I receive a fair amount of advertising for scientific products. I try really hard to keep my email box clear. I unsubscribe, block, and filter my incoming email with extreme prejudice. The sites I read for fun like medium.com and the folks I subscribe to on patreon.com are forbidden from emailing me.

The only email I am OK with is personal email from real people. So I was OK with an email campaign by duluth labs  where they actually sent me something that seemed like a real email directed at me personally. I don’t need their product, but I passed on the info.

Occasionally, spam hits the right person at the right time. Last night I was talking to a student about the pain and expense of setting up the lab for protein expression. The alternative is spending the money on catalog recombinant protein. Which is also expensive, but guarantees we get a certain amount of pure protein.

This morning I got a spam email from vectorbuilder offering custom plasmid prep services (the part of the protein expression process that I feel the least comfortable with). Any other day it would have gone straight in the spam folder… but today I clicked. I guess that’s the logic of spam: get a large enough list and you’ll hit someone at the right moment. As frustrating as that was, their site is pretty good. If it had clear pricing, it would be even better. Word on the web is that they charge ~$200 for a plasmid. Not bad, all things considered.

I upgraded the laser focusing lens on my laser cutter to a shorter focus length. The K40 laser cutters to not have  an adjustable focus, so that’s a bit of a pain, but it does make for more narrow cuts.

I also got some 1 mm thick acrylic sheets from aliexpress. I would link better, but the source is gone. It seems that sellers come and go quickly on that site.

I can make very shallow cuts in the thin acrylic, but they collapse during bonding. If I make channels deep enough in the material to avoid this, I end up cutting all the way through.

So, back to the 2 mm thick acrylic. If I make a deep channel in the 2mm acrylic, I get great results. If I do a shallow cut in the thick acrylic it still survives the bonding. The same cut parameters that collapsed in the thin sheets work fine in the thick acrylic. Weird.

Bottom line, I’m back in the acrylic microfluidic business (so to speak).