Effects of chemical mixtures: Neurotoxic effects add up

Study demonstrates for the first time the toxicological relevance of chemical mixtures as they occur in humans

22-Oct-2024 - Chemicals are omnipresent today: they enter our bodies through food, air or the skin. But how do these complex mixtures of chemicals affect our health? In a study published in the journal Science, a research team from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) has shown that chemicals ...

Pocket-sized invention revolutionizes ability to detect harmful materials

The low-cost cellphone-based Raman spectrometer system can make identifications of unknown biological molecules within minutes

18-Jul-2024 - Imagine knowing what berry or mushroom is safe to eat during a hike or swiftly detecting pathogens in a hospital setting that would traditionally require days to identify. Identification and detection of drugs, chemicals and biological molecules invisible to the human eye can be made possible ...

Chemical analyses faster and more precise than ever before

A new spectroscopy method: Ultra-short light pulses enable high-precision "artificial nose"

15-Mar-2024 - Whether you want to analyze environmental samples in nature or monitor a chemical experiment, you often need highly sensitive sensors that can "sniff out" even tiny traces of a certain gas with extreme accuracy. Variants of Raman spectroscopy are often used for this purpose: Different molecules ...

Novel development for pH measurement

Innovation in sensor technology opens up new possibilities for more precise, more efficient data acquisition in the field of chemical analysis

01-Mar-2024 - Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS announces a significant advance in chemical and biochemical analysis. The team led by Dr. Olaf R. Hild, Head of the Chemical Sensor Technology Business Unit, has successfully developed a pioneering sensing layer for chip-based pH measurement has ...

Scientists deliver portable total chemical analysis without pumps and tubes

The portability of the new device enables bedside, quantitative clinical analysis or environmental analysis in the field

27-Feb-2024 - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have engineered a new micro total analysis system that quantifies a target chemical in a microfluidic chip without pumps, tubes, and expensive detectors. The compound reacts with other chemicals to produce a gas, pushing ink in a connected chamber ...

House cats’ noses may function like highly efficient chemical analysis equipment

Parallels between cat noses and gas chromatography provide new insights into mammalian evolution

04-Jul-2023 - A new computer simulation of domestic cats’ noses suggests that the convoluted nasal structures involved in their sense of smell function similarly to parallel coiled gas chromatographs—laboratory equipment used for highly efficient analysis of the chemical makeup of substances. Zhenxing Wu of ...

More complex than expected: Catalysis under the microscope

Chemical analysis on the microscopic scale has shown that the catalyst composition can vary locally even more than expected

08-Jun-2023 - At TU Wien (Vienna), scientists use microscopy techniques to observe chemical reactions on catalysts more precisely than before yielding a wealth of detail. This made clear why some effects cannot be predicted. Catalysts composed from tiny metal particles play an important role in many areas of ...

First comparative study on automated analysis methods of large data sets in microplastics research

27-Mar-2023 - The lack of uniform analytical standards currently prevents the comparability of data on microplastics in the environment. Researchers from the University of Bayreuth and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have now, for the first time, compared two ...

Miniaturized Lab-on-a-Chip for real-time Chemical Analysis of Liquids

A fingertip-sized chip replaces bulky laboratory equipment: The possible applications are extremely diverse

01-Sep-2022 - An infrared sensor has been developed at TU Wien (Vienna) that analyses the content of liquids within the fraction of a second. In analytical chemistry, it is often necessary to accurately monitor the concentration change of certain substances in liquids on a time scale of seconds. Especially in ...

Exposing what’s in tattoo ink

Ingredient lists often aren’t accurate

29-Aug-2022 - From life-like faces to elaborate nature scenes, tattoos are a true art form. Although people have decorated their bodies for millennia for ceremonial and religious reasons, many people today adorn themselves with these images as a form of self-expression. But the inks used for tattoos are ...