The PULSE
Don’t Let Mold Ruin Your Packaging Line
When it comes to food safety, bacteria like Listeria and Salmonella get most of the attention. But mold is an equally serious threat—often underestimated, yet responsible for recalls, health risks, and persistent contamination issues in food processing facilities....
It’s Time to Modernize Food Packaging with Pulsed Light
The food packaging industry is feeling the heat these days, pressured from all sides to modernize materials and processes. Food recalls continue to be in the news. In 2024, a listeriosis outbreak linked to deli meats resulted in 10 deaths and 60 hospitalizations...
Why Food Recalls Keep Happening–and How Pulsed Light Can Help
With all the emphasis on food safety, why do problems keep happening? A recent outbreak at Boar’s Head linked to Listeria contamination resulted in 10 deaths and 59 hospitalizations across 19 states. This led to a recall of over 7 million pounds of deli meats. And...
Advantages of Pulsed Light as an Alternative UV Source for Surface Sterilization
With the recent trend away from the use of mercury lamps for disinfection, many companies are turning to Excimer Lamps (ELs) and Ultraviolet Light Emitting Diodes (UV LEDs) as readily available and viable alternatives. But most are overlooking more a competitive...
Taking Yogurt Safety to the Next Level
A few decades ago, yogurt was just another minor food product, enjoyed by a small minority of people. How times have changed! Since the 1980s, yogurt’s popularity has increased five times over, and today it’s one of the most popular foods in the world. According to...
Pulsed Light Powers New Advances in Printed Electronics
Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are the backbone of modern electronics, allowing for complex and powerful circuits to be housed in ever smaller packages. By stacking layers of circuits on top of one another, multilayer PCBs manage to pack billions of connections into...
Clearing the Air on UVGI
How safe is the air we breathe? It’s an important question these days, but not a new one. In fact, technology was being applied to the problem almost a century ago. That technology was--and still is--Ultra Violet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI). Invented in 1937, UVGI...
Answering the Call for Food Safety
If you’re in the food industry, you know that regulatory bodies worldwide are pushing for more stringent safety measures in food production. The need for innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions has never been more pressing. The food industry needs answers,...
Following the Science of Pulsed Light
A few years ago in this space, we described Pulsed Light as the “Duct Tape of technology” because it’s so extremely versatile. If anything, that may have been an understatement, because new applications keep turning up. From food packaging to solar cells, from printed...
Making baby formula packaging safer
It’s hard to imagine a more important area of food safety than baby formulas. Bad enough when a foodborne illness hurts anyone, but when infants are affected, the repercussions are so much worse. In 2008, contamination of infant formula affected 300,000 babies in...
Pulsed Light: Making food packaging safer
Despite the best efforts of industry and government, foodborne illnesses continue to be a public safety issue, as this long list of outbreaks in the U.S. shows. The 2020 E. coli outbreak, to take one example, was linked to leafy greens that sickened people across 29...
Pulsed Light: Paving the Way for Printed Electronics
Printed electronics is poised to change the playing field in many industries. If you haven’t heard of it before, chances are you soon may. In a nutshell, printed electronics is the technology of printing computer circuits on flexible materials using special metallic...
Pulsed Light & Mushrooms: Frequently Asked Questions
There’s a lot of excitement these days in the mushroom industry regarding the power of Pulsed Light and the many ways it can be used to improve health, safety, and nutrition. In case you missed it, we recently featured a blog about how Pulsed Light is disrupting the...
Driving a Boom in Pulsed Light Research
Pulsed Light has been around for a long time, but these days research efforts are growing faster than ever. R&D labs in companies, universities, and government are exploring a myriad of applications such as decontaminating and fortifying food products, sanitizing...
Pulsed Light: Disrupting an Entire Industry
Every now and then, a technology comes along that disrupts an entire industry. For the mushroom business, that technology may well be Pulsed Light. What makes Pulsed Light so disruptive? For one, it can improve the safety of the production process, because it’s proven...
