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Alessandro De Giacomo argues that grounding students in scientific fundamentals, rather than rushing them toward applications, is what makes breakthrough ideas possible.

Top content published this week includes coverage from the 2026 SciX Conference, which took place in Sparks, Nevada, from October 4–9.

In this SciX interview segment, Siddhartha Das explains how his group’s simulations revealed a nanochannel scenario that produces energy and boosts flow at the same time. This overturns the classical electroviscous trade-off without breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

At SciX, Juergen Popp explains why a new infection test must fit hospital workflows, outperform the gold standard, and cost about a euro or less per test. He also describes a host-response test that could change how emergency departments treat suspected sepsis.

Jay Kitt of the University of Utah explains that his group’s platform for quantitative Raman measurements inside chromatographic particles didn’t come from a search for signal enhancement. It grew out of a decade of chromatography and biochemistry research.

In this segment of his SciX interview, Marc Porter explains why every step matters when measuring at picomolar and femtomolar levels, and how switching to proteinase K helped make his group’s tuberculosis work more clinic-ready.

In this clip from our SciX interview with Siddhartha Das, he describes his team’s “eureka moment”: the discovery that the ion distribution inside a polymer layer shapes how water moves under an electric field. He also explains why experimental confirmation is still years away.

SciX 2026, the annual conference presented by the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS), ran October 4–9, 2026, at the Nugget Casino Resort in Sparks, Nevada. The program spanned atomic and molecular spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, chemometrics, and bioanalysis. This report follows the meeting day by day, from Monday's clinical Raman plenaries to Friday's closing talks, drawing on the online program and Spectroscopy coverage of award winners, highlighting efforts to move Raman, SERS, LIBS, and single-particle ICP-MS toward clinical, environmental, and field use.

According to Thermo Fisher Scientific, their ARL X’TRA Pro diffractometer is designed for around-the-clock quantitative phase analysis of 50 to more than 100 samples per day.

At SciX 2026, Siddhartha Das explains how graphene can be used to show how atom-level interactions between ions and water decide what passes through a membrane and what stays behind.

Four finalists for the FACSS Innovation Award presented on the afternoon of October 8, 2026, at SciX 2026. Their work spanned drone-mounted laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), a touch-and-sound virtual reality system for blind scientists, polarized infrared (IR) imaging of shape memory polymers, and an ultrasound-activated plasmonic nanoplatform aimed at Parkinson’s disease.

At SciX 2026, Marc Porter explained why surface-enhanced Raman scattering can outperform fluorescence assays. He also described how a protein-denaturing step rescued his team’s tuberculosis test from a major loss in sensitivity.

At SciX 2026, Alessandro De Giacomo explains why laser–matter interaction deserves more attention and how nanoparticle size forces a trade-off between sensitivity and practical tagging.