Top content published this week include a digital e-book to celebrate National Forensic Science Week, a recap of the top 10 articles published in August 2026, and more.

In this Q&A overview, we explore the derivation of principal component analysis using elementary algebra rather than standard matrix notation.

A new review article in Microchimica Acta finds that smartphone-based optical and spectroscopic sensors show strong potential to decentralize food safety testing across contaminants like pesticides, heavy metals, and pathogens.

In the third episode of “Spectroscopy Around the Globe,” we're heading underground and into a hillside in southwestern France to talk about one of the greatest art discoveries of the 20th century: the Lascaux Caves.

An upcoming talk at the SciX Conference will explore the concept of electroosmosis, and how machine learning (ML) can be used to understand electroosmotic flow behavior.

Raman spectroscopy just got a brain, a stopwatch, and a nose. Together, these upgrades are turning a century-old light-scattering trick into a frontline tool for catching cancer earlier, chiral drugs cleaner, and toxic chemicals faster than ever before.

A new deep-learning framework that was recently developed improves the accuracy of near-infrared spectroscopy for non-destructively measuring internal quality traits.

At the upcoming 2026 SciX Conference, Ji-Xin Cheng at Boston University will be recognized with the Charles Mann Award for Applied Raman Spectroscopy. Leading up to the conference, Cheng sat down with Spectroscopy to talk about the advancements being made in confocal Raman microscopy.

Raman microspectroscopy can be used to characterize polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Pavi Sundararajan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, explains how.

The following articles are the most accessed digital object identifier (DOI) manuscripts for Spectroscopy and LCGC International during the month of August 2026. Ten articles are individually ranked here by DOI page views.

This interactive e-book celebrates National Forensic Science Week by highlighting the vital role of spectroscopy in modern criminal investigations and emphasizing how technological innovation is making forensic analysis faster, safer, and more reliable for courtroom testimony.

An upcoming talk at SciX 2026 Conference will describe a new multimodal platform using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) elemental mapping that can detect nanoparticles and microplastics in biological tissue.

Top content published this week include a feature article on a new innovation called the Personalized Optical Digital Twin (PODT), a recap of the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS) 2026 show, and a Q&A on measuring nanoparticle formation in indoor air.

In the final part of our conversation with Brandon Boor of Purdue University, he explains the respiratory deposition model his team used to analyze indoor particle exposure.

In the second part of our interview with Brandon Boor of Purdue University, he discusses how his team controls experimental variables during cleaning experiments in order to obtain interpretable data.

An upcoming interview with Ji-Xin Cheng, a Theodore Moustakas Distinguished Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics at Boston University, will highlight his ongoing work in coherent Raman scattering microscopy.

The bulky bench-top NIR spectrometer is quietly being dismantled and rebuilt as a wafer-scale photonic chip, a self-calibrating algorithm, and a sensor small enough to ride in a shirt pocket. What once demanded a grating, a moving mirror, and a climate-controlled lab now fits inside a handheld module, a bioreactor probe, or a drone payload, and it increasingly figures out what it is looking at on its own.

In the first part of a multi-part Q&A, Brandon Boor, the Dr. Margery E. Hoffman Associate Professor in the Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Purdue University, describes the instrumentation and methodology behind measuring nanoparticle size distributions at the nanocluster scale (1–3 nm) and outlines the technical challenges of acquiring reliable, real-time data at these dimensions.

Reliability, dynamic measurements, artificial intelligence, and real-world applications are reshaping Raman spectroscopy – while Molecular Photonics points toward new translational frontiers.

In this “Tutorial Tuesday” clip, we explore one of the spectroscopic techniques that are used to characterize polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

An upcoming presentation will explore how we can better understand and control nanoparticle morphology is critical for tuning material performance.

Jurgen Popp, Thomas Mayerhofer, and colleagues at Leibniz IPHT and Friedrich Schiller University Jena introduce the Personalized Optical Digital Twin (PODT), a Photonics21 contribution to Europe's Virtual Human Twin ecosystem that connects molecular photonics—Raman blood analysis, coherent Raman tissue imaging, and multimodal endomicroscopy—with longitudinal physiology and clinical data. Drawing on the published multicenter INTELLIGENCE trials, the authors argue that technical feasibility and clinical utility must be evaluated separately as the field moves toward Europe's FP10 research agenda.

What are the main risks of leaving a corporate job and going into business for yourself?

The 2026 SciX Conference will offer an assortment of short courses during the conference week in Sparks, Nevada. We highlight these courses below.

Top content published this week include a feature article on our 2026 Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy award winner and more.

An upcoming interview with Brandon E. Boor, the Dr. Margery E. Hoffman Associate Professor in Purdue University's Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering, will recap his talk at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2026 Meeting.

An upcoming talk at SciX 2026 will explore how spectroscopy is being used to evaluate urban air pollution.

An upcoming talk at the 2026 SciX Conference will focus on nanoplastic analysis to distinguish between plastic and non-plastic particles.