Lifting up the bottle to her face she peers through the lens and squints to help her eyes focus on the far side of the bottle decorated with green seaweed-like grass. “This is what it would look like if you were a fish looking at seaweed underwater!” she proclaims as she hands off her self-made fish goggles to another girl working at the same table.
In addition to working with staff scientists to understand complex phenomena and contribute to the growing body of knowledge surrounding x-ray science, these students are working with outreach staff to deliver educational programming to area youth. The young age of these researchers, coupled with their enthusiasm for and familiarity with scientific inquiry, makes them exceptional promoters of their field.
Among them was Naomi Gendler, a senior at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In a few minutes, Gendler summarized her project, “Analysis of Methods to Excite Head-Tail Motion of Bunches within the Cornell Electron Storage Ring.” Her research could help improve the stability of electron beams in particle accelerators.
The advent of third generation light sources that produce bright X-rays allow scientists to carry out experiments at speeds orders of magnitude faster than was previously possible. This workshop focused on how advances in X-ray detector development have chartered new unexplored avenues into biological sciences, making it possible, for example, to follow enzymatic reactions in real-time as they occur at near atomic resolution.
Many more than the 25 maximum registered participants attended the first day talks. Wednesday morning was devoted to science and the afternoon to practical concepts. Thursday morning offered access to and expert help with simulation and data analysis software. Following lectures and classroom training, workshop participants shared 36 hours of measurement time, using DAVES at the C1 station.
A complete list of talk titles and abstracts is available at http://meetings.chess.cornell.edu/UserMeeting2015/agenda.html#xes.
Gino, a graduate student of Zhenan Bao at Stanford and then post-doctoral associate at MIT in the group of Klavs Jensen, proceed to explain his work entitled "Understanding Organic Semiconductor Polymorphism using High Speed in-situ Optical and X-ray Diffraction Methods”. Starting this presentation he acknowledged and thanked coauthors Ruipeng Li and Detlef Smilgies (CHESS), Aram Amassian (KAUST), and Zhenan Bao.
After the well-attended and successful BioSAXS training workshop held at the 2013 annual meeting, the ACA approved a new program that will bring together structural biologists and soft matter scientists interested in gaining expertise in SAS.
In many cases, these software packages are “research code”: works in progress written by scientists, not software developers, who are willing to share their effort with other scientists. Users frequently find that obtaining and running such software can be difficult and time consuming. In response, researchers at CHESS have been contributing to a new open-source package manager developed by Continuum Analytics called “Conda”, which provides simple access to a wide variety of scientific software packages written in C, Fortran, Python, R, etc.
A team of Cornell researchers led by Tobias Hanrath (Chemical Engineering) and Detlef Smilgies (CHESS) recently published a pilot study in which structure and optical adsorption were measured simultaneously, as the nanorods were exposed to solvent vapor in an in-situ cell with optical transmission ports [1]. The main goal of the study was to establish the basic relationship of the structure and optical properties of the nanorod film and how each can be influenced by external stimuli.
In the 1970s, canine parvovirus type 2 (CPV-2) came to the scene, and had spread around the world by 1978 to be almost completely replaced by a mutant CPV-2a variant by the end of the eighties. The CPV-2a variant has a broad host range infecting both domestic and wild carnivores (incl. dogs and cats). It’s been hypothesized that CPV-2a may be displacing FPV-like viruses in many wild carnivore hosts. Understanding the structural basis of virus-host recognition is therefore of utmost importance to be able to design strategies for intercepting infections with this high-fatality rate virus.