A tiny lab tucked away in a Duluth office park does big business with small things.

So small, they're visible only under super high-powered microscopes.

Kimberly Smith/AJC (ENLARGE)

Tim Vander Wood who holds a Ph.D. in geochemistry from the Uniersity of Chicago, is Executive Director and one of the founders of MVA Scientific Consultants in Duluth.

Kimberly Smith/AJC (ENLARGE)

Vials containing pure samples that can be used as benchmarks line a shelf at MVA. These samples can be used for comparison to samples of unknown materials.

Kimberly Smith/AJC (ENLARGE)

Bill Turner, a research microscopist, examines dust collected from a private residence as he makes an environmental forensics study Thursday at the MVA Scientific Consultants office in Duluth.

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MVA Scientific Consultants gets clients around the world, in fields ranging from manufacturing and forensics to art, environmental companies and the law, who want help in solving a mystery.

For a pharmaceutical company, it could be identifying black specks that show up in a batch of aspirin tablets, said Tim Vander Wood, who co-founded the company 18 years ago with Jim Millette. For a museum, it could be analyzing the pigment of a painting to help conservators figure out how to restore or preserve it.

The PBS-TV show "History Detectives," which frames historical narratives with objects and artifacts submitted by viewers, came calling last week to the 16-person office on Breckenridge Boulevard.

Co-host Elyse Luray and her crew settled into MVA on Wednesday to film segments for an episode about an airspeed indicator believed to be part of the Hindenburg, the German airship that famously caught fire just after landing in New Jersey in 1937. (Results will be revealed when the episode airs later this summer. Check www.pbs.org/historydetectives for schedules when the series resumes in July.)

Senior research scientist Michelle Cavaliere, who specializes in materials analysis, said she prepared for her TV debut as best she could in the window between the show's call two weeks ago and the crew's arrival last week. But evaluating the object's authenticity required more than micro-detective work, Cavaliere said. She also needed a crash course in pre-WWII German manufacturing.

"I spent hours," she said, "researching materials used in paint in the 1930s."

When your business motto is "focused on the science of small things," no detail is too tiny to matter.

Informational posters on some of the firm's most interesting case studies line hallways, as do framed prints of some of the unexpectedly beautiful images its researchers have uncovered with their high-powered microscopes. Every year, MVA has a contest to choose one for the cover of its company Christmas card. If you've never gazed upon the orderly particles that populate the microworld, you might be surprised to see past winners that resemble snowflakes, a Christmas tree and even a stocking.

Staffers here have doctorates and masters in chemistry, biology, geology, environmental science and forensics and split the workload roughly by specialty.

Problem-solving on this scale requires a different kind of business model, Vander Wood said. It's not just the equipment, or the staff, but the "interpretive skills we bring to results." It's not just analyzing compounds, he said, but providing a narrative that gets at what the results mean, getting to what he calls "the guts of problem-solving."

Which often boils down to: What is this stuff, and how did it get there?

MVA made news a few years ago, providing prosecutors in the Shannon Melendi case with key evidence linking Colvin "Butch" Hinton with the 1994 murder of the 19-year-old Emory student.

Melendi's heirloom ring was found, wrapped in masking tape, in a distinctive cotton bag used to store small mechanical parts.

The company poster that details the Hinton case — which involved connecting the tiny metal fragments discovered in the tape to those present in Delta's aircraft repair shops, where Hinton worked — lays out how researchers helped crack the high-profile crime, to which he later confessed.

It was the first time in Georgia that a conviction was made despite the lack of a body or a crime scene, said attorney John Petrey, who prosecuted the case.

"Without their work," Petrey said, "I don't know that we even could have got the case to a jury, much less a conviction."

Beyond what the company can do, Petrey said, clients like how "cool" it is, and MVA's "romantic Hardy Boys / Sherlock Holmes / 'Back to the Future' thing."

It shows up in a Post-It stuck under an AC override switch that says, "Do not push this button. It is the reset button for the Big Bang. Your existence in the universe is not guaranteed."

And in paper masks of Vander Wood's face, attached to sticks, that his staff had made last year, so they could flash his bespectacled face back at him during a lull in one of their meetings.

And in the stories of the people who seek them out, like a Florida inventor who came up with a way to create incredibly tiny particles of magnesium hydroxide called nanoplatelets. They are so tiny, they have all kinds of applications, Vander Wood said, from paper manufacturing and body armor to fire retardants.

Expanding yet again the range of what's possible is just one more perk of the job.