A handheld infrared (IR) scanner paired with an artificial neural network (ANN) can identify human versus animal bone with over 96% accuracy.

Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, a technique built on a scanning mirror invented before the moon landing, is quietly being rebuilt from the ground up. Light combs, photothermal probes, and chip-scale photonics are pushing infrared analysis past resolution and speed limits that stood for six decades.

The 29th International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS 2026) is set to have a gala dinner cruise for conference attendees to enjoy.

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy has been an important method in the study Stonehenge.

Sapienza Università di Roma team reports near-infrared (NIR) techniques that identify and quantify cocaine and cutting agents through sealed police evidence bags, addressing safety and chain-of-custody concerns in forensic laboratories.

A method transfer case study describing how digestion vessel capability, elevated microwave digestion temperature, and optimized acid chemistry resolved poor palladium spike recovery and memory effects during ICP-MS trace metal analysis, achieving consistent 98–100% recoveries with no observable carryover.

In this preview of the upcoming American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2026 Meeting, we sat down with Pavithraa “Pavi” Sundararajan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, talks about her career journey and what inspired her to become an astrochemist.

A forensic case study using FT-IR, portable Raman spectroscopy, and SEM-EDS to differentiate three-layer automotive coatings from a hit-and-run accident, demonstrating that combining complementary spectroscopic and elemental techniques improves the accuracy of paint evidence identification.

The deadline to submit nominations for the 2027 Coblentz Award, presented annually to an outstanding young molecular spectroscopist under the age of 40, has been extended to August 31, 2026.

The Altar Stone cannot be taken to a laboratory for analysis, but portable Raman analyzers are getting the job done on-site.

The 29th International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS) takes place next week in Istanbul, Turkey. We preview the conference here.

What are some of the talks that we are keeping our eyes on as the ACS Conference starts next week?

This interactive e-book covers the recent trends and developments in analytical spectroscopy and how it is being used in archaeology and cultural heritage analysis.

Infrared (IR) spectroscopy, paired with statistical modeling, can non-destructively distinguish human, dog, and cat bloodstains on sand and soil, offering a preliminary proof-of-concept for field-deployable forensic screening tools.

In this preview of the upcoming American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2026 Meeting, we sat down with Pavithraa “Pavi” Sundararajan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, discusses how spectroscopic techniques have been applied in the study of nitrogen-containing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Top articles published this week include a new peer-reviewed article how laser pulse width and repetition rate affect quantitative elemental analysis of aluminum alloys using fiber laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and more.

In this preview of the upcoming American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2026 Meeting, we sat down with Pavithraa “Pavi” Sundararajan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, previews her upcoming talk on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Researchers developed spherical and hollow gold nanoparticle-based SERS platforms that enable label-free molecular imaging of chemotherapy drug effects and drug release within cancer cells, offering a theranostic tool with potential applications in early cancer diagnostics.

In the second episode of “Spectroscopy Around the Globe,” host Will Wetzel takes viewers on a journey to England to explore how spectroscopy is being used to uncover the secrets of Stonehenge.

A study using fiber laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (FL-LIBS) to evaluate how pulse width and repetition rate affect the quantitative analysis of elements in aluminum alloys, reporting improved detection sensitivity and limit of detection at high repetition rate.

Environmental analysis is a growing area of study, and single-particle inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (spICP-MS) is one of the techniques contributing to this growth.

What are some of the limitations of elemental selective techniques?

The following articles are the most accessed digital object identifier (DOI) manuscripts for Spectroscopy and LCGC International during the month of July 2026. Nine articles are ranked here by DOI page views; a tenth entry in the July report (135 views) was recorded against the bare journal-level DOI rather than an individual article and is therefore not attributable to a single manuscript.

How can inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) detect particles that were missed in initial analyses?

An upcoming poster presentation set to take place at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2026 Meeting will explore how spectroscopy is being used to distinguish different roasted coffee types.

Can spectroscopy make real-time monitoring in nuclear and radioisotope facilities faster and safer?

An upcoming talk at the American Chemical Society (ACS) 2026 Fall Meeting will address a key question in membrane biophysics.

Welcome to “Analytically Speaking,” the podcast from LCGC International and Spectroscopy. Here in Episode #47, podcast host Dr. Jerry Workman speaks with Dr. Thomas Mayerhöfer from the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) in Jena, Germany, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, about “the other half” of the Beer–Lambert law: dispersion theory, the concentration law of the refractive index, and refractive-index and complex-valued chemometrics. Dr. Mayerhöfer, who first joined the podcast for Episode #29 on the history and theory of infrared spectroscopy, returns to explain how Beer’s law falls out of dispersion theory as a limiting case, why the refractive index obeys a concentration law of its own that was mainstream physical chemistry before about 1920 (and helped confirm the Kekulé structure of benzene), and how new refractive-index and complex-valued chemometric methods — in combination with PLS — can outperform conventional absorbance-based calibration by up to an order of magnitude.