Lab Manager

Sonicator Safety: Preventing Hearing Damage and Aerosol Exposure Sonicators are high-frequency sound generators used to disrupt cells or shear nucleic acids. Written byTrevor J Henderson Sonicators are versatile tools that can significantly enhance laboratory workflows. Register for free to listen to this article Sonicators are indispensable tools in laboratories, playing a critical role in various applications such as blending, grinding, sonicating, and lyophilizing.

The global helium market has entered another period of severe disruption, placing laboratories under renewed pressure to control costs and protect critical operations. The current crisis, sometimes called Helium Shortage 5.0, began after attacks in March 2026 halted liquefied natural gas and associated helium production at Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex.

When lab managers want to improve performance, they often look first at instrumentation, staffing models, and workflow changes. Research from Gallup and Workhuman points to another management tool: consistent, high-quality employee recognition. In practice, high-quality recognition is specific, sincere, timely, and connected to what an employee contributed. It goes beyond a generic “good job” by showing employees that their work was noticed and explaining why it mattered.

Q: Leadership needs concrete ROI numbers. How can labs leverage utilization data to deliver them? Most lab managers can tell you what equipment they own, but far fewer can tell you how that equipment is really being used. Without utilization data, capital decisions rely on anecdotal evidence, suboptimal maintenance contracts are renewed by default, and underused instruments are left occupying expensive lab space.

Researchers in Germany have developed two experimental treatment methods designed to break down per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in contaminated water rather than simply separating the chemicals into another waste stream. Teams at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf tested cold atmospheric plasma and hydrodynamic cavitation against perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, a persistent and extensively studied member of the PFAS family.

A University of Toronto environmental chemistry lab is combining product analysis, indoor sampling, and public outreach to identify how chemicals in common consumer goods move into the environments where people live. Miriam Diamond, a professor of Earth sciences, has investigated chemical exposure from products including children’s mattresses, school uniforms, cosmetics, fast-food packaging, electronics, and clothing.

Some lab operations require strict control of materials handling to protect personnel from hazardous materials (containment), protect materials from the surrounding environment (isolation), or both. In these cases, a glove-containing controlled environment may be necessary. For the purposes of this article, the term “glove-containing controlled environment or device” encompasses Class III biosafety cabinets (BSCs), often called gloveboxes, and pharmaceutical or other isolators.

A good PCR master mix calculator does more than spare you the arithmetic. By combining every shared reagent into one batch and portioning it out evenly, a master mix makes each reaction in a run effectively identical, which is one of the strongest levers you have over reproducibility. The calculator on this page works out the per-reaction and total volumes for a conventional PCR or a qPCR setup, scales them to any number of reactions, and adds the extra volume you need to cover pipetting loss.

Technology companies are expanding specialized laboratory infrastructure to support artificial intelligence, hardware development, semiconductor research, and other advanced technologies, but many lack the utilization data needed to plan and manage those spaces effectively. New benchmarking data from commercial real estate services firm JLL shows that 91 percent of surveyed technology companies track office utilization, while only 32 percent monitor utilization in technical spaces.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have developed a chemically defined synthetic cell system that can acquire resources, grow, replicate its genome, and divide. The cell-like system, called SpudCell, brings together functions that synthetic biologists have previously struggled to integrate within a single platform. The researchers described SpudCell in a bioRxiv preprint. The study has not undergone peer review, and the system remains far from a self-sustaining living cell.