Our lives are surprisingly dependent upon Helium, and the war has made global supplies limited.
Shortages mean there will not be enough to go around, and chip manufacturing laboratories will have to make do with less.
With a fleet of instruments that require regular top-ups of liquid helium, production labs have no choice but to sacrifice orders to continue running the most important.
The spectrometer was the only one of its kind in North America, and less than 12 months after its installation it was providing results that were potentially game-changing. When turned on samples of magnesium oxide, for example, it showed the minerals are capable of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. Such "carbon mineralisation" has long been explored as a way of combatting greenhouse gas emissions, but the results showed how useful these minerals could be.