THERE’S no doubt in my mind about the, erm, hottest story in science this week – although I have already given up hope of ever properly understanding it. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany,…
Category: research
Continuous flow reactions made easier for simplified chemical synthesis
SYNTHESIS capabilities in the laboratory can be improved using a new range of modular flow systems based on the Binary Pump Module (BPM) and FlowSyn flow reactor from Uniqsis, says the company. The original FlowSyn flow reactor is described as…
Weekly news: the science of seasonal spending
IT CANNOT have escaped your attention that, here in the western world at least, we are currently in the middle of the annual panic-inducing spendfest we call Christmas. The wallet-emptying season seems to start earlier each year, presaged by the…
Cooling stage is ‘breakthrough’ in cryogenic cell imaging
DIFFERENT imaging techniques offer different advantages to the researcher, and the holy grail of microscopy would be to combine all the benefits of the various techniques without any of their disadvantages. Linkam says that its new Cryo-Correlative Cooling Stage moves…
Microarrays beat karyotyping in this prenatal research study
A ‘LANDMARK’ study which is boosting understanding of prenatal abnormalities has also shown that microarrays enabled researchers to detect smaller aberrations than traditional karyotyping, reports Agilent. The three-year study, published last week in New England Journal of Medicine by researchers…
Weekly news: Forget microfluidics, the new frontier is femtofluidics
I’VE BEEN following developments in microfluidics for a couple of decades now, since I first got my hands on a prototype glass chip in a German development laboratory in the 1990s. After asking my hosts very nicely, they reluctantly opened…
Harvesting light with flash photolysis spectrometer
RESEARCH at the University of Connecticut, USA, into plant light harvesting complexes has made use of a LP920 flash photolysis spectrometer, reports Edinburgh Instruments. A paper in the journal Photosynthesis Research examines the efficiency of variants of the Peridinin-Chlorophyll a-Protein…
The latest trends in nucleotide innovation
LINK Technologies reports that it has observed a significant increase in requests for vitamin-modified oligo precursors, following on from the increasing use of vitamin-modified oligonucleotides in life science research. The company is a certified specialist in the provision of phosphoramidites…
Nanoscale thermal analysis to improve drug delivery
AT THE University of East Anglia, UK , post-doctoral researcher Jonathan Moffat is studying the delivery of drugs with poor water solubility, and looking in particular at the characterisation of delivery systems. His team creates solid dispersions using a variety…
Weekly news: Squeezing the Juice from a frozen lake
I’M GENUINELY intrigued by the reports which have surfaced in the last few days from the deep drilling project in Antarctica, which has found thriving microbial colonies in very hostile conditions in a sub-glacial lake. It has long been suggested…