As mentioned in a previous newsletter, our "Junk Genies" program has students transforming underutilized appliances into interactive physics treasure troves for public enjoyment. Last month, the finished exhibits left Ithaca aboard the Ithaca Physics Bus where they've traveled thousands of miles and have been enjoyed by hundreds of visitors.

The course consists of a series of lectures providing the basic background necessary to successfully analyze diffraction data gathered using high-energy X-ray experiments at synchrotron light sources with the goal of understanding the mechanical response of crystalline solids. The successful outcome for students who watch the lectures is developing sufficient comfort with the theory and algorithms underneath X-ray processing tools such that these tools are no longer a "black-box" and students are able to edit tools for their own research needs.

Our goal is to discuss with the user community the scientific needs potentially met by state-of-the-art high-energy, high-flux x-ray beamline capabilities. The science topics cover the gamut from fundamental materials science through biological and engineering materials, with techniques ranging from diffraction and scattering to scanning spectroscopies to wide-dynamic-range diffuse scattering.

The goal of these workshops is to identify science communities needing unique state-of-the-art high-energy, high-flux x-ray beamline capabilities. We hope to engage users about forefront science questions they will need to solve, and how high-performance third-generation capabilities at CHESS can provide solutions.

For example, even when the chemical and/or optical properties of an individual molecule are known, it is often unclear precisely how these properties change the molecule is coerced into a thin, crystalline to fabricate a device. A recent Letter by graduate student Naveen Rawat of the University of Vermont, appearing in The Journal of Physical Chemistry (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00714) contributes significantly to this challenge.

K D. Finkelstein^a,1, R. Jones^b, A. Pauling^a, Z. Brown^a, A. Tarun^c, S. Jupitz^d, D C. Sagan^e, D S. Misra^c

However, amorphous materials (like glass) lack this perfect repetition, and are therefore much harder to understand with atomic precision. Now, researchers from Canadian Universities in Guelph, North Vancouver and Montreal have invented a new intuitive computational technique [1] to construct three-dimensional statistical density maps from synchrotron x-ray diffraction, to directly visualize local atomic structure of amorphous germanium (a-Ge), enabling the interpretation of recent state-of-the-art experiments [2].

iGEM stands for “international Genetically Engineered Machines” and is an international student competition in the field of bioengineering. The Cornell iGEM team is a student-run synthetic biology project team comprised of over 20 undergraduates across three colleges and six majors. Each year, the team tackles relevant problems in the local community, and for 2015, the team looked into Bacterial Cold Water Disease (BCWD) — a fatal skin-lesion disease in salmonids caused by bacterial infection that is persistent in the aquaculture industry.

Xraise, in collaboration with CLASSE research scientist Dr. Margaret Koker, has been hosting Hour of Code sessions for middle school students at Beverly J. Martin in downtown Ithaca during the month of November and into December. In these sessions we guide middle school students through the block tutorials hosted by the Hour of Code website, we talk about what computers do and how they are programmed to do tasks, we go on adventures with Ruby (the main character in the Hello Ruby children’s book) where she explores the whimsical world of computing…

The MLL3 (mixed lineage leukemia 3) protein, for example, is a member of the SET1 family of histone-modifying enzymes, which plays a critical role in regulating transcription of genetic information in humans. Misregulation of histone modification is associated with different cancers and developmental disorders. MLL1 is well studied and has been used to predict how MLL3 and other SET1 proteins function, but the validity of these predictions is uncertain – do all family members really work the same way?