Inkjet Wholesale News aims to provide updates on the latest significant occurrences in the field of printing. Whether it’s the launch of a new technology or volatility of market prices, we’ll be here to give you the lowdown on what happened, when it happened, and what it means!
Chinese Innovators Use Colour Printers to Study Biochemical Processes
How have colour printers changed the way man thinks and works in his surroundings? This looks like a simple question. Most people would answer from the angle of making exchange of information and recordkeeping easier.
Those, who know about 3D printing, might even answer by saying that 3D printers have the potential to be the next step in the technological advancement of mankind.
Very few, however, will ever connect colour printer technology to biology or chemistry. However, Chinese innovators, led by one Yifei Zhang, made just this connection and have now set off what could be a significant involvement of colour printer technology in the field of biochemistry.
Zhang, along with his colleagues, decided to use colour printers to figure out how complex biochemical reactions in the body take place. What he did was replace the ink inside the cartridges with biological enzymes and then used the printer’s precision mixing techniques to run simulations for various combinations of enzymes and other chemicals.
Zhang and his colleagues’ research focused on comprehending the various pathways that enzymes and other chemicals take inside the human body. Processes inside the human body are nothing but a series of multiple chemical reactions that result in one substance being converted to another through a cascade of biochemical reactions.
A good example of this is how plants and trees convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugars of various types. Another example of this would be what happens to food inside our own bodies as it is broken down and converted into different substances.
These kinds of studies typically depend on the use of a device known as ‘96 well plates’. Essentially, these are 96 miniature containers that contain various chemicals and enzymes.
Once these containers are all set, scientists either user high end, precision robots to mix various chemicals and enzymes in the right concentration or do it manually. The reason why Zhang and his colleagues decided to use colour printers is that they are not only distinctly cheaper than these robots and but also distinctly faster.
A colour printer is the epitome of precision engineering because it uses four basic colours and creates thousands of shades and colours from them. It does it simply by varying the concentration of various colours while combining them. This same quality of colour printers is what Zhang and his colleagues tried to utilise to see how various biochemical substances react inside the body.
While the purpose of Zhang and his colleagues behind using colour printer technology in biochemistry was to understand enzymatic reactions inside the human body, this isn’t the only thing that colour printer technology can be used for. In fact, there are many potential applications for colour printer technology with biological and biochemical substances inside cartridges as opposed to ink.
For instance, one of the tests that Zhang and his colleagues did to prove that colour printer technology can be used in this manner involved glucose. In the test, Zhang and his colleagues combined glucose with a series of chemicals which resulted in the final colour being green.
This same process can be used with urine samples to figure out if an individual is suffering from diabetes because glucose being present in urine is a clear symptom of the disease. Processes like this and many others can result in pathological tests becoming significantly faster than they are right now. For example, the use of colour printers in pathological tests could see results being obtained in seconds as opposed to hours or even days.
Xerox Announces Poor Outlook; Sees Stocks Plummet
The stock market is fickle in many ways but one thing that it is fairly consistent in is profits. Every time a company’s profits are expected to rise, its stocks go up too. The opposite is equally true i.e. when the company’s profits drop, then the value of their stocks also drop in the market.
Xerox recently lowered its expectations from its earnings for the rest of the year. As a result, no one was surprised when the value of its stocks plummeted in the market. What did surprise people, however, was the magnitude of the drop. While it’s nothing alarming and the shareholders of Xerox would be relatively alright, the stocks’ value dropped by double digit percentage.
The announcement from Xerox came during an earnings call. In the report, Xerox also revealed the reasons why it has lowered its outlook for the rest of the year. As per Xerox, the lowering of outlook was a result of a combination of variables which include higher expenditure on pension, softer contract signings, and most importantly a stronger dollar.
In addition to this, Xerox’s senior management also specified that another reason why its revenues dropped was because it had to channel more funds towards the implementation costs of some Health Enterprise platform accounts.
Earlier, Xerox had made estimates about how much it expected to earn in the year. It had specified that it expects to earn anything between one dollar and $1.06 for every Xerox share. The recent revision of the earnings outlook meant that the company now only expects to earn something between 95 cents and $1.01 for every Xerox share.
The news resulted in the value of Xerox shares dropping by a considerable 11 percent. The shares were being traded in the market at $13.14 before they fell by $1.52 to only $11.62. The drop in Xerox share value can’t only be blamed on the lowered outlook from the company but also other variables.
For example, in the quarter that ended on March 31, Xerox revealed that its revenue took a beating of six percent and dropped to $4.47 billion. If this was to be converted to share value, it would come to 21 cents for every Xerox share.
This caused the net income of the company to drop in the same period as well. In the last quarter, the company only made a profit of about $225 million. This was a drop of about 20 percent from what Xerox had managed in the same quarter of the last year. In the final quarter of the last fiscal, Xerox had made profits to the tune of $281 million.
Between Xerox’s Document Technology and Services business, it was the former that gave it most trouble by showing a revenue dip of massive 10 percent. The saving grace for Xerox was that its Document Technology business isn’t its major business.
The Services business of Xerox amounts for approximately 56 percent of its total revenue. Fortunately, this business of Xerox only showed a revenue drop of around three percent.
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