Teledyne CETAC Blog

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).

This past week saw the publication of yet another exceptional academic paper from Prof Vanhaecke’s A&MS research group at Ghent University.

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.