Company News

TeraView (Cambridge, UK) has appointed LOT-Oriel (Darmstadt, Germany) as its exclusive agents for Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. LOT-Oriel has a long history in optics and lasers and their corresponding use in spectroscopy and imaging. This strong technical background combined with their extensive sales network and contacts across a number of key TeraView markets had an influence on the decision.

According to Ian Grundy, Senior Vice President of Global Sales, "We are very pleased to have been able to partner with such an experienced and well-respected company."

TeraView is the pioneer in terahertz solutions and technology, and supplies in-line, customized devices to process industries, particularly pharmaceuticals and electronics. It is expected that the relationship with LOT-Oriels will help to grow the market.

• Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (Franklin, Massachusetts) announced that its Radiation Measurement and Security Instruments (RMSI) business has completed its 12th annual radiation monitoring techniques training course outside of Kiev, Ukraine, and within the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The seminar and workshop, held May 3 through June 6, 2009, was designed to provide participants with the latest guidance on environmental, source, personnel, and equipment monitoring in case of a nuclear or other radiological emergency. The training program was arranged by Thermo Fisher Scientific, in cooperation with the European Centre of Technological Safety (TESEC), based in Kiev. About a dozen attendees from Bahrain, the U.A.E., and the Czech Republic took part in the training.

Research

A team of researchers at UCLA (Los Angeles, California) have developed technology to perform more than 1,000 chemical reactions at once on a stamp-sized, PC-controlled microchip, which could accelerate the identification of potential drug candidates for treating diseases like cancer. The technology is based upon microfluidics, the use of miniaturized devices to automatically handle and channel tiny amounts of liquids and chemicals invisible to the eye. The chemical reactions were performed using in situ click chemistry and analyzed using mass spectrometry. The research team pioneered a way to instigate multiple chemical reactions on a chip simultaneously, thereby offering a new method to quickly screen which drug molecules might work most effectively with a targeted protein enzyme. A thousand cycles of complex processes all took place on the microchip device and were completed in just a few hours.

• Venus Express, a mission of the European Space Agency, has charted the first map of the surface of Venus' southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths. The Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) instrument onboard Venus Express recorded over 1,000 individual images between May 2006 and December 2007. These images provide data that are consistent with suspicions that Venus might have once been more Earth-like, with a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water.

Although radar systems have been used in the past to provide high-resolution maps of Venus' surface, Venus Express is the first orbiting spacecraft to produce a map that hints at the chemical composition of the rocks. Scientists suspect that the highland plateaus of Venus are actually ancient continents, once surrounded by ocean and produced by past volcanic activity. According to the new data, the rocks from the plateau area look different from other rocks on Venus, suggesting a different chemical composition. The new map shows that the rocks in these plateau areas are lighter in color and appear old compared to the majority of the planet. On Earth, such light-colored rocks are usually granite and form continents. According to researchers at the Joint Planetary Interior Physics Research Group of the University of Münster and DLR Berlin, Germany, who headed the mapping efforts, because of the way in which granite is formed, its presence on Venus would indicate that there must have been an ocean and plate tectonics in the past. However, the only way to know for sure whether the highland plateaus are continents is to send a lander there.

Earlier this year, VIRTIS detected a faint and variable nightglow of nitric oxide in the Venutian upper atmosphere, which is the first time nitric oxide nightglow was detected in the infrared for any planet.