In April, YSI acquired the environmental division of AMJ Equipment, its southeastern US selling partner, which has been renamed AMJ Environmental. Sensicore appointed Kenneth Ogan, PhD, former vice president of technology for Danaher’s Environmental Water Quality Group, as vice president of R&D and Douglas Reed, formerly with Agilent, as vice president of Sales.

IO Informatics appointed Robert Stanley, cofounder and CTO, president and CEO in April. VelQuest integrated its GMP Electronic Notebook System, designed for QA/QC applications, with Symyx Technologies’ electronic lab notebook applications, which are designed for R&D. Thermo Fisher Scientific granted Sage-N Research a sublicense to sell the SEQUEST search engine products. Agilent integrated EMC’s NetWorker […]

Abingdon, UK 7/26/07—Oxford Instruments has agreed to acquire 81.4% of Worldwide Analytical Systems AG (WAS), a supplier of arc/spark optical emission spectrometers. Oxford Instruments will pay a maximum of £9.3 million ($19.1 million) in cash. Based in Uedem, Germany, with 67 employees, WAS generated 2006 revenues of £5.7 million ($10.5 million) and a profit of […]

Numerous countries are funding national nanotechnology efforts in order to develop the R&D and infrastructure capabilities to support private and public opportunities in nanotech technologies and products in fields ranging from medicine, to semiconductors, to chemicals. At stake is industrial and scientific leadership in a new field whose potential impact has been compared to biotechnology […]

Tecan elected Heinrich Fischer, former CEO of the Saurer Group, and Jürg Meier, former head of the Novartis Venture Fund, to its board, replacing Heino von Prondzynski, who resigned, and Timothy Anderson. The April election defeated candidates and motions put forward by BB Medtech, the company’s largest shareholder. NanoString Technologies is developing with Applied Precision […]

R&D spending by analytical and life science instrument companies showed a robust increase last year, according to IBO’s annual survey of R&D spending, indicating healthy business conditions and an optimistic forecast among instrument companies. In fact, several companies, both large and small, made sizable increases to R&D. R&D spending by the 15 instrument companies surveyed […]

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization announced that the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) has adopted 44 new and amended food codes and standards, and established a set of risk-analysis principles to assist governments in making their own standards and codes. Among the new and revised standards and codes are a code […]

According to the Chinese state press, Premier Wen Jiabao announced that a clean water supply has become a national priority. This statement comes after outbreaks of blue-green algae in Taihu, Chaohu and Dianchi, three of China’s largest lakes. In June, China adopted a new standard for tap water quality, replacing a standard issued in 1985 […]

In 2006, the German Research Foundation (DFG) had €1.41 billion ($1.76 billion) in income, according to the foundation’s annual report. Of this income, 58.2% came from the national government, 41.0% from local government and 0.4% from foundations and private companies. In the first round of the Excellence Initiative, 18 graduate schools, 17 clusters of excellence […]

St. Louis, MS and Richmond, CA 7/10/07—Sigma-Aldrich has licensed Sangamo BioSciences’ zinc finder DNA-binding proteins (ZFPs) for development of research reagents for the regulation of gene expression in living cells. Sigma-Aldrich also acquired rights to sublicense the technology for research applications. Sigma-Aldrich will initially pay Sangamo $13.75 million in the form of an upfront licensing […]