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BLOGS

So I’ll be blogging again. Watch this space!

This is just a quick note to let you know that after a scandalously long period of silence, I’ll be blogging on this site again. The reason for the long silence? Well, I’ve been extremely busy with new developments for metabolic measurement at Sable Systems, finishing the second edition of my…

new content!

May 14, 2025
Continuous Metabolic Phenotyping – How Continuous is “Continuous”?

UPDATE added June 2019: Since writing this blog post, I’ve re-thought the topic of continuous vs. multiplexed metabolic measurement! This post fails to consider the effect of the cage time constant, which substantially reduces, and sometimes entirely eliminates, the advantages of continuous vs. multiplexed metabolic measurement. I’ll be dealing with this…

Continuous metabolic phenotyping, high temporal resolution, metabolic measurement, system comparisons

May 14, 2025
Sex, lies, and water vapor

OK, don’t get your hopes up. This will be the last mention of sex in this blog entry. However, we will deal at length with lies and water vapor, especially lies (OK, OK, let’s just call it simple misunderstandings) about the feasibility of using direct water vapor measurement to correct mathematically…

gas analysis, gas drying, water vapor compensation, water vapor dilution

May 22, 2025
Tiny Food Intake Events (Micro-Intakes) Can be Important!

Many food intake events (= food uptake events) are too small for legacy “food intake measurement systems” or metabolic phenotyping systems to detect. Each of these feeding events corresponds to a neurological signal to feed, even if the actual amount is small. As such, they convey important behavioral information. I can…

food intake, micro-intake events, satiation, water intake

May 22, 2025
Combining a metabolic cage (with urine and feces collection) and respirometry: It’s easy!

In some fields of research, a difficult balancing act exists between answering different questions. For example, a researcher may need to measure metabolic rates, while also needing quantitative measurements of urine and feces output. Measuring compounds in the urine is often key to understanding questions such as the biochemical pathways by…

feces, metabolic cage, urine

May 23, 2025
Distinguishing individual food uptake in communally housed mice using RFID

Mice are communal beasts, just like rats. They live in groups, and separating them – as required for measuring food intake / food uptake or energy expenditure – stresses them, elevating cortisol levels and leading to to a host of unwanted side-effects. Using the right technology, however, obtaining separate food uptake…

communal housing, food intake, food uptake, identifying individual mice, isolation stress, RFID

May 23, 2025