March 15, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
10:15
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| Mike Adams. | |
| The climate change alarmists have brainwashed the entire public into thinking that every weather event is now caused by climate change. | |
| The Health Ranger Report. | |
| Every time it rains, they call the weatherman. | |
| Was it climate change? | |
| It's insane. | |
| It's time for the Health Ranger Report. | |
| And now, from naturalnews.com, here's Mike Adams. | |
| Oh, I'm so happy today. | |
| I finally finished the robot liquid handling automation scripting for analyzing CBD products in the laboratory. | |
| I thought I'd just share with you... | |
| How this works, in case you're curious. | |
| Thank you for joining me. | |
| This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger. | |
| You're listening to Health Ranger Science, and the website is healthrangerscience.com for more podcasts on science. | |
| And for this podcast, I'm not actually going to be talking about what's wrong with the scientific establishment. | |
| I'm just going to talk to you about how you use a robot to do liquid handling automation in the laboratory. | |
| When we make standards, well, let's say when we do sample prep for CBD products, then we have to test the CBD content and the THC content, which is usually very, very small. | |
| Just trace. | |
| As well as other cannabinoids, including CBDA and CBN and so on. | |
| So we have to get these ready in a liquid form to go into the mass spec instrumentation. | |
| So we use a liquid chromatography slash mass spec, or what's called LCMS, or in our case, LCMSTOF, time of flight system, for measuring, quantitating the active constituents of hemp extracts. | |
| And we only deal, by the way, with very low THC products. | |
| We don't test recreational marijuana or THC or anything like that. | |
| We're just dealing with CBDs only or CBD, CBDA, other cannabinoids that are non-psychoactive, just for the record. | |
| Now, to prep a sample for that, you have to You have to prep... | |
| You have to create different dilutions of the original sample. | |
| So the sample comes in as a liquid and then we have to make different dilutions. | |
| And this is done through pipetting. | |
| Now normally, in a lab that doesn't have robot automation, you do this by hand. | |
| And we've done it by hand for, you know, a couple of years here. | |
| And it's very tedious and the accuracy is never as good as what you would like. | |
| Although... | |
| If you're good, if you're experienced at pipetting, you can often get it to within maybe plus or minus 2% or 3%. | |
| Someone who's new at pipetting can often get plus or minus 5%. | |
| And someone who's bad at it might be plus or minus 10%. | |
| Typically, I can pipet at about plus or minus 2%, which is considered very good for manual pipetting. | |
| Now, obviously, if you make mistakes in pipetting, that's going to be reflected in the results that you get. | |
| So if you make a 2% pipetting mistake that's Let's say 2% too high, and you put 2% too much of the product into the diluent for dilutions, you're going to end up seeing, you're going to have a 2% higher result once you run it through the instrument. | |
| And so you're going to think maybe you have, you know, let's say you actually have 1,000 parts per million of something, and you're going to think you have 1,030 parts per million if you're 3% over pipetted, let's say. | |
| Or 1,020 if you've 2% pipetted and so on. | |
| So that's very important to keep in mind. | |
| Any mistake you make in pipetting is going to be reflected in bad numbers or altered numbers on the final result. | |
| So what does a robot do for you? | |
| Well, a robot takes over the pipetting and does it manually. | |
| I mean, the robot takes over manual pipetting and does it automatically. | |
| Now, the robot is... | |
| Robots are difficult to work with because they don't know what they're doing. | |
| They just follow instructions. | |
| And to get robots to do things that have sense about them is very difficult. | |
| But what robots are good at is repetitive motion. | |
| They're very consistent, so they can recreate the same numbers over and over and over again. | |
| So... | |
| Doing robot pipetting is a technical challenge in terms of the programming and scripting for a lot of reasons. | |
| Oh, so many reasons. | |
| You've got thermal effects of the... | |
| Well, where do I even begin? | |
| Okay, you've got air in the pipette tips. | |
| So if you have a thousand microliter pipette tip, you've got a thousand microliters of air in there. | |
| And if the liquid that you're pulling into the pipette tip is something like methanol, which has a very rapid evaporation rate, it actually... | |
| It can cause a cooling effect inside the tip, but cooling compresses the air or causes the air to contract, actually. | |
| When air contracts, you can over-pipet liquids. | |
