Analyze This
Combat food fraud: Meet Misa
What’s on your plate? Food fraud is an ever-present danger around the world. Despite increased regulations, huge scandals still occur regularly, such as deliberately tainted infant formula (2008), or the horse meat affair in the UK due to improper labelling (2013)....
Trace metal analysis with solid-state electrodes – Part 1
This new series of blog posts covers a range of new sensors suitable for the determination of «heavy metals» using voltammetric methods.The quantification of heavy metal ions plays an important role in many applications, including environmental monitoring, waste...
Comprehensive water analysis: combining titration, IC, and direct measurement in one setup
If you perform water analyses on a regular basis, then you know that analyzing different parameters for drinking water can be quite time-consuming, expensive, and it requires significant manual labor. In this article, I’d like to show you an example of wider...
Virus detection using screen-printed electrodes
With significant global viral outbreaks becoming the norm rather than generational outliers, it is imperative that fast, sensitive, and cost-effective testing is available to the masses. It is only by a concerted effort of testing and tracing that viral outbreaks can...
Save money by using automated titration systems
Perhaps you read my last blog entry: «Why consider automation – even for simple titrations» and liked the idea of disengaging yourself from the tedious, repetitive, and exhausting manual routine lab work by automating analyses and increasing the accuracy and...
Measuring herbicides in drinking water
It’s springtime in the northern hemisphere, and with rising temperatures comes increased use of herbicides on agricultural crops and in public spaces. In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published a report which stated that one such...
Photometric complexometric titration
…and how to choose the right wavelength for indicationComplexometric titration was discovered in 1945 when Gerold Schwarzenbach observed that aminocarboxylic acids form stable complexes with metal ions, which can change their color by addition of an indicator. From...
A History of Chemistry – Part 4
This article is the final installment in our four-part series on the history of chemistry. Did you miss the others? Don’t worry – you can find them all here:The industrialization of electrochemistry Michael Faraday (1791–1867) had a modest upbringing. He was 14 years...
What to consider during back-titration
Titrations can be classified in various ways: by their chemical reaction (e.g., acid-base titration or redox titration), the indication method (e.g., potentiometric titration or photometric titration), and last but not least by their titration principle (direct...
A History of Chemistry – Part 3
This article is the third in our four-part series on the history of chemistry. Missed the first two? Don’t worry – you can read both of them here:Chemistry and society: An explosive pair It is the early 19th century, and industrialization in Europe is in full swing....