Agilent Technologies has taken an important step forward in automating sample preparation with its 7693A Automatic Liquid Sampler.

Using the Horizon Technology 8270 Carbon Cartridge Kit enables the capture of the more volatile 8270 compounds. The 8270 Carbon Cartridge Kit is designed for use with the Horizon Technology SPE-DEX 4790 Automated Extractor System, and the Oasis HLB (Hydrophilic-Lipophilic Balanced) solid phase extraction disk, developed by Horizon Technology and Waters Corporation.

Independent labs are a service business that thrives on the need to perform quality testing services to answer a variety of customer questions. Successful labs protect their customers confidentiality, meet timelines, act as the independent third party and build relationships based on customers' needs.

Since exhaust hoods are among the major expense items for research laboratories and have a huge impact on continuing operational costs, we’ve decided to provide you with information on some of the newer hood designs that offer good performance and energy conservation.

Understanding the viscosity is a crucial aspect of manufacturing operations in many industries worldwide. In order to fulfill customer demands of product consistency and quality, viscosity measurement becomes even more important.

The popularity of mass spectrometers (MS) in the food, clinical research and pharmaceutical markets has pushed labs to seek ways to improve the speed of their liquid chromatography (LC), thus increasing the throughput of their MS.

To date, we’ve experienced a year of mega-mergers with six of the top pharmaceutical players combining forces to become three major contenders. What does this mean for the affected employees and managers alike? Well, believe it or not, it can lead to employment opportunities and personal successes that otherwise may not have been considered.

Sales and revenue growth are stalled at many companies in a variety of industries. As a result, these firms have frozen or reduced laboratory budgets and in some cases have reduced laboratory staffing levels. There are several ways laboratory managers can effectively respond to these situations.

Outsourcing laboratory work is usually done on the assumption that another laboratory is able to perform the work more cheaply and/or more rapidly while maintaining adequate quality of the results. Laboratory managers must study other laboratories to determine if this assumption is correct before outsourcing work to them.

In tough economic times many companies slash their training budgets, thinking that training is expendable. This, according to the author, is ill-advised. Training is not an expense to be minimized; it is an investment that pays dividends by helping workers do their jobs more effectively so that they can positively impact a company's bottom line.

For most laboratories, turnover is low and tenures are high, so the opportunity and necessity to conduct interviews is limited. But, when it's necessary, the author argues that behavioral event interviews work best because the questioning format requires on-the-spot self-analysis that is difficult to prepare for except through life experiences.

So far, nearly 5,000 grants totalling over $1 billion have been awarded by NIH. Most have been awarded to research labs at large universities and small colleges, while some have been awarded to small, privately owned research and product development companies.