$80/day is a cheap room in most of the US and Canada.
My standards for hotel rooms on road trips are quite low and I will call the crappy motels to avoid the bloated .com booking rates and it’s not very often I find even 1 star hotels under $80/day after taxes.
Right- that's really just a version of a worm pick. I use similar tools (including a mouth pipette... remember kids, in chemistry: don't pipette by mouth, in biology: oops I think I just inhaled something!) working with tardigrade. If it was steampunk there would be some sort of goggles, leather, gears, and a tincture of laudunum.
Why did they work in a motel room? The article kinda implies it had something to do with Trump’s funding cuts, but unless I missed something the connection wasn’t made explicit.
I think it's mainly to be close to the sample collection area while also having a place to do microscopy in semi-privacy. Looking at their equipment, I think they bought everything out of pocket and pay for the hotel on their own.
Super cool, and I bet housekeeping loved tidying up after turning a motel room into a street biology lab. Honestly, I think I’d prefer to stay in a room previously used to cook meth.
> Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass.
I don’t know, that goes a little above and beyond IMO. One typically doesn’t do science in a house-type setting, for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.
https://archive.is/2026.09.26-101638/https://www.nytimes.com...
Thank you !!
I have an idea on how life could originate in a motel room :D
So $80 is considered a "cheap room"? How is a person supposed to earn $80 a day to pay for it and have something left?
It takes ~30 minutes to turn around a nightly hotel room, front desk check-in and other labor can easily make that >1h of labor per room per day.
Even in the budget industry, your nightly utility usage comes close to $10, consumables are $3+.
Hotel stays are typically taxed higher than typical sales tax.
Once you add that in, real estate taxes, and any corporate taxes - you're getting close to the $50 price point...
That's before you factor in the cost of maintaining the building, or the financing to buy the building itself (or any profit).
$80/day is a cheap room in most of the US and Canada.
My standards for hotel rooms on road trips are quite low and I will call the crappy motels to avoid the bloated .com booking rates and it’s not very often I find even 1 star hotels under $80/day after taxes.
Have you stayed at hotels? Most people that work don’t stay at hotels and pay the hotel out of pocket.
This was also interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z
I wonder what the author thinks steampunk means
Right- that's really just a version of a worm pick. I use similar tools (including a mouth pipette... remember kids, in chemistry: don't pipette by mouth, in biology: oops I think I just inhaled something!) working with tardigrade. If it was steampunk there would be some sort of goggles, leather, gears, and a tincture of laudunum.
All they needed was a blue UV light
Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/science/motel-science-dis...
Thank you! (Also, haven’t seen this kind of gift link that has the little login requirement, suppose they’re looking to strike a better balance.)
Thank you!
I thought they use built up gunk from years in the bathroom to discover new species, so they choose a cheap motel.
Why did they work in a motel room? The article kinda implies it had something to do with Trump’s funding cuts, but unless I missed something the connection wasn’t made explicit.
I think it's mainly to be close to the sample collection area while also having a place to do microscopy in semi-privacy. Looking at their equipment, I think they bought everything out of pocket and pay for the hotel on their own.
non-paywall (perm): https://archive.ph/QpBF1
Super cool, and I bet housekeeping loved tidying up after turning a motel room into a street biology lab. Honestly, I think I’d prefer to stay in a room previously used to cook meth.
You think pond water is the worst thing an $80 motel room has seen?
> Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass.
I don’t know, that goes a little above and beyond IMO. One typically doesn’t do science in a house-type setting, for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.
Probably poetic license. You can look at the pictures and see everything looks very clean.
The jugs are sealed. We can't see any "overflowing" buckets. Looking at some water samples under a microscope is not really that messy.
> for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom
For some reason this is a commonplace in the UK.
Yeah....
I had a colleague who walked the tiled floor in front of pissoirs in socks..
Ugh, I just realised my imagination is too good :)
> for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.
someone should inform the orange POTUS of this: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/did-donald-trump-j...