Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry

But of course, this was an epi study, so we couldn't say anything about whether it was depleted uranium or what it was.

But in order to investigate it, we then decided to go ahead and have a look at a group of parents of children with congenital malformations and so one of the team who was a pediatrician at Fallujah General Hospital organized 25 fathers and 25 mothers of children with serious congenital malformations many of these died of course and took hair samples from these people, and we analyzed those hair samples using quite a sophisticated technique called inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, ICP-MS.

And we looked at 52 elements in the hair samples of these people, and we found quite large increases in a whole range of elements, but most of them were innocuous, things like calcium and aluminium and magnesium, which are elements which are unlikely to cause congenital malformations.

In fact, the only thing that we found apart from uranium that might have been implicated is mercury.

Yes, well, so were we.

But I have to say that we weren't quite, we weren't absolutely astonished as we might have been because we had already turned up enriched uranium in a bomb crater in Lebanon in 2006.

And there's certainly no doubt about that because we had those measurements made in two separate laboratories using two entirely different techniques.

So in one laboratory they used ICP-MS, which was this method we just used.

Well, botanicals pull minerals out of the earth as they grow, and industrial stainless steel extraction vats can leach alloys.

The specification requires inductively-covered plasma mass spectrometry, ICP-MS, to test for elemental impurities like lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium, ensuring they are virtually nonexistent.

So an API spec is an exhaustive, mathematically rigid legal guarantee of exactly what is, and crucially, what is not in that powder.

It is the absolute bedrock of clinical safety.

Not necessarily at Sukhinda, it's not at the moment economically mined, but it's very important to understand where these elements sit inside the rock.

And so, for instance, when we were looking for understanding the chromatite formation, we did all the textual analyzes, the mineralogical analyzes, or diverse chemical analyzes, typically the scanning electron microscope combination with laser ablation ICP-MS. It's called the technique for trace element analysis for minerals.

and then we really step by step for instance in terms of the pges we were trying we were able to understand where individual elements of this group of six elements were sitting so for instance some of the platinum group elements it was very surprising we found it was sitting within the chromite crystals so you have a crystal lattice you have the chromite and some of the platinum group elements enter the chromite crystal itself than other Pt-Pratamon group elements behave very differently.

Like Usmium iridium, they were forming very tiny minerals, smaller, I think you can say 100 times smaller than a human hair, actually, these minerals.

This was 15 years ago.

And the first instrument that I purchased in my lab was an ICPMS, which is elemental analysis.

And then I learned the process of sample preparation and food digestion in nitric acid to prepare it for the instrument run.

And I started out testing chlorella.

So in CSIRO, we have a lot of good tools to help to understand the basic petrology, mineralogy, what's the mineral association with them.

And also, once we have good understanding of the frame, then we apply the laser ablation ICP-MS, which Louis is the lab manager, to help us to measure the trace element, particularly rarest content from these different minerals.

In this way, then we can use the data to build the evolution history of this carbon chart.

And if I link it back to your last question, it's like if they come from the same source or different.

And we're working toward coming up with machine learning models and elemental ratios that will allow us to know if those appetites came from rare element rich carbonatites as opposed to the rare element poor ones.

So we've compared a whole bunch of carbonatites from within Australia and the ones that are from India as well.

and use the laser ablation ICP-MS to do little tiny holes in all of these little tiny minerals to assess their chemistry.

And we also did some fun trace element maps of the grains, the whole grains themselves, because they can be moderately sized in these samples, and found out that they are spectacularly zoned in their trace