Near-infrared spectroscopy combined with principal components analysis and a back propagation neural network identified Huanglongbing-infected Gannan navel orange leaves with an overall accuracy of 98.75%, outperforming LDA, KNN, and SVM models.
|Articles|April 1, 2009
- Special Issues-04-01-2009
- Volume 0
- Issue 0
From the Editor
In the Wake of Tragedy, Technology Advances
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I'm sure every person reading this letter can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001. The details and specifics of that day have been the subject of many movies, documentaries, and television specials at this point, as have the events that evolved from that day. However, one aspect of 9/11 that does not often make its way into mainstream pop culture is the impact it has had on the scientific community, particularly the field of analytical chemistry.
David Walsh
Advances in airport-screening technology have exploded, as have advances in portable instrumentation for explosives detection, benchtop instrumentation for chemical weapons identification, and more. The scientific community has made technological leaps at a greatly accelerated pace, and as you may have seen during the media coverage of the new risqué X-ray technology now being implemented in airports worldwide, some outsiders can be downright startled to see some of the technologies that now exist as a result. In many ways, it is as though we have collectively jumped ahead in time, and we are now seeing technological advances that would not have existed if not for that tragic day.
Which brings us to the reason for this supplement. As always, Spectroscopy's goal is to bring the latest advances and the most cutting-edge technologies to members of the analytical chemistry community, and once again, we believe we have achieved this. Here in one issue are all of the research leaders in the field of homeland security. From handheld devices that have been compared to the famous Star Trek "Tricorder" to benchtop instruments right out of an episode of CSI, all of the latest advances in this area are here for your perusal.
It is a certainty that homeland security technologies will continue to advance at their current staggering pace, and Spectroscopy will be there to cover those advances as they happen. So please feel free to contact us, submit a technical article, or simply send an e-mail with your feedback. The next technological leap is always right around the corner.
Enjoy the issue.
David Walsh
Editor-in-Chief
Articles in this issue
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Related to this article
Top articles include an examination of the current trends propelling atomic spectroscopy forward and post-conference coverage of the 2026 SciX show in Sparks, Nevada.
In this Q&A, we recap the October edition of “What’s Nu,” which covered topics such as how novel spectroscopic and analytical methods are transforming environmental monitoring, medical treatment, and accessibility in scientific research.
In this Q&A article, we highlight several prominent researchers being recognized at the 2026 SciX Conference for their significant contributions to spectroscopy and photonics and discuss what these researchers talked about at the conference.
Amy Colleran, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Centre of Metabolomics Research at the University of Liverpool, is exploring how to detect volatile organic compounds by bubbling them directly into colloidal silver and gold nanoparticles.
The Eastern Analytical Symposium returns to Plainsboro, New Jersey, November 16–18, with a keynote on AI-ready data and a posthumous award honoring solid-state NMR researcher Robert Schurko.
In this segment of our SciX interview with Kevin Wilkinson, a professor of environmental chemistry at the Université de Montréal, discusses extending lead isotope work to greater distances and explains why graduate students need adaptability, critical judgment, and coding skills more than expertise in any single instrument.
Atomic spectroscopy has quietly gone from counting elements in bulk to counting single nanoparticles, imaging tissue at the micrometer scale, and reading Martian rocks from several meters away. The instruments got smaller, the software got smarter, and the questions they can now answer got a lot more interesting.
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