising! This technology is so sensitive that it can distinguish between minor water leakages along pipes embedded dee...