Paul Heney

By Mark Jones In a normal world, vodka, nickel, palladium, and neon would have nothing in common. In our current world, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they do. All are currently experiencing supply chain disruptions due either directly to the fighting or to sanctions. Nickel and palladium come from mines. Russian mines produced about 10%…

A test tube, also known as a sample tube, is a clear cylindrical vessel with a closed bottom and an open top. Test tubes are very common in laboratory testing and experimentation. The exact design of test tubes depends on their intended use. Uses for test tubes include storing samples on the bench, refrigerator or…

Beakers are a common type of laboratory glassware used for preparing and holding solutions and other samples. A beaker is generally a cylindrical container with a flat bottom and an open top. This shape is similar to a drinking beaker. The straight cylindrical sides of a beaker distinguish it from a flask, which has sloping…

A pipette is a common laboratory tool used to transport and deliver small measured volumes of liquid. Pipettes now encompass a diverse range of instruments, with widely varying accuracy. The earliest pipettes were simple glass tubes with a narrowing tip at the bottom, and a separate a flexible bulb covering the top. Many more modern…

By Mark Jones Last month, I got caught up in the Olympic mixed doubles curling. At the start of the competition, I think it is safe to say no one guessed a team would go undefeated on the way to a gold medal. The gold-medal winning Italians were young and from a country with very…

By Becky Chambers Hennessy, contributing writer   If you haven’t heard the drumbeat from the American Chemical Society (ACS), April 17 marks the start of 2022 Chemists Celebrate Earth Week, designed to promote “the positive role that chemistry plays in the world.” But as important as that role is, let’s face it: “Chemistry” has an…

By Mark Jones We are addicted. We know it is bad, but we can’t stop. It rusts our cars, destroys our bridges, damages our plants, yet, when it snows, we throw the salt. Ten inches of snow debilitated the Washington area in early January, closing a section of I-95. Snow closed roads, both in the…

The 60th R&D 100 Awards program is now open for submissions. The program is open to corporate, government, and academic R&D organizations across the globe, and has been called “The Oscars of Innovation.” First established in 1963, the R&D 100 Awards is the only S&T (science and technology) awards competition that recognizes new commercial products, technologies…

By Gordon Feller In a report charting, “The Rise of Innovation Districts,” the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., lists Barcelona alongside seven other cities that contain such districts, the others being Berlin, London, Medellin, Montreal, Seoul, Stockholm, and Toronto. How exactly did an ancient Catalonian city, situated on the coast of Spain, manage to pull…

The 60th R&D 100 Awards program opens for submissions on March 1st, 2022. The program is open to corporate, government, and academic R&D organizations across the globe, and has been called “The Oscars of Innovation.” First established in 1963, the R&D 100 Awards is the only S&T (science and technology) awards competition that recognizes new commercial…

By Scott Kirsner, CEO and Co-Founder of InnoLead Is it possible that R&D organizations are weathering the pandemic better than most other parts of Global 1000 companies? A recent survey that we fielded at InnoLead, supported by qualitative interviews with senior R&D execs, buttresses that idea. It’s possible that amidst the pandemic, and dramatically changing…

The first time Dan Arvizu thought about anything related to science or engineering was in the sixth grade. His teacher, John Price planted the seeds about a pathway that Arvizu hadn’t anticipated when he assigned the young student to write a paper on what matter was. Price was “one of the first people who gave…

Nanoengineering deals with structures at the nanoscale — between one and 100 nanometers. A nanometer (nm) is one billionth of a meter, and the distance between individual atoms in a solid is between 0.1 nm and 0.4 nm. The nanoscale is therefore about as small as materials can get, without becoming individual atoms. Nanotechnology and…

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Dan Arvizu, the Chancellor of New Mexico State University. Arvizu also sits on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and was the first Hispanic to lead a DOE National Laboratory. One of the things we touched on what makes engineers…

International Freezer Challenge honors Univ. of Illinois with 2021 “Winning Streak Award.” By Becky Chambers Hennessy, contributing writer (This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one, Facing sustainability in the lab, here.) The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is continuing a hot streak in arguably the coolest competition around. The university was recognized…

By Becky Chambers Hennessy, contributing writer Scientific research leaders are taking a long look in the mirror. They see their laboratories as home to beneficial scientific breakthroughs, in areas from epidemiology and the coronavirus to climate change and greenhouse gases. They’re also recognizing them as resource-intensive spaces with enormous carbon footprints. It’s an irony that’s…

Supercomputers are very large and powerful computers able to perform calculations much more rapidly than general-purpose computers. They achieve this with a massively parallel architecture. Today’s supercomputers use the same off-the-self processors, operating at the same clock speeds, as desktop computers, but they have a large number of them so that many calculations can be…

A rheometer is an instrument which characterizes the flow of a substance in response to forces, its rheology. A viscometer measures a fluid’s resistance to deformation at a given rate. This gives a single parameter, viscosity, for the fluid. Newtonian fluids have a fixed viscosity at a given temperature. As the applied force is increased,…

By Mark Jones A century is how long it took for one bad chemistry choice to run its course. The end of August 2021 was the end of what can only be described as a sad century in the history of chemistry. At the end of August, headlines proclaimed the world finally stopped using leaded…

By Gordon Feller, Contributing Writer Increasingly, trilateral R&D partnerships — linking government with academia and industry — are considered critical to the success of Silicon Valley. Such mixed partnerships succeed when they link industrial firms with governments with universities, especially as real-world variations of the “triple helix” model of innovation, which is a more common…

The winners in the 2021 R&D 100 Awards in the Process/Prototyping and Software/Services categories have been announced by R&D World magazine in a virtual ceremony broadcast from Cleveland, Ohio. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 59th year, received entries from 17 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel included nearly 40 well-respected industry professionals across…

The winners in the 2021 R&D 100 Awards in the MechanicalMaterials category have been announced by R&D World magazine in a virtual ceremony broadcast from Cleveland, Ohio. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 59th year, received entries from 17 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel included nearly 40 well-respected industry professionals across the globe.…

The winners in the 2021 R&D 100 Awards in the first two categories (Analytical/Test and IT/Electrical) have been announced by R&D World magazine in a virtual ceremony broadcast from Cleveland, Ohio. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 59th year, received entries from 17 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel included nearly 40 well-respected industry…

Medalists in the 2021 R&D 100 Special Recognition categories have been announced by R&D World magazine. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 59th year, received entries from 17 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel included nearly 40 well-respected industry professionals across the globe. These five Special Recognition categories were established to honor specific aspects…