Parabens are widely used preservatives in food, cosmetics, & pharmaceuticals. Due to their presence in consumer products, methods to determine their purity are important. The current methods using HPLC are powerful, but wasteful and inefficient. In this blog post, we showcase the use of benchtop NMR to quantify the purity of 3 different parabens & demonstrate that this approach is quicker & far less expensive than the traditional methods currently used in industry. Read more.

This year, to bring out that Christmas spirit inside of everyone, I would like to talk about Santa Claus. Now, I know there are a plethora of Christmas treats out there that you will be making, but for the big man flying through the skies, there is one treat that stands head and shoulders above all else. I’m talking, of course, about cookies. However, with the never-ending list of cookies the big question becomes: which one are you making for Santa? With this blog, I might be able to provide you with a little bit of guidance.

Have you ever been curious as to why your pumpkin spice latte doesn't taste like pumpkins? Pumpkin spice is actually a mix of spices; such as, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, etc. In this blog, we focus our attention on cinnamon, where we obtain the 1H NMR spectrum using benchtop NMR. We then compare this with known molecules that comprise cinnamon such as, cinnamic acid and cinnamaldehyde. Read more.

…let’s look at regular eggs! Specifically, we’re going to look at cholesterol in the egg yolk. This idea hit me as I was taking my daily dose of raw eggs, when I thought, “why not try and analyze this to see what I am putting in my body?”.

Let’s talk about Candy Corn and ask the question: what is really in candy? One thing I have noticed is that the nutritional facts on the back of the candy bag can be somewhat misleading.

Who doesn’t want to start the day with a warm cup of coffee? Coffee has a stimulating effect on humans because of its caffeine content and for that reason it has become one of the most popular drinks in the world. Some clinical studies actually suggest that small amounts of caffeine everyday might be beneficial for adults. In this blog I am going to highlight an experiment done in collaboration with the Swager group at MIT using an organometallic complex to quantify the caffeine content in regular coffee without sample preparation!