Our sister society in Japan, the Spectroscopical Society of Japan (SSJ), publishes a Japanese-language journal, Bunko Kenkyu, in which a number of outstanding review articles on different aspects of spectroscopy are published. Last year, the Society for Applied Spectroscopy entered into a cooperative agreement with the SSJ through which the authors of some of these articles would translate them into English (with the assistance of the editors of Applied Spectroscopy if necessary) and update them where appropriate so that they could be published as one of the Focal Point Review articles in our Journal. The first of these articles, on far-ultraviolet spectroscopy of liquids and solids, written by Yukihiro Ozaki and his colleagues Yusuke Morisawa, Akifumi Ikehata and Noboru Higashi appears in the January issue of Applied Spectroscopy. As many members of the SAS will know, Professor Ozaki is an internationally recognized leader in the field of analytical vibrational spectroscopy, having published in the areas of mid-, near and far-infrared and Raman spectroscopy, chemometrics and two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy. His recent work in the area of far-UV spectroscopy is arguably less well known simply because far fewer analytical spectroscopists work in this area. Nonetheless, in their article, Professor Ozaki and his colleagues demonstrate the power of far-UV spectroscopy for a variety of different applications. The editor-in-chief of Applied Spectroscopy would like to thank Dr. Ozaki and the executives of the SSJ for their cooperation in setting up this collaboration.

The life sciences play a significant role in the contributed papers to this month’s issue of the journal. For example, the first six contributed papers in this month’s issue cover the in vivo measurement of natural moisturizing factor content of the stratum corneum of human skin, the on-line monitoring of the components of mammalian cell culture medium, the real-time analysis of the extracellular matrix of cells under dynamic conditions, the application of Bayesian probability to feature significance in the infrared spectra of bacteria, the use of linear discriminate analysis of fluorescence spectra of phytoplankton species, and Raman and fluorescence imaging of live breast cancer cells incubated with treated gold nanorods. There is little doubt that biospectroscopy is the fastest-growing application of infrared, Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy today.

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is another rapidly growing type of spectroscopy that is being applied to many different areas. In this month’s issue of the Journal, the application of LIBS to the evaluation of the total elemental concentration in soils and the detection of rapidly moving carbon particles in a gas stream is reported.

See Applied Spectroscopy, Volume 66, Number 1 (2012) for a full list of articles.