Got milk? The infamous advertising campaign started in 1993 for the California Milk Processor Board and was an instant success. The strength of the advertisements stays true even today, with 90% of all Americans aware of the slogan. Though the campaign has been...
Farmers are fortune tellers. In so many ways, they must predict what will happen in the future. What seed do they plant? How many? Will there be a drought? What will their yields be? What will the market be like? Everything science can do to give farmers an edge in...
In 2013, as the eastern span replacement of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was drawing to a close, 277 vertical steel rods to improve the seismic stability of the replacement were tested under tension using three-inch-diameter bolts. Within two weeks, 32 of the...
Carbon is an essential building block of life on our planet. The amount of carbon present is an important factor in soils and agriculture. Carbon levels can help determine the quality of soil or the location of natural hydrocarbon fossil fuel deposits that may affect...
How do you know what is in your food? If you’re like most consumers, you take a look at the information on the back of your food packaging to know the ingredients and nutritional value. But how can you trust that information is correct? Where does that...
Sulfur is an essential nutrient in crop production. It is vital for the production of chlorophyll and several amino acids that form protein, among other functions in plants. In recent years, the world has been paying more attention to sulfur emissions, trying to...
Many LECO analytical instrument rely on consumables like pure chemical and high purity gases to function. When supply chain issues affect these consumables, laboratory operations can quickly increase in cost or in worst case scenarios can even be shut down. One...
The very first alloys used by humans were meteoric irons, alloys of iron and nickel that fell to the earth in meteors. As smelting technologies were developed, humans began creating alloys such as bronze and brass, metals that were more flexible in their properties,...
Since the 1800s, there have been two major methods of protein determination, the Kjeldahl and the Dumas methods. Both methods measure the nitrogen in a sample and use mathematics to convert that into the protein content. Though the Dumas method was older, the Kjeldahl...
Once more expensive than gold, aluminum has not lost its value over the years, only its price tag. Thanks to revolutionary methods of production largely developed in the late 1800s, the price of aluminum dropped from $34 an ounce in 1852 ($1,276 in 2022 dollars) to...
