Cleaning up the lab… finally!

 

 Whenever you are doing research, it's important to control the chaos. That could be keeping notes and reference papers organized, keeping track of simulations and parameters or the physical items that accumulate in any lab. This week, Kevin describes a major cleanup in our lab to keep entropy at bay for a little while longer.

by Kevin Axelrod

December 20, 2025 was finally the day. 

I have been at the PVL for over 2 years now, and while projects and some people have come and gone, one thing has always remained constant: our PVL lab room has looked like my bedroom when I was 7. Because we work in planetary sciences, we have a wide variety of equipment – from optical equipment to vacuum chamber components to flow tubing to spectrometers to regolith simulant to various chemicals. And that is before we get to all the non-science items in the lab, like books and files, as well as that big Venus globe! 

Keeping all these things organized is difficult, with so many different projects in and out of the lab. And at times, motivation to clean can ebb and flow, both for me and a lot of other people. But, on the week of December 15, just one week before I planned to leave town for the winter holiday, I decided that it was finally time to get down on it. 

It started when we needed to pack up our Martian Atmospheric Gas Evolution (MAGE) experimental breadboard spectrometer and send it back to our industrial partner, ABB. Abby and I had collected a pallet and ordered some bubble wrap and shrink film a few weeks prior, and on December 16 we put those materials to use (below). Shipping it out via LTL freight, which happened on December 19, only 2 days before I left for the holiday, was a significant step towards making the lab genuinely clean. This was not just because it had been sitting in there for a few weeks and was crowding our lab, but also in the process of shipping it out, we cleaned the lab upstairs (which belonged to a different group and was where we conducted most of our experimentation with this spectrometer).

Sending it out freed up a little bit of space on our optical table. Nonetheless, there was still a significant amount of optical equipment and other things lying out - tools strewn everywhere, old boxes/cardboard, tubing pieces from the spectrometer setup, etc. Even our chiller still contained ethylene glycol-based antifreeze from a project that occurred several months ago.  

It seemed like such a massive task that maybe we were beginning to accept the constant state of clutter. However, in many cases, constant clutter in a laboratory is a safety hazard, because it impedes the ability to conduct experiments in an organized fashion, and introduces issues like tripping and spilling hazards. So, on December 20, with my flight out of Toronto less than 24 hours away, I drank a cup of coffee, put in my earbuds, and somehow just got into the zone. I went through the lab putting away tools, taking apart optical equipment, wiping down counters, and throwing away scraps. I officially started a “Sharps” disposal box for our lab (we were starting to use glass pipettes on a regular basis) and also started and labeled waste disposal containers for the ethylene glycol. I also started a “Misc/I don’t know” box. This box is for all the things that are probably optical components, but I am not completely certain of exactly what they are or how they are used in optical setups. “Misc” is a Swiss-army knife of a lousy excuse for a box label, isn’t it? 

The lab is far from perfect so far. We still have 2 desks in the back of the room that are filled with miscellaneous computer equipment, the corner next to the door is overflowing with old poster tubes, and the floor could use a sweeping. But, when cleaning a lab, just like in conducting scientific experiments, progress is always incremental. I forgot to take a “Before” picture, but the “After” picture is at the top of this post. It will keep getting better, too.

Two final thoughts:

1. For what feels like the millionth time, our lab’s tape measure has gone missing. It might be time for another trip to our local hardware store.
2. During this day, I listened to a lot of what I would call “indie EDM” and a lot of the songs made me think of outer space.  We need to start making a PVL playlist/mixtape.

[Insert Title Here]

Writing is a key part of being a researcher of any kind. It's not enough to do the work, take the data or make the discovery. It's not science until it is shared. This week, Alex reflects on their writing journey.

By Alex Innanen

I like to think of myself as a pretty good writer. Very young me harboured the wish to be a famous novelist when I grew up, and I probably still have old notebooks hidden somewhere in my parents’ house full of stories and attempted novels. There’s a lot about writing I like. I like putting words together in interesting and clever ways (I am a big fan of puns), I like figuring out how best to say something, and I really like the rules of language which feel a bit like a puzzle. In first year engineering we had a Technical Writing for Engineers course that many of my classmates groaned about but for me I was thrilled to have a whole class full of grammar quizzes. 

Moderate bragging aside, there’s one thing I struggle with time and again when I’m writing and that is choosing a title. Several of the posts I’ve written for this very blog have been sent to John with something like ‘I can’t think of a good title, HELP!’ at the top. I also write blog posts about once a month for the Curiosity Rover’s mission updates page, and there’s many a time I’ll have the whole post written, sitting in my inbox ready to be sent for approval and struggling to think of a title. 

It's not just blog titles either – short stories, journal articles, even my dissertation. And all these different kinds of writing need different sorts of titles! But this post is not just for me to complain about how hard titles are though. Having toiled in the title mines for as long as I have, I’ve developed some tricks and observations about choosing a good title. 

The job of your title is to give your audience somewhat of an idea of what they’re getting into, or at least to interest them enough that they might want to read what you’ve written. For something like a blog post, I try to keep it relatively short and clear. The title of this post, for instance, pokes fun at not being able to come up with a title while also giving an idea of what the post may be about. When I’m writing mission updates for Curiosity I tend to go one of two ways: some wordplay or reference to a well known phrase (for example, “New Year, New Clouds”), or succinctly describing something important from the plan (like “On Top of the Ridge” – three guesses where we were). 

Writing a title for a paper is a bit different. You can assume that whoever is reading your title has a bit more familiarity with the subject so you can be a bit more specific. Sometimes this leads to marathon-length titles. The title of my first research note, for example, “Minimum Mars Climate Sounder Retrieval Altitudes Reveal Cloud Altitudes at Aphelion and Stranded High-altitude Dust Following the MY34 Global Dust Storm on Mars” is twenty three entire words. This may seem a bit excessive, but you cannot deny that it tells you exactly what’s in the note. We’re also big fans of the humble colon in academia. My master’s thesis was titled “Aphelion Cloud Formation and Swiss Cheese Sublimation: Martian Atmospheric Water Vapour Processes”. The first bit of the title tells you the two subjects of my thesis, the second part ties them together. Sometimes, Journals will have guidelines for paper titles. Acta Astronautica, for example, has a 15 word limit. My research note above wouldn’t fly, and in fact the title I proposed for the paper I submitted there (which I posted about here) was too long and I had to figure out how to fit what I wanted to say in their word limit (I think I changed ‘Canadian Arctic’ to ‘Arctic’). 

So maybe I actually do know a bit more about this title thing than I thought when I started writing this blog post. In fact, I feel confident enough to offer some things to think about when you’re coming up with a title: 

1. Consider your audience. Will they recognise what Aphelion means? Will they enjoy a good pop culture reference? 
2. What is/are the main takeaway(s) of your piece? Are there different subjects you need to link?
3. Is there a word limit? Should there be a word limit? How can you be more concise?
4. How are you going to get people excited to read what you’ve written? 

As with most things, though, practice helps. The more I write, the more titles I need to think of and the less daunting it gets each time.