Sometimes when you get scientific data that doesn’t make sense, the best use of your time is to say “well that’s weird,” and just redo the experiment. I’ve been in many labs where strange data, be it unknown proteins in a mass spectrometry sample or unknown shapes under an electron microscope, have gotten people’s minds aflutter as they try to figure out what it all means. Is it contamination, is it scientifically interesting, is it something that should be expected but we just don’t know about it? Humans are innately curious, scientists most of all, so when presented with a mystery it’s natural to want to solve it. And a scientific mystery should be easier to solve than most because not only are the experiments set up with numerous controls that can be checked against, but there is a wealth of data in the literature that might point to an answer. When you see something you don’t recognize, it’s easy to dive deep into the literature searching for some paper or clue which might tell you what you’re looking at.

But this isn’t always the best use of your time. Sometimes stuff is just weird for dumb reasons and if you spend weeks trying to figure out why then that’s weeks you’re not spending working on your actual projects. Chasing false leads can also blind you to the more important (if less mysterious) true leads that you should be following. All this to say, my lab is currently in the midst of a mystery that I don’t think is very important and I wish we could all just agree it’s mysterious and get back to more mundane but solvable problems.