Every morning since the beginning of my Ph.D., I check the temperature and relative humidity when I am arriving in the lab. Now, after nearly 4 years, I have really nice curves (ok: nice charts, if you prefer) …

As you can see, temperature for the animals is always between 20°C and 25°C (this is good) and relative humidity in their room usually fits in the 20-80% range (ideal range is 30-70%). For a lab where we are only able to monitor the temperature and relative humidity, it’s good. I am sure that if we had the possibility to control it, it will be better (we only have a pot of water if the relative humidity is too low or an additional heater if the temperature is too low).

What’s really interesting is that relative humidity follows a 1-year cycle: we have high levels of humidity in summer and low ones in winter. Temperature seems to follow another cycle: hotter in summer, cooler in winter. I checked (but did not the statistical tests) and it seems that our experiments were not influenced by these changes.

Finally, these graphs show that I did not take any holidays, except for Christmas 2004 and my honeymoon (end March 2005 – mid May 2005). And some people are suggesting that I didn’t work hard for this Ph.D. … Notice we rarely had more than 20°C in my office … And, yes, these charts are made with Gnuplot, a free software (but not GPL)!

• Lab life