This article shares the results from an evaluation of a novel thermal imaging technology that took place before the initial implementation in a Pfizer manufacturing facility. The manuscript describes the technology and reviews the extensive process used to challenge its inspection capabilities through field testing. Finally, the potential benefits of adopting this first-in-class pharmaceutical technology as a new standard for non-destructive testing^{1, 2} of bottle induction sealing integrity in the pharmaceutical industry is summarised.

HIGH-RESOLUTION, cryogenically cooled thermal imaging technology was initially developed for military purposes. Furthering the commercialisation of the technology for civil applications, a pharmaceutical assembly – for high-speed and 100 percent inline verification of induction integrity in bottle packaging – was first developed and made available for testing relatively recently.³ This article summarises outcomes from initial plant feasibility work and extended rigorous proof-of-concept trials. The evaluation process resulted in the first Pfizer network implementation of the technology for the routine inspection of heat induction foil sealing integrity in a high‑speed bottle packaging line at a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility.

Following four years of top-secret research and development, the scientists of the Manhattan Project were ready to test their first nuclear weapon, a plutonium bomb code-named Trinity.

When the bomb detonated over the sands of New Mexico on July 16, 1945, the fireball heralded the arrival of the nuclear era. It also created something a little smaller: scattered lumps of knobbly green glass.

Trinitite is the mineral that formed from sand that liquefied during the intense heat of the Trinity test. Initially it was believed that trinitite was created when the heat of the fireball liquefied the sand on the ground. In 2005, however, Nuclear Weapons Journal published a study that contradicted that assumption. After conducting “macroscopic measurements and theoretical calculations of the blast” using trinitite samples “approximately the size of a small pancake,” Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist Robert Hermes and his colleagues concluded that the chunks of mineral were formed when sand got scooped up into the atomic fireball, liquefied in the heat, then fell back onto the hot sand on the ground to form glassy clusters.

We’re rigged for silent running in the Seawolf, America’s newest and fastest attack submarine.

In the January 1998 issue, Popular Mechanics boarded the U.S. Navy’s newest (and deadliest) attack submarine, the USS Seawolf. After the Cold War, the U.S. pivoted away from these heavily armed behemoths of the deep, but the Navy’s upcoming submarine, currently named the SSN(X), could be as armed to the teeth as its Seawolf forebear, a signal that times are changing on the high seas.

Capt. Dave McCall admits to one vice. “I like to drive fast,” he says, “I like to drive very fast.”

The Navy has indulged McCall’s need for speed by giving him command of its fastest attack submarine ever, the USS Seawolf.