Spark Holland B.V. (VE Emmen, Netherlands) and Gerstel GmbH & Co. KG (M?lheim an der Ruhr, Germany) have entered into an agreement based on Spark's patented dried blood spot (DBS) technology.

LearnLight Spectrometry

RamanFest, an international event held by Horiba Scientific (Edison, NJ) in conjunction with Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) has added Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, of MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts) to its growing list of world-renowned speakers.

In a distribution agreement between B&W Tek, Inc. (Newark, Delaware), and VWR International, LLC (Radnor, Pennsylvania), B&W Tek?s Raman products will be promoted and sold in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

TSI (Shoreview, Minnesota) has acquired the business assets and Raman spectroscopy technology of Enwave Optronics, Inc. (Irvine, California).

Michael Doyle, a founder and CEO of Axiom Analytical (Tustin, California), and the president of Symbion Systems (Tustin, California), will receive this year's Coblentz Society Williams-Wright Award.

Ocean Optics (Dunedin, Florida) has named Gabriel Orsinger of the University of Arizona (Tuscon, Arizona) as the winner of the 2014 Ocean Optics Young Investigator Award.

Horiba Scientific (Edison, New Jersey) has acquired Photon Technology International (PTI) (Birmingham, New Jersey).

Spectroscopy magazine is seeking contributed manuscripts for its June 2014 supplement on Raman spectroscopy.

Engineers from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth (Hanover, New Hampshire) and radiologists are developing new approaches for an emerging technique in diagnostic imaging for breast cancer-MRI with near ?infrared spectroscopy (IIRS) as reported in the February issue of the journal Academic Radiology.

The Eighth International Conference on Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS 2014) will be held at Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) from September 8-12, 2014.

The Center for Nano-Optics has been created at Georgia State University (Atlanta, Georgia), under the leadership of Georgia State Physics Professor Mark Stockman. The center will expand the university?s nanotechnology focus and continue the development of two university inventions ? the spaser, and the nanoplasmonic metal funnel.

Labcyte, Inc. (Sunnyvale, California), an acoustic dispensing company, has been awarded $1 million to create an innovative process to detect cancer-related proteins in samples, with initial work in breast cancer detection.

The Coblentz Society, an affiliate of the Society of Applied Spectroscopy, was approached with a challenge from an anonymous donor during the SciX13 conference.

Bristol Instruments, Inc. (Victor New York), a designer, manufacturer, and marketer of optical interferometer-based instrumentation, has moved its headquarters to better accommodate the company?s growing business in the scientific research, fiber communications, and optical metrology markets.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as part of an ongoing interagency partnership, have awarded a total of up to $53 million to fund tobacco-related research in fiscal year 2013 to create 14 Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science (TCORS).

The Urine Metabolome Database (UMDB) (www.urinemetabolome.ca) containing detailed information on over 3000 metabolites has been launched following the comprehensive quantitative metabolome characterization of urine by scientists at the University of Alberta, Canada.

The New York section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy is seeking nominations for the 2014 Gold Medal Award. Established in 1952, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of applied spectroscopy.

The Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) will be held this year from November 18 to 20, 2013, in Somerset, New Jersey. EAS is the second largest conference and exposition for laboratory science in the United States dedicated to the needs of analytical chemists and those in the allied sciences.

Frost & Sullivan has awarded AB Sciex the 2013 Global Market Share Leadership Award for Mass Spectrometry.

A new Raman technique that color codes cancerous and health brain cells according to their chemistry could help surgeons remove all traces of brain tumors while minimizing damage to sensitive tissues.

Bruker Corporation (Billerica, Massachusetts) has acquired Prairie Technologies, Inc. (Middleton, Wisconsin), a provider of life science fluorescence microscopy products.

Edinburgh Instruments (Livingston, UK) has appointed Mark Vosloo as chief executive officer.

Scientists at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL, Livermore, California) have developed a sensor for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) that has allowed them to detect a certain organic species (1, 2bis(4-pyridl)ethylene, or BPE) in a concentration of a few hundred femtomoles per liter.

A novel Inborn Errors of Metabolism (IEM) screening assay was successfully demonstrated during a clinical study in Turkey, in which more than 1,000 newborn babies were screened by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy in an effort to establish a method for a non-invasive, efficient, and reliable assessment of absolute and relative metabolite concentrations in newborns, allowing pediatricians to assess their health, and to detect a multitude of inborn metabolic errors simultaneously.

Agilent Technologies Inc. (Santa Clara, California) and ABC Instrumentacion Analitica (ABCIA) (Mexico City, Mexico) have signed a definitive agreement for Agilent to acquire assets from ABCIA.

Teledyne Completes Acquisition of Cetac Technologies Teledyne Instruments, a subsidiary of Teledyne Technologies of Thousand Oaks, California), has completed the acquisition of assets of SD Acquisition, Inc. (better known as Cetac Technologies).

Rigaku (The Woodlands, Texas) has acquired the crystallization reagent and consumables business, including crystallization screening kits, from Emerald Bio (Bainbridge Island, Washington). The companies have agreed to work together to develop new products and solutions for the field of protein science.