The Pocket Card Monthly QR Exclusive - March 2025

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March sale: Buy 2, get 3 FREE Science Stickers

OK, it’s time to basically give these away, given the hard times our community is facing for STEM research funding. This is the best deal we can give where we don’t lose money every order. Grab a sticker for your upcoming rally or show your support for science (and diversity in our STEM workforce) on your laptop, Stanley, or notebook.

Visit our stickers collection here, add 5 to your cart and 3 of them will be free! We also don’t upcharge shipping at all, so this is purely just getting these out into the world when we need them the most! If the code doesn’t auto-apply, use “STANDUPFORSCIENCE” at checkout.

Science Themed sticker collection by Genius Lab Gear

Tricks for staying focused in challenging times for STEM:

With all of the proposed funding cuts and attacks on our core scientific institutions the last few weeks, it’s been far too easy to grab my phone and doom-scroll. I wanted to share my new daily process that’s keeping these distractions at bay until the end of the day.

I’ve talked before about time-blocking - where you make an hour-by-hour plan for your entire day and then just execute that plan. This forces you to estimate how long each thing will take and gives you a sense of urgency to stay on track. I used to do this in a notebook, but this month I finally implemented a tool that made it digital and added one crucial element: a count-down timer.

Sunsama prompts you every week to arrange a weekly plan with weekly objectives, and every morning to lay out your daily plan. It imports your tasks from tools like Asana, Notion, Todoist, Trello, or Monday and you drag them onto your calendar. Then you enter “focus mode” and a floating countdown timer keeps the task and time left in your vision on your screen. This has let me plow through tasks and avoid reaching for my phone or reflexively check emails mid-way through a task.

There’s so much more to the tool but I won’t get into that now. I would only try it if you’re already using a common task tracking app consistently. Otherwise just set a Pomodoro timer for each thing you’re doing. My personal Sunsama referral link will get you 1 free month and if you use it longer, I’ll get a free month too!

Just for fun: Science Cartoon

If you want to argue with conspiracy theorists, you must first learn to think like one.

Science cartoons by Tom Gauld.

March behind-the-scenes news:

Our Maternity Lab Coat has a name!

On International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we unveiled the name of our new maternity lab coat, based on voting results from over 170 participants. It will be called “The Alma”, after Alma Levant Hayden. It’s quite fitting that she was the top choice. Her first name is also the Latin word for “nourishing”, including the common term “alma mater” which translates to “nourishing mother”.

Alma Levant Hayden was an American Chemist, mother of two, and by all accounts the first African-American woman to work in a science position at an agency in Washington, D.C. (per ACS). She worked at both the NIH and FDA, and her work was critical in exposing a highly touted anti-cancer serum as being nothing more than a creatine supplement. Our first maternity lab coat will be named “The Alma” in honor of her important contributions and trailblazing while also balancing motherhood and family life.

Black lab coat fabric finished

The fabric weaving is finished and our black lab coats are about to start coming to life! We received a few yards from the production lot and showed it off on a 2-minute Instagram video. I can’t wait to see how it looks on some of you in a lab setting!