I guess it's more along the lines of not "direct" interaction. Basically they aren't shining a laser through a material like plastic, for example, and having a detector on the other side measuring how much of the energy from the laser was absorbed by the plastic.

My guess is that the material is in some sort of chamber. Microwaves are being released in this sealed chamber that doesn't allow the microwaves to escape. The object absorbs this energy, and now the loss of the microwave energy that is present is less than what was released because the object isn't re-emitting the energy. The net difference in energy is giving us a measurable to do some sort of analysis.

So, while the energy isn't directly being blasted into this material and monitored on the other side of it, it's more of a 3-dimension energy absorption with the loss of energy being measured. This is all hypothetical of course since they didn't go into any details of what the experiment actually was, it's just my guess as someone who's done all sorts of instrumental analysis with other types of lab equipment. I think the title is more sensationalist than anything, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

It would be cool if there was some way to measure energy absorbance or emittance by skipping distance and time though.

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It’s like when you have “dotted line” responsibilities on the org chart, and thing can be both your responsibility and not, at the same time.