Mass spectrometers are much simpler than they look—or sound. Suppose someone gives you a bucketful of atoms of different chemical elements and asks you what's inside. You need to separate out the atoms quickly and efficiently, but how do you do it? Simple! Tip your bucket into a mass spectrometer. It turns the atoms into ions (electrically charged atoms with either too few or too many electrons). Then it separates the ions by passing them first through an electric field, then through a magnetic field, so they fan out into a spectrum. A computerized detector tallies the ions in different parts of the spectrum and you can use this information to figure out what kinds of atoms were originally in your bucket. That's the basic idea.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is an analytical chemistry technique used in quality control and reserach for determining the content and purity of a sample as well as its molecular structure. For example, NMR can quantitatively analyze mixtures containing known compounds. For unknown compounds, NMR can either be used to match against spectral libraries or to infer the basic structure directly. Once the basic structure is known, NMR can be used to determine molecular conformation in solution as well as studying physical properties at the molecular level such as conformational exchange, phase changes, solubility, and diffusion. In order to achieve the desired results, a variety of NMR techniques are available. The basics of NMR are described here.