Surprisingly, cells also have a completely alternate means of producing small special-purpose polypeptides which act as antibiotics or various other environmentally-friendly compounds of therapeutic importance. Instead of the ribosome, cells use a very large protein complex called nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) to produce these compounds. Like a molecular assembly line, the different subunits of an NRPS each perform a critical step in the process and, using moving parts, hand off the product to the next domain.

The theme for the event was "Investments in STEM Research and Education: Fueling American Innovation." The CHESS booth focused on Training a New Generation of Synchrotron Scientists, with Louisa and Mark proving the investment in education at CHESS is unparalleled.

Taking advantage of several synchrotron-based techniques developed at CHESS, one research team, led by Dr. Hongyou Fan at Sandia National Laboratory in USA and Dr. Feng Bai at Henan University in China, combined a joint force and developed one molecular nanocrystal sensor, which can perceptively feel external force and thus emit bright and distinct light.

As photosynthesis rates rise, leaves ultimately become net nutrient sources, supplying carbohydrates to the remainder of the plant. This sink-to-source transition is likely to have profound effects on mineral distribution, sequestration, and compartmentalization of essential elements in plants. But determining these effects is challenging due to the difficulty in measuring such distributions over large areas, such as a whole leaf or plant.

Cornell University’s first STEP grant opened on July 1, 2015 and provides opportunities for 99 student participants in grades 7-12 to succeed in pre-college performance and ultimately in their science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) higher education pursuits. STEP serves economically disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students in the Ithaca City School District, specifically DeWitt Middle School, Boynton Middle School and Ithaca High School.

The morning session consisted of lecture-style presentations delivered by Arthur Woll, covering theoretical background and practical considerations regarding XRF signal generation, x-ray detection, and data analysis. For the afternoon portion, Louisa Smieska led a hands-on demonstration of the GeoPIXE software used with the CHESS Maia detector.

Hard X-rays like those available at CHESS can provide an element-specific probe of geometric and electronic structure at or around an absorbing atom. Also, their lower attenuation at ambient pressure, compared to soft X-rays, makes them ideally suited to the study of molecules and materials in situ.

In addition to the research they are doing in our laboratory, each of these summer interns is giving six hours of their time to science in the community organized through our outreach program, Xraise. This arrangement allows the undergraduates an opportunity to hone their skills of public communication and interpersonal skills, while pushing them to articulate difficult concepts in an easily digestible way.

In the SNIPS method a block copolymer film is coated onto a substrate, left to evaporate for a magic time period, and then plunged into water. Graduate students Yibei Gu and Rachel Dorin of the Wiesner group at the Cornell Department of Materials Science and Engineering set out to investigate what happens during the evaporation period in the top surface separation layer. They used an in-situ doctor blade coater developed by CHESS staff scientist Detlef Smilgies to study the membrane formation in real time at CHESS D1 station. Their results were recently published in Macromolecules [1].

This unit cell was repeated roughly 50 times around the CESR tunnel. A FODO-based accelerator is very flexible and the design allowed for many modes of running over the following decades, up to and including the present-day "arc pretzel" CHESS operations.