JEOL USA Blog

During this unprecedented time when masks are being worn to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, we thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at masks. These were imaged on our IT500HR Scanning Electron Microscope at different magnifications.

Like any proud new owner, Cathy is anxious to get the new 1400, a 120kV TEM that is probably the most popular in its class for use in schools, hospitals, research labs, and materials, to work. She had a special plastic cover made for the JEM-1400 table, and it sits pristinely in the lab, yet idle, waiting for a new semester to begin whenever life returns to a new version of normal and schedules can resume.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensic Lab in Ashland, Oregon is helping to stop the export and import of rhino horn. The only wildlife forensic lab of its kind in the world, their work is identifying illegal exports and imports of products made from endangered wildlife as well as protected natural resources. JEOL is proud to share this story about how the AccuTOF-DART mass spectrometer is used to accurately identify the presence of rhino horn, as well as any suspicious items that may be made from endangered species, including pangolin and rare woods.

Thomas G. Huber: November 18, 1936 - December 2, 2019

Ben Muller joined JEOL’s SEM applications team in late September, and in that short time has already taught two classes and assisted several customers with applications support and sample preparation work.

NMR data contains a trove of useful information for answering a wide variety of chemical and biological problems. However, with this broad utility comes complexity. CRAFT uses a Bayesian statistical approach to convert NMR time-domain data directly to the tabular domain. This bypasses the artifacts created by the Fourier transform when producing the spectrum and makes the automated extraction of these chemical shift and intensity data tables more reliable. With CRAFT, the spectrum (or frequency-domain data) is simply a human visualization tool for the data tables.

That’s the problem that 8th (now 9th) grade students at Concord-Carlisle Middle School, in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JEOL USA, set out to solve when they responded to a NASA challenge for the development of innovative technologies to support human colonization of Mars by 2050.

Traditional SEM instruments have provided us with unprecedented details of every surface you can think of, from whole insects to crystals and bacteria, but can be complex to use, requiring specialist knowledge, and also require a large dedicated space. The dawn and advancement of compact and user-friendly benchtop SEMs however is changing this picture.

Entitled “Nano Nemo on the Water,” entry was selected as the winner of the Grand Prize SEM Image category in JEOL’s image contest for 2017.

Marine Science research yields winning SEM image