Science has yet to achieve the alchemist’s dream of turning lead into gold. But a group of re-searchers using the GeoSoilEn-viroCARS (GSECARS) and High-Pressure Collaborative Access Team (HP-CAT) facilities at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory, may have found a way to turn ordinary soft graphite (source of the “lead” found in pencils) into a new, super-hard material that “looks” just like diamond.

With strokes from four ceremonial pens, the Inelastic X-ray Scattering Collaborative Development Team (IXS-CDT) became the twenty-second research group to sign up for construction of x-ray beamlines at Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source (APS).

Amy Rosenzweig, Associate Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has been named a 2003 MacArthur Fellow. Rosenzweig is a member of the DuPont-Northwestern-Dow (DND) Synchrotron Research Center (sector 5 at Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source).

The High Pressure Collaborative Access Team (HP-CAT) at APS sector 16 will be a primary location for research carried our under a new grant from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Two teams of high-school students tied for first place in an interactive-exhibit design contest sponsored by the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory. A team from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, IL, and a team from Delphi Community High School in Delphi, IN took the top honors.

A new high-resolution powder diffractometer beamline will be funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences for construction at APS sector 11-BM. The beamline proposal and subsequent funding arise from the department's general call for new instrumentation at x-ray and neutron facilities.

Using x-ray beams from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Advanced Photon Source, Structural GenomiX, Inc., (SGX), a San Diego, California-based, structure-guided drug discovery company, has completed the three-dimensional crystal structure of the main protease from the Coronavirus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

A new photon source, the Sub-Picosecond Particle Source (SPPS), that promises to image the movement of objects down to the atomic level in subpicosecond time scales will benefit from the contributions of the Advanced Photon Source, the Optics Fabrication and Metrology Group of Argonne's Experimental Facilities Division (XFD), and BioCARS (The University of Chicago). The SPPS is being constructed at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), part of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California.

Eleven advanced placement physics students from Riverside-Brookfield High School gained a hands-on introduction to innovative x-ray science at the Advanced Photon Source (APS). The students spent the better part of March 7 at the APS sector 15 facility operated and managed by ChemMatCARS (the chemistry and materials beamlines of the Consortium for Advanced Radiation Science). ChemMatCARS and APS staff members guided the students through a curriculum that ranged from basic scientific principles to the finer points of experimentation.

Award-winning research on the characteristics of fuel sprays from injectors is one of the featured articles in the May 2003 issue of Mechanical Engineering and on the Web site of that magazine. The studies, carried out at APS's X-ray Operation and Research beamline 1-BM and the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, revealed startling new information about fuel sprays, including the presence of a shockwave as the spray leaves the injector nozzle.

William G. Ruzicka has been appointed Director of the APS Operations Division (AOD), effective April 21, 2003. Ruzicka, who has served for 11 years as Operations Manager for the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS), fills the position vacated by the unexpected death of Antanas V. Rauchas in November 2002.

Sharing the wealth of new technology and supporting new synchrotron radiation facilities has been a hallmark of the international synchrotron light-source community.

A new technique for high-resolution x-ray scattering spectroscopy developed at the Advanced Photon Source has garnered an award for innovation in synchrotron radiation research. Ralf Röhlsberger, Professor of Physics at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, is a recipient of the "Innovationspreis Synchrotronstrahlung 2002" ("Innovation Prize in Synchrotron Radiation 2002") prize awarded annually by the Friends of BESSY.

A surprising insect breathing mechanism similar to the way lungs work in vertebrates has been discovered by scientists from The Field Museum in Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, using brilliant x-ray beams from the Advanced Photon Source (APS).

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) is a new DOE project to construct an x-ray free-electron laser at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).