Chemistry Matters' Blog

You hear it all the time in the news about companies being under fire for releasing contaminants into the environment.. But have you ever wondered how they determine who is responsible for the contaminants? As experts in environmental forensics, we did an investigation to identify the source of a strange methane gas...

In my previous blog, I discussed how your laboratory measurements could be precise (the results are reproducible), yet inaccurate (the value is wrong).  

Have you ever noticed that when you are on vacation, your mind relaxes but starts thinking of work-related stuff?It isn’t a bad thing. I know I am supposed to forget about work when I am away but by relaxing, interesting things come to mind at the weirdest times.That is what happened while remote camping back in the...

Having recently joined the team at Chemistry Matters Inc., I am excited to have transitioned from academic science to an industry position that has allowed me to apply, on a daily basis, laboratory techniques that I learned and practised during my undergraduate and graduate studies.

Gas chromatography (GC) is an analytical technique that characterizes a chemical mixture by separation and identification of the chemical components. At Chemistry Matters, data generated from GC is used in arson investigations, biomonitoring, and environmental forensic investigations. Developing a concise timeline...

Next week, I will be traveling to Philadelphia for the PITTCON Conference. I will be meeting another Chemistry Matters colleague, Michelle Misselwitz there as well. It is not so far to travel for Michelle as she is a resident of Pennsylvania but I will be spending some ever important focus time on a couple of plane...

This is the third in a series of blogs on river PAHs (Blog 1 and Blog 2 on River PAHs are here). The aim of our investigations is to answer the question “where did the PAHs come from that were present in all of the Alberta and Saskatchewan rivers?”

In the first post of this series on River PAHs characterization, we described the background to why we have spent many hours driving across Alberta from border to border to collect sediment samples from the rivers of southern Alberta.

For the last few years we have spent a lot of our free time collecting sediment samples from rivers across southern Alberta and characterizing these for Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). Often driving many hours across prairie gravel roads for a single good sample, it quickly became a passion of quality...

In the first post of this series, I described the basis for how we became involved in determining a method for the detection of a natural, biogenic source of toluene. In this post, I describe how the process works and provide some thoughts on how to conduct an investigation.