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.

With chillers, the solution is the same for achieving temperature control, cost-effective cooling protocols, energy savings, and long operating life: mechanical and operational efficiency.

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.

Advances in computer hardware and software, data storage and processing, optics, systems and instrumentation, labeling agents, and reagents have all contributed to the current surge in imaging in the life sciences.

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.

Microwave digestion in concentrated acid reliably eliminates sample matrix while rendering metals to species appropriate for analysis by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry or atomic absorption.

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

Laboratory shakers come in a variety of configurations, including orbital, horizontal, incubator, tumbling, roller, overhead, rotator, and the subject of this article, rocking shakers. Within these categories, numerous
variables are possible: physical size and sample capacity, speed adjustment, shaking direction, sample pitch, direct temperature control through heating or cooling coils, and environment control through enclosures or use within incubators.

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

Refractometer manufacturers quote accuracy and reproducibility to the fourth, fifth, and sometimes even the sixth decimal places. A good manufacturer will only advertise this level of accuracy after carefully running standards.