I particularly enjoy this time of year: Warm evenings, late sunset, the sky illuminated in a wide variety of colors between blue, yellow and red. This fantastic mixture makes me relax and helps me pre...
The analysis of metals is commonly performed on all types of waters and foodstuffs to make sure the water we drink is free from toxic lead and the food we eat does not contain the highly toxic inorgan...
As countries across the world accelerate their efforts to move away from fossil fuels, lithium ion batteries have rapidly become established as a key component in the drive to greener energy alternati...
This week, I had to carry out a task I rarely need to do these days. One of the lamps in the ceiling light blew when I was preparing the coffee maker for its daily service. While searching unsuccessfu...
In a recent poll I carried out about sustainability initiatives, a lot of the respondents replied that they considered new, more efficient agricultural practices such as vertical and precision agricul...
Hello again to those of you who joined my first and second ICP-MS expeditions through the Group 1 and Group 2 elements of the Periodic Table respectively, and a warm welcome to those of you who have j...
The days of limiting your routine trace elemental analysis workflow productivity are over. The launch of a new series of inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) instruments ...
Welcome back to those of you who joined my first ICP-MS expedition through Group 1 of the Periodic Table (the alkali metals), and hello to those of you who have just joined me here!Our expedition cont...
The Periodic Table is one of the most familiar creations in the world of chemistry. Since Dmitry Mendeleev first proposed that different elements could be related together in rows and columns accordin...
Does your lab work with a variety of samples that need to be analyzed like acids, water, rocks, or maybe even stardust?Performing multi-element determination of unknown samples containing major, minor...
On a recent flight, I came to appreciate the ability to reduce the background din of fellow passengers and, more importantly, the unavoidable roar of the jet engine. If that noise wasn’t there, I’d de...
It’s no surprise we’re having a spectacular week at Pittcon 2018. There is so much innovation to discuss and new solutions to discover.Here’s the scoop on a couple of them:The next-generation Thermo S...
One of the more annoying tasks that I find myself having to perform at least once every few days is cleaning my glasses. I initially try wiping them with my shirt, but that only succeeds in spreading ...
We’ve got historyAround one hundred years ago J. J. Thomson was busy researching how charged particles can be separated by their mass-to-charge ratio, a technique that became known as mass spectrometr...
Have you checked your calendar lately? The USP guidelines for elemental impurities, Chapters <232>, <233> and <2232> are scheduled to be implemented in less than 1 year from now! Hopefully you’re not ...
What is Robustness?This seventh in a blog series on robustness and its role in enhancing lab optimization processes focuses on organic elemental analyzers (OEA). The series takes a critical look at th...
Hello again, scientists!It’s a wrap for day 2 at Pittcon 2017 in Chicago, and what a day it has been!So much has happened already, but I am especially excited about the debut of the brand new Thermo S...
Trace Elements in Pharmaceuticals – The Details on USP <232> and ICH Q3DThe arrival of 2017, following as it does on the back of a politically momentous 2016, heralds the start of the one year countdo...
Although it might seem longer, quadrupole ICP-MS technology has only existed since the early 1980s. What we recognise as ICP-MS (inductively coupled plasma - mass spectrometry) started life as the com...
Christmas season is upon us – it has been here since the moment Halloween ended. Here in the U.S., Thanksgiving is not even a fully recognized holiday anymore. It’s become the “we’re halfway to Christ...
I love being a homeowner because it gives me the freedom to take on small home repair projects and makes me a superhero mom to my kids. The other day, my son scraped his knee while playing outside. Wh...
How many of you are you familiar with “I, Robot?” No, I’m not referring to the 2004 action, science fiction movie starring the handsome Mr. Will Smith. I’m talking about Isaac Asimov’s collection of s...
Athletes, flavor, constitution, someone’s voice, coffee – these are all words that you might expect to be qualified with the word “robust.” It’s a great description and creates a nice word picture. Ho...
I found myself laughing uncontrollably as I pulled into the grocery store parking lot last week. I was sitting at the traffic light entrance to the shopping complex when my rearview mirror was suddenl...
We’ve all been there. It’s the first of the month and you have a pile of bills waiting to be paid. The kids are in bed and you sit down at your computer to get them paid before you finish washing dish...
For an application chemist, challenging sample matrices are as exciting as letting a small child loose in a toy store. This was especially true for me. Two particularly challenging sample sets immedia...
Two years without worry? If you’re anything like me, even a week free from worry seems like an impossible dream. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I was driving my kids to school, talking to my son ...
In one of my previous blog posts, I told a series of anecdotal hiccups that happened to me during my days as a trace elemental application chemist. After reading several comments and stories, it’s nic...
Done! Another successful day measuring elemental impurities with my ICP-MS. I was quite proud of the customized flow injection setup I’d constructed for determining traces of Cu in volume-limited samp...
With a background as a chemist performing elemental analysis, I can remember an instance when I was rushing to analyze multiple sample sets on my ICP-OES in the same week. I had completed the first se...
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