News

Jeney Wierman started as the new MacCHESS Director on July 1st, 2022.  Below is a welcome message to the whole CHESS Community.  Jeney takes over the MacCHESS directorship from Marian Szebenyi, who will be retiring later this year after 30 years at MacCHESS.

The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) celebrated the groundbreaking for a new $32.6 million high magnetic field project April 14 – the facility’s latest milestone.

X-rays can uniquely address fundamental, long-standing questions about the nature of matter in high magnetic fields. The new HMF facility will enable research that is currently not achievable anywhere in the world.

Many cancer cells require the enzyme glutaminase synthase C (GAC) to grow well. Consequently drugs that inhibit GAC are potential cancer treatments, and much work is being done to find the best ones. The Cerione group reports some of this work.

Powerful X-rays, energy tech, wireless electric-vehicle charging, big data, swarming robots, and cryo-electron microscopy are among some of the research themes that helped six faculty members earn Cornell Engineering Research Excellence Awards – the highest research honor given by the Ivy League’s top-ranked engineering college.

EGCG, a polyphenol compound found in green tea, has a proven anti-cancer effect. Studies now suggest that EGCG works by binding to the potent anti-tumor protein p53 and stabilizing it, so that its activity against cancer is increased. Several experiments, including BioSAXS at CHESS ID7A, support this conclusion.

A natural food colorant called phycocyanin provides a fun, vivid blue in soft drinks, but it is unstable on grocery shelves. Cornell’s synchrotron is helping to steady it.

Recent developments at station ID7B2, jointly operated by MacCHESS and the HP-Bio project of CHEXS, demonstrate the use of high-pressure crystallography to examine the response of macromolecules to changes in pressure.