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Can spectroscopy make real-time monitoring in nuclear and radioisotope facilities faster and safer?

An upcoming talk at the American Chemical Society (ACS) 2026 Fall Meeting will address a key question in membrane biophysics.

Welcome to “Analytically Speaking,” the podcast from LCGC International and Spectroscopy. Here in Episode #47, podcast host Dr. Jerry Workman speaks with Dr. Thomas Mayerhöfer from the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) in Jena, Germany, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, about “the other half” of the Beer–Lambert law: dispersion theory, the concentration law of the refractive index, and refractive-index and complex-valued chemometrics. Dr. Mayerhöfer, who first joined the podcast for Episode #29 on the history and theory of infrared spectroscopy, returns to explain how Beer’s law falls out of dispersion theory as a limiting case, why the refractive index obeys a concentration law of its own that was mainstream physical chemistry before about 1920 (and helped confirm the Kekulé structure of benzene), and how new refractive-index and complex-valued chemometric methods — in combination with PLS — can outperform conventional absorbance-based calibration by up to an order of magnitude.

Top articles published this week include a preview of an upcoming presentation at the American Chemical Society (ACS) 2026 Fall Meeting in Chicago, Illinois.

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has moved from the laboratory to the field, offering rapid, in situ elemental analysis of minerals, rocks, soils, and meteorites with minimal sample preparation. This practical tutorial covers LIBS instrumentation, field sampling best practices, quantification methods, common pitfalls, and emerging applications in geoscience.

For 170 years, spectroscopists have built quantitative analysis on only one number pulled from every spectrum they ever recorded, discarding its inseparable twin. New dispersion-theory and complex-valued chemometric methods recover that missing half, the refractive index, and in favorable systems cut calibration error by as much as an order of magnitude.

Cellular autofluorescence often masks target signals in time-resolved fluorescence imaging, and metal-based phosphors that could solve this raise toxicity and cost concerns. Thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) materials offer a metal-free alternative with long emission lifetimes, and early studies show promise despite remaining challenges with quenching, solubility, and spectral purity.

Nearly every diabetic on earth still stabs a finger to measure their blood sugar, but a small army of lasers, infrared beams, and machine-learning algorithms is quietly plotting to end that ritual for good. This review tracks the photons chasing glucose through skin, from near-infrared reflectance to Raman fingerprints, and asks why the “needle-free” promise keeps slipping just out of reach.

How is the water quality in Biscayne Bay? A talk at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2026 Meeting will explore this.

Handheld spectroscopy tools are being used to identify food fraud.

HORIBA has launched Partica, a laser diffraction and dynamic image analysis particle size and shape analyzer for advanced materials research and quality control.

The July 2026 “What’s Nu” newsletter highlights a recent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rule that can impact peer-review publishing.

Spectrometers that once filled an entire lab bench now fit in a coat pocket, and they are quietly reshaping how fentanyl gets identified on a roadside, how counterfeit cashmere gets caught on a loading dock, and how a five-hundred-year-old painting gets authenticated without ever leaving the wall. This review tracks five years of coverage from Spectroscopy alongside the broader literature to show how handheld Raman, FT-IR, NIR, and XRF instruments moved from laboratory novelty to field necessity.