A new paper published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials shows the SimPrep autodilution system by Teledyne CETAC being used as a tool in researching new solar energy technologies. A team of researchers from Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands sought to understand the lifecycle of lead-based materials used in novel solar cells.
Most solar panels are currently silicon-based, but successes with newer perovskite solar cells have driven interest in this material, which has the potential to overcome silicon’s limitations in efficiency and cost. Key to bringing perovskite solar cells (PSC) to market is a thorough understanding of their environmental impact beyond taking the place of other energy sources.
Imagine going on a safari 17,000 years in the past. An international team of researchers was able to do just that by reconstructing the lifetime movement patterns of an ancient woolly mammoth. Mammoths went extinct at the end of the last ice age, so little is known about how these prehistoric giants lived—and died. But thanks to modern analytical techniques, we can begin to understand the habits of these long-gone creatures and compare them to animals still alive today.
It’s been quite a few years since femtosecond (fs) lasers appeared on the scene, and the adoption of this technology by micromachining and medical applications in the early 2000s led to a rapid acceleration of the technology providing a range of different systems, wavelengths and overall performance variants that we see today.
Climate scientists hoping to unlock the secrets of a 1.5-million-year-old ice core soon to be recovered from Antarctica have a new tool at their disposal. The Department of Environmental Sciences at Ca’Foscari University of Venice has recently assembled a new state-of-the-art LA-ICP-MS setup dedicated to ice core analysis.
Ice core science is one of the cornerstones of climate research that aims to gain a fuller picture of what our planet looked like from decades to hundreds of millennia ago. Due to the flow of glacier ice, the oldest, deepest layers of ice are also often the thinnest. Unlocking the data contained in these thin layers is a challenge requiring new high-resolution techniques.
Images produced using Teledyne CETAC laser ablation appear on the February 2020 cover of
Radiology.
A team of world-renowned scientists from Boston University School of Medicine have found that a potentially harmful chemical used in MRI scans can get left behind in sensitive areas of the brain. Contrast media (sometimes called 'dyes') are chemicals injected into the body to enhance the quality of MRI images. One of the biggest concerns in radiology in recent years is the safety of gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCAs) used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
The paper in Analytical Chemistry is titled “Sub-µm nanosecond LA-ICP-MS imaging at pixel acquisition rates above 250 Hz via a low-dispersion setup” and is authored by Dr. Stijn van Malderen, Dr. Thibaut Van Acker and Prof. Frank Vanhaecke. It provides an in-depth characterization of the Cobalt ablation chamber now released by Teledyne Photon Machines as an integral part of the Iridia laser ablation system.
After more than 18 months of extensive field testing there is a wealth of data presented, clearly demonstrating the importance of scientific collaborations when developing analytical laser ablation capabilities and giving real credibility to the commercial specifications highlighted in Teledyne’s marketing literature. This system is truly engineered by science.
The United States Pharmacopeia (USP) sets quality, purity, strength, and identity standards for medicines, food ingredients, and dietary supplements. Many USP standards are enforceable by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under US law. When standards become more stringent, testing laboratories can face new challenges.
To celebrate National Periodic Table Day (February 7 in the United States) and 2019’s International Year of the Periodic Table, here are a few of our favorite interactive periodic tables.
Teledyne CETAC and Arkansas State University completed a study to determine the concentration and normalized profiles of elements in the organs of a beach harbor porpoise (Phocaena phocaena). The carcass was stranded off the coast of Cape Cod, Ma, in 2003. Multiple elements (including Hg, Se, Cd, Zn, Cu, and Na) were detected and measured in liver and kidney samples. A thermoelectrically cooled sub-zero laser ablation sample cell (Hyphenated Solutions, Jonesboro, AR) was created for the analysis of porpoise liver and kidney tissues. The temperature-controlled cooling cell has a user programmable operational range between 0 and -30 degrees Celsius. The cooling cell was used to preserve the integrity of the sample during ablation and to evaluate the affect of sub-zero temperatures on reproducibility.
