News|Videos|October 14, 2025

Off-Gas Monitoring for Fuel Dissolution

Author(s)Robert Lascola, Will Wetzel

Fact checked by: John Chasse

In this interview segment, Rob Lascola discusses how Raman spectroscopy complements other techniques in fuel dissolution and solvent extraction and what Raman can detect in off-gas streams.

At the 2025 SciX Conference, which took place in Covington, Kentucky, Rob Lascola, a Senior Fellow Scientist at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL, Jackson, South Carolina), delivered a presentation titled, “Applications of Raman Spectroscopy For Monitoring and Understanding of Nuclear Materials Processing” (1). Lascola discussed how the use of Raman spectroscopy is key to monitoring and optimizing spent nuclear fuel processing.

Related to this article

October 23rd, 2026

Jürgen Popp on Bringing Optical Twins Into Everyday Healthcare

In this interview segment from SciX, Juergen Popp explains why molecular “twins” built from optical measurements could reach patients within a decade, provided the field builds the regulatory, computing, and standards ecosystem around the technology.

3D rendering of artificial intelligence hardware concept. Glowing blue brain circuit on microchip on computer motherboard. Machine learning background. | Image Credit: © knssr - stock.adobe.com.

October 23rd, 2026

Machine Learning Speeds Analysis and Design in All-Atom Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Siddhartha Das explains how machine learning helps his group sift through roughly a trillion simulation data points. It reveals water and electroosmotic flow behavior and could speed the design of sensor-like channels.

Walking to new better world. Hope and bright future | Image Credit: © Photocreo Bednarek - stock.adobe.com.

October 22nd, 2026

Marc Porter on Open Questions, Detection Limits, and What Comes Next

In his SciX interview, Marc Porter discusses what happens to hydrogen when thiols bind to gold, how close analytical chemists can get to detecting a single molecule in a liter, and his new PFAS-focused startup.

Drone flying front of home | Image Credit: © Ruslan Ivantsov - stock.adobe.com

October 21st, 2026

How Self-Calibration Makes Quantitative LIBS Possible on Drones

At SciX, Alessandro De Giacomo explained how airborne LIBS can produce quantitative results. Instead of relying on reference measurements, the method draws calibration directly from the measured signal, which sidesteps the drone’s positioning and motion problems.

October 21st, 2026

Jürgen Popp on Building a “Personalized Optical Twin” for Continuous Health Monitoring

At SciX, Jürgen Popp explains how miniaturized optical spectroscopy could add molecular data to wearable health tracking, which could enable earlier disease detection and a shift toward prevention.

October 20th, 2026

Jay Kitt on Chasing High-Impact Biology With Raman Spectroscopy

At SciX, Jay Kitt describes the experiment he ran on his own that launched his cytochrome c research, and explains why putting a number on peptide–lipid interactions matters.

Work of the surgeon in the hospital operating room. Concentrated doctor with glasses. | Image Credit: © velimir - stock.adobe.com

October 20th, 2026

Fitting Optical Diagnostics to the Surgical Workflow

Jürgen Popp explains how head and neck surgeons in Jena use a Raman probe to locate tumor borders, why the technique could replace frozen section biopsies, and why optical tools must adapt to clinical workflows rather than the other way around.

Baseball on the lawn. | Image Credit: © Reipert - stock.adobe.com.

October 19th, 2026

Stepping Up to the Plate: A Baseball Analogy for Raman Scattering

At SciX, Marc Porter explains how a Thanksgiving batting lesson led him to compare a bat meeting a ball to light scattering off a molecule, and how his group is using simulations to test whether the analogy holds.