Partner Spotlight: MOS Technology
With this blog, we are pleased to introduce a new feature spotlighting XENON distributors, OEMs, and other partners. In our first installment, our featured partner is MOS Technology of Taiwan. MOS Technology is an equipment and parts provider with comprehensive...
Pulsed Light & Mushrooms: Growing Possibilities
It’s been more than a year since we featured mushrooms and Pulsed Light in this space, and it’s time to do an update because a lot has been happening. First, some background for those who are new to the subject. Mushrooms are one of the richest sources of Vitamin D...
Pulsed Light: Like a Breath of Fresh Air
Pulsed Light is one of the most versatile technologies in the world. Harnessing the power of the sun, it’s being used to sanitize surfaces, enhance nutritional value in foods, improve food shelf life, and cure special materials, among other things. What could possibly...
XENON Welcomes a New Leader: John Glynn II, North American Sales Manager
For over 50 years, XENON has been led by experienced industry professionals who have made us the industry’s Pulsed Light experts. Now we’re pleased to welcome a new leader to our ranks: John Glynn II. John started his career at AMD, and has held sales director and VP...
Energized by the Possibilities of Pulsed Light
What’s exciting about Pulsed Light is the seemingly endless list of beneficial uses for the technology that have been discovered. And we keep learning of more. It was in this vein that two years ago, XENON launched the campaign “What could you do with high-energy...
Wondering About the Future of Pulsed Light
What do chicken eggs, solar cells, and avocados have in common? They were all made better or safer in 2021 thanks to breakthrough research in the use of Pulsed Light. Chicken eggs made headlines when Dr. Josh Cassar announced that Pulsed Light could decontaminate eggs...
A Brighter Future for Solar Cells
For the past decade, Thad Druffel has been developing materials and processes for roll-to-roll manufacturing of commercial renewable energy devices, with a particular interest in the use of Pulsed Light. He has written over 20 papers on the subject, and has used XENON...
Protecting Our Pets With Pulsed Light
When we buy pet food at the supermarket or pet store, we expect that it was made with care and attention to safety, and for the most part it is. Nevertheless, hundreds of pets die each year from contaminated foods. A recent case was a tragic reminder, as more than 130...
Hatching New Applications for Pulsed Light
Dr. Josh Cassar has been researching Pulsed Light’s application in food safety for years, with one project in particular receiving a significant amount of attention: Pulsed Light processing of chicken eggs. Dr. Cassar earned his PhD at Penn State, and there has...
Pulsed Light Versus the Variants
It’s been a year and a half since I first wrote in this space about the SARS-2 Coronavirus, and the pandemic is still with us. The good news is, the vaccines that were developed in record time have been successful, reducing both the chance and severity of infection....
What Researchers are Saying about Pulsed Light
In universities, companies, and government laboratories around the world, scientists are researching Pulsed Light. Try Googling the phrase “high-energy Pulsed Light” and you’ll be directed to hundreds of research studies and experiments. And most of these studies...
The New CIXL Pulsed Light Solution
An interview with CEO Lou Panico. UV light has been getting world-wide attention since the pandemic started, because of its unique ability to kill the virus that causes COVID-19—and virtually all other pathogens, too. But UV light, and Pulsed Light in particular, has...
The Power of Light Keeps Making News
It’s been a little over a year since I began writing about the many different ways Pulsed Light can help protect us against COVID-19, from decontamination of airport security bins to safety in food processing. If you’re new to the subject, Pulsed Light uses...
Putting Food Safety Under the Spotlight
The next decade will be full of advancements in food safety, with technology innovation driving new procedures to prevent contamination outbreaks. At least, that’s the goal of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, as these key...
Pulsed Light and Ambulance Safety
Ambulances, and the first-responders who serve in them, are the very symbols of safety. When our lives are in danger, they rush to help us. Trained paramedics treat and care for us, and take us to the hospital if necessary. We certainly want to feel safe in an...
