Articles

The African crested rat chews poisonous bark and then applies its saliva to specialised hairs which provide a most effective protection. Maxime Boulet-Audet and Chris Holland describe this and the use of infrared spectroscopy to learn more about this unusual animal. The new knowledge may even lead to new treatments for human cardiac conditions.

Read more: The African crested rat’s poisonous hairs studied by attenuated total reflection infrared spectroscopy

With the threat of climate change, understanding the workings of our atmosphere is of crucial importance. Ozone is the most important trace gas in the stratosphere and troposphere and it is monitored by both satellite-borne and ground-based instruments. Accurate knowledge of ozone absorption cross-sections is vital for this work and described in this article.

Read more: New broadband high-resolution ozone absorption cross-sections

Monitoring drinking water quality poses many challenges and the authors describe their approach that combines instrumental developments with new software.

Read more: Combining liquid chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry for water screening with software tools to identify pesticides and their metabolites

Industrial environments pose potentially hazardous situations whereby workers may be exposed to various airborne toxic elements in their breathing zone. One of the main aerosol fractions of interest is welding fume, which can be determined with XRF spectrometry.

Read more: X-ray spectrometry analysis of welding fumes