Latest News and Application Notes

With fewer celebrations demanding helium balloons during the pandemic, the supply of helium for laboratories hasn't been as shaky lately as it has been in recent years, but the price of helium continues to rise. In the meantime, replacement gases keep being tested.

Here at LECO, we have been celebrating Farai-Day (Fri-day) every week for fourteen years! Our new Director of Separation Science Customer Success, Farai Rukunda has been a force of positivity and solutions ever since he accepted his first position as a training specialist. Farai joined host Andrew Storey on LECO's podcast: Measured Science.

No matter where you are in the urban landscape, you are never more than a few feet from cement. Cement forms the basis of virtually the entire world’s infrastructure. It is an impressively cheap binder that enables a wide variety of building materials. Despite its ubiquity, it is a surprisingly complex mixture of a balance of ingredients such as lime, silica, alumina and more. Knowing what is in your cement is a fundamental check of its quality and strength.

Sustainability is on everybody’s mind these days. Companies want to create products that are better for the environment and consume fewer resources. Unilever is no exception. This forward-thinking flavor company has recently been pushing to develop new and delicious plant-based protein substitutes that are more sustainable than meat-based protein but no less healthy (or, preferably, even more healthy!). However, as Unilever scientists Hans-Gerd Janssen and Ed Rosing explain, nature made a pretty delicious protein in the form of meat, with a very distinct flavor and mouth-feel. Creating a substitute isn’t easy.

Fall is just around the corner, and here at LECO we're gearing up to take our instruments on the road. Check out the shows we're excited to be appearing at in-person this year and make your plans to come by for a visit!

As with all foodstuffs for human consumption, meat is highly regulated. Determining its makeup is essential to confirming a safe product. The faster regulatory analyses can be performed, the quicker you can confirm the quality of your product and maintain production speed.

Determining the moisture content of meat is one such analysis that helps identify the quality and safety of the meat in question. Moisture content can control the texture, taste, and microbial stability of the meat. It also determines the level of retained water, additive solutions for flavoring, and the leanness of meat.

Both lemons and limes have strong citrus odors, but the difference between these fruits is wide at an analyte level. Identifying these differences is not as easy as it first seems, but the Pegasus® BT and the automated data processing software included in its ChromaTOF® brand software make finding the peaks easy.

The thermogravimetric analyses of the TGA801 and its predecessors can do more than measure organic materials. With its ability to handle large, gram-sized samples, the TGA801 has become an invaluable tool for the monitoring of industrial byproducts, such as flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) solids.

The pressure to save money is everywhere these days. The changes due to COVID-19 have only exacerbated the age-old question your own lab has probably asked: how can we cut costs? One hidden expense in a GC-MS lab setting is the cost of cleaning your instrument's ion source.

LECO's world-renowned customer service is returning with our in-person training classes in the fall of 2021! We want to give you all the tools you need to succeed in your lab, and this means being there for you each step of the way—even after the sale. In our customer training classes, we can show you exactly how to use your instruments to their full potential. You’ll get hands-on lab experience in our state-of-the-art training facilities and learn about an array of topics specific to your instruments, ranging from daily operation to troubleshooting, as well as how to use more advanced features.