In biopharmaceutical research and manufacturing, many processes involve sophisticated separations. One of the most advanced separation technologies is ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC). “There are two reasons to use UHPLC,” says Ken Cook, sales support expert, bioseparations and bio market Europe for Thermo Fisher Scientific (Waltham, MA). “The first is speed, and the second is resolution.”

A fluid's complexity and the questions to be answered determine the right technology

Accessing the brain to unravel its structure and function is one of the greatest scientific challenges. This delicate structure consists of many regions—all made from many, many parts and even more connections—that communicate through chemical and electrical mechanisms.

As the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen might seem easy to come by, except that it’s usually bonded to oxygen in water or bound in organic compounds. Many applications, though, require pure hydrogen.

Combining chromosomes from different organisms started as soon as someone created a hybrid. “In natural breeding,” says geneticist Kulvinder S. Gill of Washington State University in Pullman, “we transfer genes through hybridization—transferring pollen from one plant to another.” He adds, “It can, for example, be pollen from wheat to rye or rye to wheat.”

When a scientist needs to concentrate a sample that’s in a volatile liquid—like acetone, acetonitrile, or methanol—a nitrogen evaporator can do the job. As a result, scientists use this technology in sample preparation in environmental, polymer science, quality control, and toxicology labs, plus others.

Big data might bring more benefits to drug discovery than to any other field. For one thing, discovering a new drug turns out to be incredibly difficult. On average, a pharmaceutical company tries about 10,000 drug candidates for every one that ends up on the market. Plus, the process of discovering and developing a new drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars and takes more than a decade—some say more for both measurements.

When working with a biological safety cabinet (BSC), safety comes first. Nonetheless, it’s easy to make mistakes that can compromise a BSC’s performance.

Once gas chromatography (GC) separates a sample into its component parts, a detector identifies them. All detectors provide certain benefits and struggle with some limitations. Whether some feature is beneficial or detrimental, however, depends on the sample and the application.

Some scientific and even industrial stirring applications seem no more complex than mixing milk in your coffee, but others demand much more control. In fact, some of the most demanding stirring applications might not even sound so complicated, including dissolving powdered milk in water, combining oil and water, incorporating pigments in a base coat of paint, and so on.

Clinicians and patients alike know that traditional cancer treatments beat up the person as much as the cancer. Success arises only if the treatment kills the cancer before the patient. For decades, researchers sought solutions that attacked only the cancer, not healthy tissue.

For many labs, automation provides the biggest return on sample preparation because it’s the key time-consuming bottleneck for many processes.

If a product or industry involves particles, and most do, someone analyzes the size of those particles.

For the general public, the concern over food fraud revolves around headline-grabbing examples, such as melamine—an organic compound used in plastics—appearing in infant formula from China in 2008 and beef replaced with horsemeat in the UK in 2013.