Page 10 - Microbiology and Life Science News
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October 24, 2012
At Sterlitech Corporation, we take great pride in producing the best laboratory filtration products on the market. It’s of one of our specialties, after all. But even we have to admit that filters aren’t always the most electrifying products to talk about. Until someone decides they should be. A team of chemists led by Anthony Kucernak, from the Imperial College London, decided to do exactly that in a study to determine if they could use Sterlitech’s silver membranes as electrodes and improve the performance of alkaline anion exchange membrane fuel cells (AAEMFC). AAEMFCs are a new twist on one the oldest and well-developed fuel cell technologies: the alkaline fuel cell. Owing to their nearly 70% power efficiency, NASA chose alkaline fuel cells to provide electricity with the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle. AAEMFCs usually have electrodes made from carbon, but the performance of carbon electrodes in the cell tends to degrade because of unwanted secondary reactions. According to the
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October 16, 2012Today, we have a video that shows, in dramatic fashion, just how simple and efficient Sterlitech's Autofil Laboratory Filtration System is to use in comparison to traditional filter funnel assemblies. In this video, we have Jason on the Autofil System and Kristina on the traditonal filter funnel racing to filter 1000 mL of red water. Jason has to fill four 250 mL Autofil funnel assemblies, while Kristina has to fill two 500 mL filter funnel assemblies. Lets see how this plays out:
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October 10, 2012
---->As you sit in front of your computer reading this, a myriad of thoughts are probably running through your mind. "Where is this story going?" "What am I going to have for lunch today?" "This blog is awesome!" But what you probably aren't thinking about is how you are actually able to read this. How often have you spared a thought about how the light from the screen is passing through the cornea and lens of your eye to trigger the light-sensitive photo-receptors in your retina and send the visual information to your brain? While you consider that, also consider sending a message of congratulations to Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka for winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today. Their work over the past few decades has revealed the inner workings of G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR), a family of cell receptors which includes the photo-receptors in your eyes, and receptors for adrenaline, taste and smell. GPCRs are a crucial signal pathway for cells, allowing them to detect
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October 09, 2012
In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with one of the most famous thought experiments in history, Schrödinger's cat. The premise of the experiment has a cat in a box, with a capsule of poison gas connected to a Geiger counter. If a radioactive atom decays and triggers the counter the capsule opens and the cat will die. Quantum mechanics, which govern radioactive decay, state that the atom is in a superposition state of both not yet decayed and having decayed. The cat, by extension, is both dead and alive in the box, a seemingly paradoxical outcome. Quantum superposition is so sensitive to interaction with the environment that any attempt at observation ends the superposition and the cat becomes either dead or alive. Today, we are happy to offer our congratulations to Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for independently devising ways to directly observe individual quantum particles in a superposition state without destroying
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October 08, 2012
Congratulations to Shinya Yamanaka and Sir John B. Gurdon for winning the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine! They kick-off this year's Nobel Prize season with their amazing discovery that mature, specialized cells can be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells. In 1962, John B. Gurdon replaced the nucleus of an egg cell of a frog with the nucleus of an intestinal cell. The modified egg cell developed into a normal tadpole, clearly demonstrating that the DNA of specialized cells still contain the information necessary to develop into tissue cell in the frog. More than 40 years later, Shinya Yamanaka introduced a few genes into the cells of mice and reprogrammed them to become pluripotent stem cells, which can develop into any type of cell in the body. The medical potential of their discoveries cannot be overstated. The ability to take tissue cells from an organism and then culture them into a different type of cell opens new avenues to treat diseases and injury that may be untreatable
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August 27, 2012
Bacteria is something of a dirty word. They’re everywhere, invisible and insidious, waiting for their chance to climb into your body and wreak havoc. But before you reach for your hand sanitizer and start counting your sick days, take a moment to consider the many uses that people have found for bacteria. Bacteria are essential in making yogurt and cheese, fixing nitrogen for our crops, and they help us digest our food. In the near future, Damian Palin would like to add mining the ocean to the list of things bacteria do for us. Damian Palin, a geomicrobiologist working in Singapore, has been developing bacteria strains that can be used to precipitate useful minerals out of the briny effluent produced by desalination plants. If he is successful, he would be killing two birds with one stone: useful minerals that would otherwise go to waste could be extracted, and the highly concentrated brine could be treated before it is pumped back into the ocean. Biomining is already used to extract gold,
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July 23, 2012
The EZgrip™ Carboy is a pioneering fluid storage and transfer system now being offered Sterlitech Corporation as part our expanding line of Microbiology and Life Sciences equipment. The EZgrip™ Carboy features an ergonomic, space-efficient rectangular shape and a line of interchangeable caps and spigots that come together to make it ideally suited to handle any task in life science, bioprocess, and pharmaceutical manufacturing laboratories. The EZgrip™ and its dizzying array of accessories comprise the most versatile and usable fluid storage and transfer system available on the market today. To learn more about this product please, visit the EZgrip™ Carboy page.
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February 24, 2012Yesterday news broke that the possible revolutionary findings of the physics experiments that detected particles traveling faster than the speed of light may have been corrupted by two mechanical errors, one of them being a loose cable. Since proof of particles breaking the speed of light would contradict Einstein’s special theory of relativity, not to mention certain principles of quantum mechanics, the initial report in September was met with a great deal of skepticism from the scientific community, and even members of the team that released the data expressed doubts at the time. Since the announcement, the research team and physicists around the world have been reviewing the results to see if they could detect any flaws in the experiment. The tests were performed by the OPERA collaboration, a research venture between CERN and the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. Initially they measured neutrinos traveling from one location to another 450 miles away and found that some arrived
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February 16, 2012
Marine biology and Oceanography organizations have long used a variety of filter media to assist with their research. While the ways in which filtration supplies can be used are as diverse as the life forms that live under the waves, here we highlight a couple of these applications that have previously been mentioned in published papers to give you an idea about some ways filters can be purposed in marine research.
In a study on mercury content of the ocean area between Antarctica and Tasmania, researchers from the Ifremer Institute used the 0.2 Micron, 47 mm polycarbonate membrane filters to filter samples of seawater and brine prior to determining their mercury content through atomic fluorescence spectroscopy. The PCTE membranes were used in conjunction with Sartorius filtration devices and a Nalgene vacuum pump to attain filtered water in volumes between 100 and 1000 mL. By applying this filtration setup the researchers were able to find patterns in how mercury travels the ocean.
Another
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February 02, 2012
In a case of good news/bad news for industrial workers, OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is getting a budget increase for 2012, but the money comes with a delay on a proposal that would further limit workers’ exposure to carcinogenic silica dust. The backstory: Last February OSHA sent a proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget that called for a reduction in the silica PEL¹ (Permissible Exposure Limit), which would be the first change to this regulation since the 1960’s². The plan was to get the approval of the OMB and then open up the proposal to public debate after 90 days, but one year later and OSHA is still waiting. The reason for the snag is most likely because of concerns raised by the industries that would be financially affected by stricter controls. Some opponents of the new OSHA proposal argue that the government needs to do a better job of enforcing the current rules before making any changes to the exposure level. Congress seems to
