A simple and robust solvent suppression technique that enables acquisition of high-quality 1D 1 H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra of alcoholic beverages on cryoprobe instruments was developed and applied to acquire NMR spectra of Scotch Whisky. The method uses 3 channels to suppress signals of water and ethanol, including those of 13 C satellites of ethanol. It is executed in automatio...

Results from an intercomparison of several currently used in-situ techniques for the measurement of atmospheric formaldehyde (CH2O) are presented. The measurements were carried out at Bresso, an urban site in the periphery of Milan (Italy) as part of the FORMAT-I field campaign. Eight instruments were employed by six independent research groups using four different techniques: Differential Opti...

Within the HarvestPlus program there are many collaborators currently using X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy to measure Fe and Zn in their target crops. In India, five HarvestPlus wheat collaborators have laboratories that conduct this analysis and their throughput has increased significantly. The benefits of using XRF are its ease of use, minimal sample preparation and high throughput ana...

Environmental and occupational monitoring of hazardous aerosols, especially bioterrorism threats by way of dispersal of pathogenic bioaerosols, requires advanced systems that can identify harmful bioaerosol particles in quasi real-time and in situ. Instruments presently available to identify airborne biowarfare agents (BWA), mostly based on biochemical technologies, cannot be run continuously a...

Advances in electron monochromator technology are providing opportunities for high energy resolution (10 - 200meV) electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) to be performed in the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM). The energy-loss near-edge structure in core-loss spectroscopy is often limited by core-hole lifetimes rather than the energy spread of the incident illumination. Howeve...

ISSN: 0967-0335 © IM Publications LLP 2012 doi: 10.1255/jnirs.973 All rights reserved In the early 1960s, Karl Norris and co-workers of the Agricultural Research Service of the USA Department of Agriculture introduced NIR spectroscopy (700–2500 nm) as an analytical technique for agricultural products. They recognised the potential of the diffuse reflectance measurement for rapid analysis of gra...

Spectroscopy, the study of the interaction of light (electromagnetic radiation) and matter, is the most ubiquitous and precise method available to the physical scientist. Especially for isolated atoms, molecules, and small clusters, it has no peer. It is used to elucidate the structure and dynamics of quantum systems from atomic nuclei to natural proteins. Essentially everything we know about t...

ChemCam is an instrument suite on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission that will launch to Mars in 2011. MSL is a rover-type lander that is capable of exploring large territories over the mission lifetime and includes a number of instruments for analysing rocks and soil. ChemCam includes a laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) [1] instrument that samples the surface chemistry of targ...