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.

When implementing laboratory informatics systems, managers should consider both current and anticipated workflows, says Trish Meek, director of product strategy at Thermo Fisher Scientific (Waltham, MA). “They need complete agreement and buy-in from business owners and IT. Managers should consider the agility their business requires, for example, when bringing in a new product or instrument.”

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.

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration promulgated its good laboratory practices  (GLPs) for animal toxicology labs in 1979, the regulations were considered a breakthrough in compliance assurance.

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.