Teledyne CETAC Blog

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.

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.

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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).