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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…

Cybersecurity plays a more prominent role in today’s laboratories. Digitalization, remote work, and cloud applications make labs more connected and vulnerable to security breaches. Strong password policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA) improve security, though at a price. Security practices force laboratory workers to enter log-in credentials several times an hour, interrupting their workflows throughout the day. The resulting security fatigue…

Consolidating aspects of your lab’s operations within a laboratory information management system (LIMS) improves your lab’s information security, in part, by controlling access to client information and testing data. Access control is a two-stage process comprised of: Authentication: The verification of a user’s identity, and Authorization: The granting of limited access privileges within the system. This blog post will discuss…

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,…

Download PDF In Murfreesboro, Arkansas you can visit Crater Diamonds State Park and with a little digging, you’ll walk out with a diamond1. One visitor walked out with an 8.52-carat gem. In Franklin, New Jersey and nearby Sterling Hill, you can find 350 different mineral species, two dozen of which haven’t been found anywhere else2. The Jade Cove Trail in…

When shopping for a laboratory information management system (LIMS), it’s best to remind yourself of the old idiom “you get what you pay for.” The number of businesses offering LIMS software has grown significantly over the past few decades, and cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) providers are the new norm. The global LIMS market was valued at $1.3 billion…

When you hear the word “metallurgy,” what comes to mind? For this author, the first thought was an allergy to metals. Boy, was I wrong! Metallurgy is a branch of science and technology concerned with the properties of metals and their production and purification. If that sounds fascinating yet a bit removed from your daily life, you would be mistaken.…