Pulsed Light Sparks R&D Interest
As applications for Pulsed Light keep growing, so does interest in research and product development. Companies and universities are actively investigating what Pulsed Light can do and where it can be applied. XENON supports these efforts with benchtop products...
The Mushrooming Interest in Pulsed Light and Vitamin D
A serving of mushrooms enhanced with Pulsed Light provides 100% of the Recommended Dietary Allowance of Vitamin D. It’s no secret that vitamins are important for good health. Now, new research has found that Vitamin D in particular may help in fighting COVID-19. As...
How to Build Pulsed Light into Your Product
An Interview with Tom Marshall, XENON VP of Sales You’ve heard about all the things Pulsed Light can do. It’s helping to fight the coronavirus in sterilizing applications, from hospitals to airports. It’s used in food processing to sterilize conveyors and packaging....
Pulsed Light’s Application in Food Safety & Enhancement
A Webinar Presented by XENON and New Food Magazine On October 21, 2020, XENON presented a webinar on the use of Pulsed Light for food safety and enhancement. XENON’s leading experts, including CEO, Lou Panico, Chief Scientist and VP of Operations, Saad Ahmed, and...
Pulsed Light Under the Microscope
2020 has given us all a heightened awareness of dangerous pathogens, whether they are in the air we breathe or the food we eat. When the Covid-19 pandemic is a distant memory, the need to protect ourselves will remain. Pulsed Light is playing a growing role in this...
After the Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has altered the way we live our lives in so many ways. In the early days, it was not entirely clear who was most at risk, how it was transmitted, and just how bad it would become. But as time went on, and at the urging of medical professionals,...
Keeping Food and Food Workers Safe
It seems like every week, there’s another story about food processing plants shutting down for health issues—either from a food-borne illness or, these days, from a coronavirus outbreak among workers. Some plants have become COVID-19 hot spots, while also facing...
Airport Security’s New Line of Defense
What are the dirtiest, most contaminated objects in an airport? You might immediately picture the bathrooms or door handles, but you’d be wrong. The answer is the plastic bins at security checkpoints where we all place our phones and shoes. Those bins typically carry...
Pulsed Light: The Energy of a Thousand Suns
If you’ve ever wondered how Pulsed Light can do things like sterilize equipment and kill the novel coronavirus, the answer was summed up recently by XENON’s VP of Operations and lead scientist, Dr. Saad Ahmed, when interviewed by a Boston TV station. As he put it,...
Living in a Pulsed Light World
It’s a cold, early morning in February and it’s been three years since the pandemic. Covid-22 is in the news now. We knew back then that we couldn’t hide away forever and as many feared, Covid-19 was not a one-time event. But we’ve gotten back to our lives, adding the...
Pulsed Light and the New “Normal”
We’re all looking for good news these days. As I write this blog, the worldwide effort to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 infections is beginning to succeed. Some states in the U.S. are cautiously opening up certain businesses. We can begin to see light at the end of...
Pulsed Light: What it is and What it isn’t
The physical world is, for the most part, disorganized, messy, and ambiguous. One of the aims in science and technology is to try and bring some order to this chaos so that it can be systematically studied, or even consistently named. Sometimes out of such efforts...
Can Pulsed Light Kill the Coronavirus?
I had planned on writing about a different subject this month, but XENON’s management asked me to set aside our usual blog and write about the new coronavirus, which causes the potentially deadly disease known as COVID-19. According to the World Health Organization,...
Pulsed Light: Making History in Food Safety
When you sit down for dinner at home or in a restaurant, do you worry if your food is safe? Neither do I. In modern societies, it’s easy to take food safety for granted. But a look back in history reminds us that it wasn’t always that way. Just a few hundred years...
Pulsed Light: Duct Tape of the Technology World
Ever since XENON asked me to write some blogs for them, I’ve been struggling with a simple question: how do I talk about a specialized technology that’s easy to explain, but it’s not obvious why you might need or want it? You see, I’ve been writing about technology my...