With cannabis now legalized in Canada, research into the beneficial effects of cannabinoids and terpenes is growing across the country. I was recently at Expo Cannabis 2019 in Montreal, Quebec, and in only its second year of existence, the organizers were able to assemble clinicians and industry opinion leaders from all over the country to discuss the benefits and challenges of using cannabis in healthcare.   

Barcodes are integral to your daily workflow, whether you’re a business, laboratory, or healthcare institution. For many businesses, they help track and trace inventory; for labs, they’re also necessary to identify samples and patient specimens. But what happens when the barcode fails to scan? Here are some reasons (and solutions) that might help you navigate through this unwanted situation.

Lab security is critical no matter what kind of lab you work in. Medical labs need to keep patient identities confidential, while pharmaceutical labs and clinical trials face potential risks of theft or tampering. Even academic labs work with sensitive samples that need to be properly secured. Here, we’ll review some of the ways you can safeguard your samples and data from being meddled with by outside parties.

BarTender is the most versatile label printing software available on the market. BarTender 2019, the software’s first full update since 2016, was released this year with changes that yield additional functionality and a more streamlined database creation process. Here, we review the top 4 new additions that will improve how you manage databases and print labels with BarTender.     

Whether you enjoy watching films, listening to music, or painting in your spare time, art plays a major part of our everyday lives. Films today are seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide—let’s be honest, who hasn’t seen Avengers: Endgame?—and are generally critiqued on their artistic merits, whether the reviewer is a trained critic or not. However, the connection between art and its influence on science (and vice versa) isn’t always as apparent. What’s certain is that art shares many similarities to the scientific method, with lessons that can help scientists as they make new discoveries and try to place them in a broader context.    

When working in a lab, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by excessive workloads. Clinical labs are regularly inundated with patient specimens, while biomedical research often requires large-scale experiments involving hundreds to thousands of samples, with multiple steps per assay. Here are some tips to help you cope with high-volume assignments as well as the stress that can come with them. 

As any entrepreneur will tell you, developing a company from scratch isn’t easy. Here’s the story of how George Ambartsoumian, founder and CEO of GA International, grew his company from a one-person enterprise to one of the worldwide leaders in laboratory identification solutions.

Infection Control and Prevention (IPAC) Canada and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have stringent guidelines on the sterilization and logging of equipment used in dental offices. Among the requirements, any material that’s registered as a “critical” or “semi-critical” item, which includes surgical instruments, mouth mirrors, amalgam condensers, reusable impression trays, and anything else that contacts mucous membranes or non-intact skin, needs to be sterilized.^1,2

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is one of the most widely used techniques among biomedical researchers, forensic scientists, and medical laboratory professionals. It’s employed for genotyping, sequencing, cloning, and gene expression analysis to name only a handful of its applications. Labeling PCR tubes and strips is no easy feat, however; they are relatively small, providing little space for information, while skirted quantitative PCR (qPCR) plates can only be labeled on their side.   

So, you’ve decided to make the switch to a thermal-transfer barcode printer. Whether this is because your label printout keeps smearing due to chemical exposure or your having difficulty scanning your barcodes, there are some key factors you can expect to encounter when making the switch from laser to thermal-transfer printing.