Spectroscopy General

Ahura Scientific, Inc., has announced the close of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.’s acquisition of the company. The acquisition expands Thermo Fisher’s technology portfolio with a suite ofportable spectrometers.

PerkinElmer, Inc. has agreed to purchase the remaining interest of its joint venture in ICP-MS and related assets from Danaher Corporation. Danaher acquired this joint venture stake and these assets as part of its acquisition of MDS Inc.'s Analytical Technologies business.

The purchase of the remaining 50% of the joint venture and related assets will provide PerkinElmer with full ownership of the joint venture and its ICP-MS product line.

John Roush, president, Environmental Health, PerkinElmer, said, "The global population is increasingly vulnerable to safety threats from toxic elements such as lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic affecting the quality of our water and food supplies. Our continued commitment and innovation in ICP-MS will provide our customers with solutions that support the analysis of component elements, trace elements or contaminants in samples of interest, leading to improved products and applications for their end markets - and ultimately to better outcomes for human and environmental health."

A European research project has shown how to build optical sensors directly into the structure of labs-on-chips. The breakthrough paves the way for on-the-spot medical diagnostics.

Scientists from the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technische Universität München (TUM) under the direction of Professor Michael Sattler have developed a new strategy allowing them to determine the spatial structure of biomolecules in solution based around NMR spectroscopy. The method is flexible and generally applicable to obtaining structural information for signal forwarding pathways in the cell or in the regulation of gene expression. Their work is reported in Angewandte Chemie.

Anasys Instruments has introduced the nanoIR platform that combines the nanoscale spatial resolution capabilities of atomic force microscopy (AFM) with infrared spectroscopy’s ability to characterise and identify chemical species.

Bruker Corporation has appointed Bill Knight to Chief Operating Officer and Brian Monahan to Chief Financial Officer effective 1 February 2010. Further appointments in the BioSpin division are Dr Bernd Gewiese and Dr Werner Maas as Co-Presidents. In Bruker Optics, Urban Faeh has been appointed President, and will become Managing Director of Bruker Optik GmbH in Ettlingen, Germany, where he will be based. www.bruker.com