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A technician's blue-gloved hands hold a red handling tunnel with a calm white mouse peeking out, above a cage of fresh shredded-paper bedding in a quiet vivarium.

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October 6, 2026

The 3Rs in Practice: What Refinement Looks Like on a Tuesday

The 3Rs get taught as three words on a slide. On the floor, Refinement is a run of small choices…

A technician crouches at the bottom shelf of a vivarium cage rack holding a light meter to a dim cage where a white mouse sits, while the top shelves glow bright, showing how vivarium lighting falls off down a rack.
October 1, 2026

Vivarium Lighting Is a Variable, Not a Fixture

Everyone remembers to set the light timer. Almost nobody checks what the cage on the bottom shelf is actually getting….

A technician's gloved hands at a vivarium bench, cage cards fanned beside a laptop open to a LIMS screen, a mouse cage softly out of focus behind them, warm documentary lighting.
September 8, 2026

Cage Card to LIMS: Where Rodent ID Data Actually Breaks Down

We’ve covered why a wrong ID quietly wrecks a study. This time the question is narrower: where, exactly, does the…

A close-up photo of blue-gloved hands pouring fresh wood-shaving bedding from a scoop into a clean polycarbonate cage, a mound of white nesting material already pressed into the far corner.
August 5, 2026

Cage Bedding Is a Variable, Not a Given

Bedding gets bought like a shop supply: whatever’s in stock, whatever’s cheapest, swapped when a vendor backorders. It doesn’t behave…

A realistic close-up photo: a blue-gloved hand holds a small clear microfluidic organ-on-a-chip up to soft daylight, with a microscope and culture flasks blurred on the lab bench behind.
July 16, 2026

NAMs: What’s Actually Validated, and What’s Just Hype

New Approach Methodologies are having a moment. The hard part isn’t believing they’re coming. It’s telling the validated tools from…

An illustrated vivarium cage rack; one cage has a worn, smudged handwritten card, the next a clean machine-readable 2D code, linked by a flow line.
June 22, 2026

The Quietest Threat to Your Study’s Validity: A Mislabeled Cage

We talk about the reproducibility crisis in terms of statistics and study design. Some of it starts somewhere much smaller…

Genetically Engineered Models: Use of a 2D Barcode Mini Tag for Identification of Mice in an Automated Colony Management System

The 2023 National AALAS (American Association for Laboratory Animal Science) conference held last week in Salt Lake City brought together…