When executive director Graham Shimmield and his colleagues set out to build a new home for Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in 2009, they wanted a structure sensitive to the surroundings of the new locale on the coast of Maine. With the help of their architects, contractors, and engineers, they got just that.

For something so instrumental to keeping glassware clean, it only makes sense that maintaining the cleanliness of your lab washer is one of the keys to keeping it running properly.

After 15 years of constant improvement, S.C.A.T. SafetyCaps belong to the global safety standard in pharmaceutical and chemical laboratories. They enable operators to get solvent vapors under control and create perfect solvent conditions for their HPLC systems. The automated caps think ahead and fight health and environmental hazards directly at their origin - the solvent receptacle. 

Two features add efficiency, safety, and ease of use.

I’ve worked in hoods where a little piece of tissue paper attached to the bottom of the sash served as an indicator that it was exhausting the air. Somehow, that sounds like a prehistoric lab by today’s standards. Granted, it was a while ago, but I wasn’t using a dinosaur-era device.

Problem: Molecular biology relies on the ability to precisely target and amplify nucleic acids, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and cloning reactions benefit from precise size selection and analytical characterization of samples. For decades, researchers have used electrophoresis with agarose gels for both size selection and fragment-length distribution assessment of DNA samples for downstream assays.

Equipment for dispensing and aspirating liquids runs the gamut from handheld pipettes that cost less than $100 to mid-range benchtop units to complex, fully robotic systems that cost $1 million or more.

The program will cover key differences between hood types, proper set up and adjustment and maintaining efficient flows. OSHA standards and other applicable guidelines and regulations will be covered, including NFPA.  

It is a summer afternoon and dark clouds are rolling in. You notice that outside your laboratory windows the lightning strikes are getting closer. Your first thought is to back up your data. Your second thought is to shut down your $50,000 spectrometer so electrical surges from lightning strikes don’t kill the sensitive electronics.

An assistant professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering at Clarkson University is pioneering a new purification process that, if successful, could help millions of people without access to clean water quickly and efficiently purify water to make it safe for drinking and cooking.

In clinical lab environments, as in any laboratory using chemicals, work processes pose an inherent risk of hazardous chemical exposure for operators and for the lab environment.

For David Hemmig, director of equipment sales at Matheson Tri-Gas (Basking Ridge, NJ), the key word in on-site gas generation is reliability. He explains that a major problem with gas generators that incorporate some sort of compressor is that eventually that component fails.