Students in a typical instrumental analysis course may learn more than 30 analytical techniques. There are more than 150 components associated with the instrumentation that they learn. To help students organize this large amount of information, we classified these components into four categories: sources, samples, discriminators, and detectors. In…

A public demonstration of laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) for fast and sensitive qualitative elemental analysis of solid everyday objects is described. This demonstration served as a showcase model for modern instrumentation (and for elemental analysis, in particular) to the public. Several steps were made to…