A recent conversation with Kevin Wilkinson, a professor of environmental chemistry at the Université de Montréal, sheds light on why no single signature can separate engineered nanoparticles from natural ones.

How do ions and water interact at the atomic level in nanochannels grafted with polymer brushes using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations? Siddhartha Das of the University of Maryland and his team are working on answering this question.

Mammograms can find breast microcalcifications but can’t tell whether they are likely benign or malignant.

In a SciX interview, Marc Porter covered a lot of ground, from a student-driven pivot into immunoassays to a baseball analogy for Stokes and anti-Stokes scattering, and shares the open questions he is still chasing.

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is being used in numerous application areas, including environmental monitoring, cultural heritage, and space exploration.

At SciX, Kevin Wilkinson of the Universite de Montreal explains how faster data acquisition and new software have cut analysis time and how a particle’s chemical composition can link arsenic-bearing emissions back to a copper refinery’s processes.

Marc Porter describes how his group’s surface science work led to SERS-based immunoassays, why reproducibility and pre-analytics decide whether a test reaches the clinic, and the questions he still wants to answer.

Does industry need to get more involved in training the next generation of spectroscopists?