Category Archives: Contamination Control

Nonwoven or Knitted? When It Comes to Wipes, What’s the Difference?

Within the cleanroom or contamination-controlled environment, one of the most useful pieces of equipment is the wiper. From preparing work surfaces to cleaning up after spills, the wiper is expected to perform perfectly whatever the task. We depend on them every day, but how much do we really know about them? What’s the difference between [Read More…]

What is a Level 4 Biosafety Laboratory?

corona-virus

A Global Response to Coronavirus. In a headline image a floodlit cruise ship sits somberly in dock. In the foreground, buses ferrying passengers across the tarmac vanish into the dark Yokohama night. Flashing lights cast a red glow onto the metal fences separating the liner from the port, illuminating the quiet drama playing out under [Read More…]

Retrieving Clean Samples From Mars

clean-samples-from-mars

Welcome to 2020! A new year and a new decade that’s ripe with possibility and opportunity. A time to take stock, change life up a little (or a lot), and refocus on priorities. Maybe for you it’s a renewed commitment to better health? More conscious curation of your social media stream? Or perhaps it’s that [Read More…]

How the ‘Hidden’ Internet May Be Causing Injury and Death

e-cig-dark_web

Habits can be hard to break. That impulse purchase that breaks our budget, that extra slice of pizza despite our diets, that glass of wine to relax on a Friday evening. Whatever the form of our own personal kryptonite, habitual behaviors are a sort of neural wiring and as such ingrained and a real challenge [Read More…]

Will Hayabusa-2 Reveal the Secrets of the Origin of the Universe?

National flag of Japan on clear blue sky

Recently there has been much talk about the process and ethics of moving materials that may be subject to later analysis and scrutiny into ‘secure storage.’ But the quarantining of assets such as, shall we say ‘electronic data,’ is not the only target of enhanced protection and safeguarding. In fact, around 195 million miles from [Read More…]

Can Ethylene Oxide Ever Be Considered Safe?

EtO-Sterilization

Let’s face it, no-one is getting any younger. Even the fittest, most active and health-conscious among us will confront a health challenge at some point in our life and, as we age, those concerns tend to become more complex and require more careful treatment. Where youngsters can get away with the trauma of the occasional [Read More…]

Colorful Cleanrooms and Cochlear Implants

Conceptual image about human hearing

Just a couple of decades ago, the concept of biohacking – deliberately blurring the biological line between man and machine – was little more than just that: a concept, confined mainly to the avant garde of science fiction and futurism. And this was with good reason. When we think of enhancing human abilities with the [Read More…]

Lab-Grown Leather: When Contamination Control Meets Chanel

leather . Rolls of gray genuine leather isolated on white background

From way back in the Stone Age to our current Silicon Age, we have labeled periods of our development as a species by the materials we have come to master: stone, bronze, iron, and so on.(1) And, at each stage, our adoption of nature’s materials has also brought with it the development of other consumables [Read More…]

Cadaver Bones vs. Synthetic

Radiologist checking an x-ray image

Near to an abandoned Mayan temple in the steamy jungles of Guatemala, camouflaged beneath a matrix of overgrown vine and lianas, nestles a small medical clinic catering to the needs of, at most, a handful of patients. A private facility, not marked on any known map, the clinic is an important link in the supply [Read More…]

Contamination Control vs Embryotoxicity

Mitochondria, a membrane-enclosed cellular organelles, which produce energy Mitochondria , Cell energy and Cellular respiration Mitochondrial disease Mitochondrial DNA

When you hear the phrase ‘designer babies,’ what springs most readily to mind? It’s an emotionally, socially, and politically loaded term that’s come to represent much of what’s ethically questionable in genetic research. Perhaps we might think of the movie Gattaca (that we referenced last week) in which genetics equal destiny. Or the 2003 German [Read More…]