Archaeologists examining late period Mayan containers have identified nicotine traces from a codex-style flask, revealing the first physical evidence of tobacco use by ancient Mayans. The study published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry reveals the flask is marked with Mayan hieroglyphics reading, “y-otoot ’u-may” (“the home of its/his/her tobacco”), making it only the second case to confirm that the text on the exterior of a Mayan vessel corresponds to its ancient use.

Read more: Mass spectrometry detects nicotine in Mayan container

Verisante Technology, Inc. has announced that a research study using its Core laser Raman spectroscopy system was named as one of the Canadian Cancer Society’s 10 research achievements for 2011.

Read more: Top 10 Cancer Breakthrough of 2011

FACSS has announced the winners of the 2012 ANACHEM and Charles Mann awards: Peter Griffiths and Don Pivonka.

Read more: FACSS awards

The Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS) has announced the winners of the 2011 FACSS Innovations Awards. The FACSS Innovation Awards showcase the newest and most creative science debuted orally at a FACSS-organised conference. Shortlisted finalists competed in front of expert panels at the 2011 FACSS conference in Reno, NV, USA (2–7 October 2011). The panel commended the high quality of entries and selected four equal awardees.

Read more: Inaugural winners of the FACSS Innovation Awards

Part of managing diabetes involves piercing a finger several times daily to monitor blood sugar levels. Attempts have been made for decades to find a suitable spectroscopic method to replace this invasive procedure for monitoring glucose with a painless one. A number of spectroscopic techniques, including near infrared (NIR), have shown promise, but now instrumental developments in Raman spectroscopy may offer a solution.

Read more: Raman for diabetes monitoring

For the past 30 years, one of the most valuable and widely used techniques for studying electronic structures has been Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy (ARPES). However, this technique primarily looks at surfaces. Now, for the first time, bulk electronic structures have been opened to comparable scrutiny through a new variation of this standard called Hard x-ray Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy (HARPES).

Read more: New bulk analysis spectroscopy technique

Researchers have used mass spectrometry imaging to uncover exactly how a human egg captures an incoming sperm to begin the fertilisation process, in a new study published this week in Science. The research identifies the sugar molecule that makes the outer coat of the egg “sticky”, which is vital for enabling the sperm and egg to bind together. Researchers across the world have been trying to understand what performs this task for over 30 years.

Read more: Mass spec imaging reveals how sticky egg captures sperm

Using two-dimensional spectroscopy, researchers in Berlin have shown that electrons in a semiconductor are best described as a cloud with a size of a few nanometres. The cloud size is determined by the interaction of the electron with vibrations in the crystal lattice.

Read more: 2D spectroscopy illuminates electrons in semiconductors