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Public Health Labs Reveal What’s Living in Your Water
While we’re all rubber-necking the Flint water-quality crisis, municipalities around the US are taking a closer look at their own aging infrastructures. Flint, Michigan, isn’t the only city turning up […]
Earth Day Can Be Every Day in the Lab
On Earth Day, we renew our efforts to conserve energy, conserve water, reduce, reuse, and recycle. At home, it’s often easy enough with curbside pickup of recycling bins and Energy […]
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of US Food Safety
Germs are everywhere. Keeping the dangerous ones out of our stomachs is the explicit job of manufacturer food safety testing programs. With the abundance of technology available for testing and […]
Who Can Americans Trust with Food Safety?
Salmonella, E. coli, and listeria are invisible invaders, making supermarkets a scary place. Behind a facade of bright packaging and colorful produce lurks the possibility of bacterial infections that can […]
Sterilizing Prion-Contaminated Waste in Just 11 E-Z Steps!
Any facility regularly handling prions needs a good sterilization protocol. Reliable sources suggest the following minimum inactivation protocol for prion-exposed items: Carefully place prion-contaminated item in appropriate autoclave waste bag […]
Opt in for Safety with a Research-grade Tabletop Autoclave
We like to assume that if we haven’t heard about a food safety problem, that’s because no problem exists. Unfortunately, in the absence of rigorous testing, we simply have no […]
When Tabletop Autoclave Water Conservation Goes Too Far
“Ed!” Edna stood in the bathroom, brow furrowed. “Yes, honey?” Ed shuffled down the hall from his den. “Something’s wrong with the toilet. I keep flushing it, but the water […]
Special Sauce, Pathogens, and Tabletop Sterilizers
Chipotle screwed up. Big time. And a quality control department with two techs and a decent tabletop sterilizer could have prevented it all. Between August and December 2015, almost 500 […]
The Culture of Safety Starts With Good Training
We applaud the American Biological Safety Association (ABSA) and the White House for taking initiative to close gaps in biosafety and biosecurity at infectious disease laboratories. A memorandum released October […]
Solar Autoclaves Harness the Power of the Sun
The locations may be remote, with challenging terrain and weather and no electricity, but the available tech is anything other than backwards. Researchers, students, and instructors at the Massachusetts Institute […]
Autoclaves Increase Biogas Production Threefold
Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) — or biogas — is the quiet darling of alternative energy. It’s not a pretty process, fermenting organic waste materials like plant matter and manure to […]
Advanced Autoclave Food Processing Gains Foothold with U.S. Consumers
Retort packaging — the sterile, autoclaved, highly shelf-stable sealed food pouches familiar as the modern military rations (or “MRE,” for “meal read-to-eat”) — is gaining traction in the consumer food […]