One of the judges of the competition noted that "This list represents a snapshot of Asia's up-and-coming technologists and innovators. It was a challenge to narrow down 100 names to the 10 you see here."

This new system, known as CHESS-DAQ, consists of a dedicated high-speed network that connects the experimental stations to over 130 terabytes of enterprise-class redundant disk arrays, as well as an offsite magnetic tape library for long-term archival. From September through December 2015, we collected roughly 40 terabytes of data, which is more than a factor of 12 increase over the first run of 2015.

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.