This month's cover story invites you to take a walk through your lab and look at everything as though seeing it for the first time, through unbiased eyes. Is there unnecessary clutter? Have your labcoats outlived their usefulness? What is the condition of your lab's extension cords? This simple exercise can help you develop a keener eye towards lab safety.

When managers think of optimizing laboratory performance, they might think of buying a new instrument. But that would be overlooking something they already have–human performance optimization in the form of cross training.

Laboratory managers and team leaders, because of their knowledge of how research on a project unfolds, often play critical roles in deciding inventorship issues. Correct inventorship has to be considered whenever one or more of your staff members submit an invention disclosure to be considered for filing as a patent application.

Retention programs are as diverse as the businesses that implement them, but an ideal retention strategy is comprised of three key elements.

Any number of variables during testing can cause inaccurate results, but most of the variables in the process can be rechecked and verified. As with most lab equipment problems, the most often overlooked is the lab’s utility power source and specifically its voltage regulation.

When purchasing used or refurbished equipment from auction sites, equipment brokers and third-party vendors, laboratories aren’t always provided with product certification to guarantee that their equipment will operate according to the manufacturer’s specifications upon arrival.

The latest equipment, instrument and system introductions to the laboratory market.

Fundamental to the process of laboratory facility planning is an understanding of some basic design principles that ensure future adaptability.

While the fundamental components of a high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) system—pumps to deliver solvent, an injector, a column for separating the constituents of a sample, a detector and computing software—have remained the same, there continues to be innovations in their design and capabilities.

Water purification systems are required for a variety of applications, all of which require different degrees of purity. With a wide range of pure water systems available, it can be difficult to know which one will provide the best results for your lab.

The majority of the zetameters are based on the electrophoresis measuring principle where the zeta potential for a colloidal system is analyzed by measurement of the electrophoretic mobility of the particles.

Currently nanoparticles are measured by most particle size analyzers using scattered light; however in some cases this presents many physical restrictions and also requires the input of the refractive index as a measurement condition.

What application are you using the water for? This is the first question you must answer when choosing a water purification system for your lab.