Sometimes one of the pair was actually a lab assistant instructed by Nemeth to provide a wrong answer.

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He divorced his wife of 34 years and married Manette Hobart, 21 years his junior and the ex-wife of his chief lab assistant.

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He also had a job as a public health lab assistant in Conwy during the day, before heading to work at the Prince of Wales at night.

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Mpendulo Hashe, 30, a lab assistant, agrees.

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Rob Hemsley, a research assistant at the Media Lab, was on hand to demonstrate two of his projects.

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In the video below he talks about his first summer job, as an office assistant at a federal research lab in Maryland, where his responsibilites included mopping up the mess after safety showers were tested.

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Professor Latanya Sweeney, director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard, along with her research assistant and two students scraped data on 1, 130 people of the now more than 2, 500 who have shared their DNA data for the Personal Genome Project.

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Started in 1998, the Tinmith project is the brainchild of Dr Wayne Piekarski who is Assistant Director of the University's Wearable Computer Lab.

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