| So depending on the liquid that you're using, you can get thermal expansion or contraction effects inside what's called the air aliquot of the pipette tip. | |
| And that can throw you way off. | |
| By the way, when I talk about this to other labs, most of them have never even tried to be as accurate as this, so a lot of other labs don't even know what I'm talking about, which I find absolutely shocking. | |
| So if you're not a lab technician and you're wondering what I'm talking about, don't worry. | |
| Other lab technicians often don't know what I'm talking about either because they've never tried to make something as accurate as I do. | |
| We're getting right now plus or minus 0.4% reproducible pipetting, and a lot of the results fall within plus or minus 2%. | |
| I haven't actually done the analysis of the standard deviations yet, so I don't know exactly where our standard deviation is on that range. | |
| But for example, the other day I was doing... | |
| I was doing a multi-step process to move 1,000 microliters of methanol into a vial, taking 10 steps to do it, so about 100 mics at a time. | |
| And the result, which was confirmed gravimetrically, turned out to be 1,001 microliters. | |
| So requested was 1,000, delivered was 1,001. | |
| That's a 0.1% effect. | |
| Inaccuracy, which is considered astonishingly good in lab science. | |
| So in any case, getting back to the sample prep, you have to make dilutions, and then you have to make what are called external standards of your known analyte, the thing you're looking for, which could be CBD, could be THC, could be CBG. Or another molecule. | |
| You could be looking for vitamin C, for all I know. | |
| Anyway, you have a standard of that, and then you have to dilute that standard into multiple vials at different concentrations so that you can build a standard curve in your mass spec reporting. | |
| Right now I'm actually using an 8-point standard. | |
| We're using 2 parts per million, 5, 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100. | |
| And then we're building an 8-point curve and getting a really, really nice, great fit actually for it. | |
| Like.99999 fit is one that I got recently. | |
| That's incredible to have that kind of a fit. | |
| And you don't get that from manual pipetting. | |
| You only get that when you're doing the consistent, automated, robotic pipetting. | |
| So the bottom line is, it took me over three months, I think almost four months actually, to do all the scripting and to program the robot and to get it calibrated to handling these different diluents, different solvents, different liquids accurately because every liquid has a different density. | |
| Every liquid has different viscosity. | |
| Every liquid is handled differently. | |
| So literally four months to get this robot nailed. | |
| And now we have crazy throughput. | |
| We can set a sample down in the tray. | |
| Just tell the robot, go! | |
| And the robot makes all the standards, the robot does all the dilutions, it does it all, and then we just take that over to the instrument, put it in the auto-sampler, and we run it. | |
| So now, what used to take maybe an hour, takes like two minutes to set up, and then the robot does the work for you. | |
| And the robot can also do this all day long without getting carpal tunnel syndrome or getting a sore shoulder or losing its concentration. | |
| You see what I mean? | |
| Believe me, if you've ever sat down and tried to pipette, like, 56 standards, you know, you will lose track somewhere along the way. | |
| It's just human. | |
| Nobody can do that accurately day after day. | |
| It's insane. | |
| You can't do it. | |
| So the robot is great for that kind of tedious, repetitive... | |
| Precision work. | |
| And so now we can handle all kinds of testing, including pesticide testing, including other analytes that we might be looking for with a lot higher throughput. | |
| So the good news is you're going to see a lot more test results publicly because of this robot. | |
| The robot, by the way, it's about a $100,000 robot. | |
| So if you've got $100,000 and four months of time, you can also do what we just did, which is... | |
| Painful to go through, let me tell you. | |
| And you've got to use all kinds of science and mathematics all along the way to make adjustments, calibration changes, liquid density measurements, gravimetric conformations, all these things all along the way. | |
| That's what I've been doing for four months. | |
| So it's been a lot of fun, but also very, very difficult. | |
| But we finally got it done. | |
| It's done. | |
| You know, it's a celebration now. | |
| The robot is now our new lab partner. | |
| It's going to be a lot of fun now to just crank through a lot of testing. | |
| Can't wait. | |
| Thank you for joining me. | |
| You can check out more Health Ranger podcasts at healthrangerscience.com. | |
| Learn more at healthrangerreport.com Support our films for humanity. . | |
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