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?

Quinones, in general, and anthraquinones, in particular, are especially attractive due to their ability to reversibly exchange multiple electrons per formula unit. When used as the active electrode material in a real lithium-ion battery (LIB), crystalline anthraquinone (in powder form) reversibly changes crystal packing as a function of state-of-charge (redox state), with a well-defined voltage plateau appearing concomitantly with new structural phases.

One piece missing though was horizontal position stabilization. With the installation of undulators for A and G line, new beam position monitors were installed on A line which give horizontal information as well as vertical (see related article). This has allowed us to implement horizontal position corrections for the undulator beams serving A1 and A2.

A report describing the fabrication and tests of this new detector, the most recent of which utilized the G3 station at CHESS, is highlighted as the cover art in the current issue of Journal of Synchrotron Radiation (see figure) [1]. The work builds on the group’s pioneering success in developing single- and quad-region detectors that operate in a similar manner, now available commercially through Sydor Instruments (http://sydortechnologies.com/imaging-detectors/x-ray-beam-monitors).

A group from Argonne National Lab is capturing a flood of data using the huge Pilatus3 6M detector, rotating crystal samples at slow speed while continuously (~10Hz) measuring diffraction of high energy (57 keV) x-rays in shutterless operation.

The results are literally a gigabyte of data approximately every 4 seconds (14 GB per minute) or several terabytes per day and at the end of their run could easily reach 30 Terabytes.

Early pioneers in the now-popular "Maker Movement", we are familiar with the positive impact that this type of project based learning can have on both attitudes toward science, and self efficacy in science.

One of the highest-stakes applications is the area of solar cells, where reliable operation depends upon developing stable and energetically suitable hole transporting buffer layers in tune with the electrode and photoactive materials of the solar cell stack.

Conventional methods use liquid nitrogen to cool the protein crystals (with cryoprotectants) so that low-density amorphous (LDA) ice, rather than crystalline ice, forms. Kim et al. developed a procedure known as high-pressure cryo-cooling that uses high-pressure on protein crystals to form high-density amorphous (HDA) ice instead [1].