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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that each year, food-borne illnesses sicken 48 million people (or 1 in 6), send 128,000 people to the hospital, and cause 3,000 fatalities in the United States alone.1 With these kinds of figures, it is evident that being ready for a recall or other potential catastrophe is crucial when a…

Imagine waiting a lifetime for an idea to become a reality, and then it is over in 100 trillionths of a second. That’s exactly what happened to a group of scientists at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California at 1:03 a.m. on December 5, 2022, when 192 giant lasers blasted a tiny cylinder of hydrogen…

In 2010, the United States Department of State launched the Feed the Future Initiative. Coordinated by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the objectives were clear: advance global agricultural development, increase food production and security, and improve nutrition in vulnerable populations. Since the launch of the program over a decade ago, Feed the Future has developed a network of…

The New England area around Boston is known today for medical and biotechnology research and development, overtaking the dominance of the computer industry that flourished here for decades. In the mid-1800s, another industry — textiles — dominated the area with mills spotted throughout eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Today, if you drive along route I-495, you’ll find many brick textile…

A laboratory information management system (LIMS) can positively impact multiple aspects of operations for many different types of laboratories, including food and beverage laboratories. These labs exist to ensure safety and quality in the production and management of food and beverage production operations. These laboratories use various informatics solutions to ensure operational efficiency by improving, for example, inventory management, sample…

The agriculture industry and its affiliate laboratories cover a wide range of operations related to the cultivation of food crops. Global reliance on agriculture makes it essential to diligently test everything from fundamental soil and irrigation water to the pesticides used to cultivate much of our global food supply. In particular, testing the effects of chemicals such as pesticides is…

Oil and natural gas are fossil fuels, formed underground from the remains of plants and animals. Since the mid-1800s, the United States has been drilling wells and extracting oil and gas. The oil is refined into gasoline and diesel for vehicle and jet fuels, and distillates are extracted as petrochemicals used for a range of manufacturing products. Natural gas is…

Laboratory information security is not merely a question of who can access your systems. What you allow people to access once they are in matters just as much. In a previous blog post, we discussed the first pillar of access control: authentication, or the process of verifying user identity. In this post, we will discuss the second pillar, authorization, and…

Download PDF When I was younger, we had black and white TV (three channels!) and were told that oil came from dinosaurs; it said so in the TV commercials. Now we have color displays and different ideas about where oil comes from (or how much is left). There are different theories about oil’s origins. The prevailing theory has oil coming…

Infectious diseases are still among the leading causes of death worldwide. In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that infectious diseases were emerging at an unprecedented rate. Over 40 infectious diseases have been discovered in the past 50 years, including AIDS, SARS, MERS, Ebola, avian influenza, swine flu, Zika, and most recently COVID-19. Some infectious diseases have even reemerged,…