Everything we have published, newest first. Use the section links in the header to narrow by area, or the search box to look for a specific test, technique or term.
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HbA1c, Fasting Glucose or OGTT: Choosing the Test
The three routes to a diabetes diagnosis measure different things, and they disagree often enough that which one you are given genuinely matters.
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Seafood Substitution: When the Fish Is Not the Fish
Once a fish is filleted, skinned and cooked, almost nothing visible identifies the species, and DNA testing keeps finding that the label is optimistic.
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Blood Cultures and the Skin Contamination Problem
A blood culture that grows something is not the same as a bloodstream infection, and telling the two apart shapes days of treatment.
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Antibody Validation: The Quiet Crisis in Protein Research
A commercial antibody is a biological reagent with no guarantee it binds only your protein, and the consequences run through thousands of published figures.
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Autoclave Operation and Why Cycles Fail Validation
An autoclave does not sterilise by getting hot. It sterilises by getting saturated steam into direct contact with every surface, which is why packing decides the…
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PFAS in Food Packaging and How Testing Caught Up
Chasing PFAS one compound at a time was always going to lose. Measuring total fluorine changed the question from which chemicals are present to whether any…
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Pipette Calibration and the Drift You Cannot See
A pipette that has drifted still feels exactly the same in the hand. The error arrives silently in the data, and only a balance will find…
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Gel Electrophoresis and How to Read the Lanes
A gel image carries far more information than whether a band appeared. Position, sharpness and intensity each report on something specific that happened in the tube.
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Point-of-Care Testing: Trading Precision for Speed
A bedside result in three minutes is not the same measurement as a core laboratory result in forty. Here is what is actually given up, and…
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Centrifugation Theory and Why Rotor Choice Matters
A spin protocol written in revolutions per minute is not a protocol at all, because the same speed produces different forces in different rotors.
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Choosing a Laboratory Centrifuge Without Overbuying
Most centrifuge specifications are chosen from a brochure rather than from a protocol, which is how laboratories end up paying for speed and cooling they never…
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Acrylamide: The Compound Created by Cooking Itself
Acrylamide is not a contaminant that gets into food. It is manufactured by the same browning chemistry that makes toast, chips and coffee taste of anything…
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Haemolysis: The Most Common Reason Samples Get Rejected
When red cells rupture in the tube they flood the plasma with their contents, wrecking a few results completely while leaving most of the panel entirely…
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Buffers and pH: The Chemistry Behind Stable Reactions
A buffer chosen for the wrong pKa fails silently, holding its label while the reaction it was meant to protect drifts out of range unnoticed.
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Laboratory Career Paths and How the Pay Bands Work
Laboratory careers do not climb a single ladder. They branch, and the branch you take in your first decade largely determines what your pay looks like…
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How Phlebotomy Technique Changes Your Blood Results
Several of the numbers on a blood report are decided at the needle rather than at the analyser, by tourniquet time, tube order and how fast…
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Melamine and the Loophole That Poisoned Infant Formula
For a century the food industry measured protein by measuring nitrogen. Melamine is mostly nitrogen and no protein at all, and that gap was eventually exploited…
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Food Fraud: How Laboratories Detect Adulteration
Authenticity testing is an arms race in which laboratories must guess the next substitution before it happens, because a targeted test only finds what it was…
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Aseptic Technique: The Habits That Keep Cultures Clean
Aseptic technique is not a list of rules to memorise. It is airflow management and hand choreography, and once you see it that way the rules…
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At-Home Blood Test Kits and What You Trade Away
Home test kits usually run on the same analysers hospitals use. What changes is everything that happens to the sample before it arrives.
