Maybe 'Chateau de Cardboard' isn't that bad? Boxed wines are routinely sneered at, but the packaging can reduce bad taste caused by 'ladybug taint'. The taste is caused by chemicals called alkyl-methoxypyrazines that accumulate in wine from grapes and from remains of ladybug beetles crushed when grapes are processed.

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Clinical trials say a spectroscopic screening technique could be as or more successful than a colonoscopy in screening for colon cancer. When the low-coherence enhanced backscattering (LEBS) spectroscopy method analyzed tissue samples taken from the base of the rectum, the nanostructure of cancerous cells provides a distinctive fingerprint.

A synchrotron-based x-ray imaging technique might provide early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. It visualizes tiny micron-sized beta-amyloid plaques in the brain — the distinctive histological feature of the disease. Conventional techniques have difficulty distinguishing between plaques and other soft tissue. Results appear in NeuroImage.

Ultrasound is typically used to image hearts and fetuses, but it could be made much smaller and finer to look into individual cells. The developers plan to use pulses of laser light to produce ultrasound rather than an electrical current. The ultrasonic nanotechnology might be able to measure single molecules.

Pesticide and toxicology kits based on liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry help labs get applications up and running quickly. They can cut new technology costs and increase confidence in initial results. The kits offer GC capillary flow technology, deconvolution reporting, and GCMS/LCMS screening databases to speed review and analysis.

A pilot plant in Leicestershire, UK, will demonstrate how industrial processes could be made cleaner and greener using ionic liquids rather than acidic solvents. The solvents developed in the Ionic Liquids Demonstrator (ILD) project will be non-toxic, environmentally friendly, and tunable to allow for more efficient industrial processes.

The details of metabolism are complex. Software tools aimed at unraveling these details work with data from time-of-flight mass spectrometers. The informatics-based software will let scientists identify the nature and site of metabolism of a candidate pharmaceutical compound, and accelerate optimization in drug discovery.

Just how toxic is it? The Cellomics ToxInsight Solution provides a robust risk assessment tool for in vitro toxicity testing. The instrument was introduced at the World Pharmaceutical Congress. It combines imaging hardware and analysis software, and couples pre-validated panels of toxicity assessment targets.

In many ways, the pharmaceutical industry is faced with a more extreme version of many of the standard challenges facing process manufacturers. Because of that, the American Chemical Society's ProSpective in November in Durham, NC focuses on Process Chemistry in the Pharmaceutical Industry. It also includes speakers from the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing and Vertex, presenting case studies and the latest research in a meeting with limited attendance over a two-day period.

Is pipetting a sport or an art? (And here we thought it was just a job skill?) Whichever, on the show floor at the 2009 AACC Annual Meeting and Clinical Lab Expo in Chicago this July, Artel will host the Pipetting Olympics — a competition to test precise liquid dispensing skills. Will your team be competing?

Public Perceptions of Bio-chemistry

How can we explain complicated bioscience, and risks associated with them, without triggering unwarranted 'Frankenstein' fears in the general public? Is it a hopeless task?