On April 8, the In-Situ-1 crystallization plate – developed by Robert Thorne, professor of physics, and the company he founded, MiTeGen, LLC – was used in experiments for Eli Lilly onboard the history-making SpaceX CRS 8 mission.

“It was personally exciting to me,” Thorne said, “because the U.S. space program of the 1960s and 1970s was one of the reasons I became a scientist.”

The secret to a long-hidden magic trick behind the self-assembly of nanocrystal structures is starting to be revealed.

The workshops open with the annual CHESS Users Meeting, June 7-8. This meeting brings together CHESS users, scientists and staff to discuss research taking place at the facility, as well as the ongoing upgrades to both CHESS and the Cornell Electron Storage Ring.

“There are lots of things going on at CHESS, including the upgrade,” said Ernie Fontes, associate director of CHESS, noting that the upgrade projects that visitors will hear about should be complete during the current $100 million National Science Foundation funding award period, which expires in 2019.

He has used X-ray crystallography at CHESS, as well as other resources, to decipher the operation of the Golgi apparatus, the cell's sorting depot. Read the announcement from the Guggenheim Foundation here and a story from the Cornell Chronicle here.

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.