on Jane Friedman site:
Science and technology are fundamental elements of many literary genres. Unfortunately, the depictions of these subjects in books and movies are entirely fiction.
A classic example of this is in the movie Avatar, when the character played by Sigourney Weaver uses a micropipette. These hand-held instruments are used in a laboratory to move tiny, precise amounts of liquid from one tube to another. They’re a vital—and expensive—piece of lab equipment.
There’s just one rule for using a micropipette: they must be held upright. If you turn a micropipette upside down, the liquid that it just picked up will get into the mechanism. And that’s exactly what Sigourney Weaver did while using a micropipette in Avatar. Amusingly, the makers of that micropipette, Eppendorf, even chided them about it on Twitter. The amount of lab equipment that’s irreparably destroyed on-screen would give university accountants a heart attack.