Michael P. Balogh | Authors

Put yourself in their spot: How would you tackle analyzing a bag of gummy bears that showed up on your lab bench? Here, we offer some insights from the very capable finalists at The Conference on Small Molecule Science (CoSMoS), which was held in August 2015 in San Diego, California.

"In retrospect, we sometimes see the successful return of an earlier idea on the back of great advances in technology."

"...We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise healthcare's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories...." - President Barack Obama, 44th President of the US, Inaugural address, 20 January 2009, Washington, DC.

Part 2 of this three-part series focuses on comparing operation and performance of the most well known mass spectrometers.

Technological changes affecting how we access information - both in the depth of knowledge we can access and the speed - leads to some observations about electronic versus print media. First, anything committed to public view must be of high scholarly order, often serving as a prime resource for equations and things we can't or won't remember. Second, once words have been printed, the value of the meaning they impart decreases as new understanding takes shape.

A decade or two ago, the primary users of mass spectrometers were probably graduates of doctoral programmes specializing in mass spectrometry (MS). But as the science evolved and merged with the analytical mainstream, manufacturers redoubled their efforts to make their instruments and operating software user-friendly. These days, specialists in various disciplines use MS as an analytical tool, a development that demands that instrument and software engineers pay close attention to ease-of-use issues and better understand how - and for what purposes - their instruments are used.