Water may be the most important molecule on Earth, but our understanding of its properties is embarrassingly limited. In solid ice form, water takes on numerous phases and structures that can be studied by means of diffraction techniques.

It's a short hop from the Australian Consulate in Chicago to the Advanced Photon Source (APS), but a recent visit from the Australian Consul-General and Deputy Consul-General is symbolic of an international collaboration that spans the 9,272 air miles from Sydney to Chicago.

Dr. Gabrielle Long, Associate Director for the ANL Experimental Facilities Division, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In notifying Long of her election, the AAAS noted, "Each year the Council elects members whose 'efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished.' 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded David H. Mao of the Geophysical Laboratory the Gregori Aminoff Prize in Crystallography 2005 "for pioneering research of materials at ultrahigh pressures and temperatures." Dr. Mao is the Director of the High Pressure Collaborative Access Team, which manages the beamlines at Advanced Photon Source (APS) sector 16.

Scott Benes (Chief Technician, ASD-Controls) is the first winner of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) Supervisor of the Year award. Benes was surprised with the award during an APS “all-hands” meeting on September 28.

The Advanced Photon Source (APS) Users Organization is pleased to announce that Dr. Alexis S. Templeton has been chosen to receive the first APS Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award. Dr. Templeton will receive this award, which consists of a plaque plus $1000, on Thursday, May 6 at the closing session of the 2004 APS User Meeting. At that time, Dr. Templeton will also deliver a short talk about her work.

A request for proposals (RFP) to operate the Commercial Collaborative Access Team (COM-CAT) beamline at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) has been issued effective March 16, 2004.

A Request for Proposal (RFP) has been issued for the contract to manage the Industrial Macromolecular Crystallography Association Collaborative Access Team (IMCA-CAT) beamlines at APS sector 17.

A group of undergraduate students participating in a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, recently performed a series of synchrotron x-ray tomography experiments at the GeoSoilEnviroCARS beamline 13-BM at the APS, in collaboration with Mark Rivers (University of Chicago).

In conjunction with the Advanced Photon Source (APS), the APS Users Organization (APSUO) has established the APSUO Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award. The nomination deadline for this award is March 15, 2004. The award will be presented at the 2004 Users Meeting for the Advanced Photon Source, held at Argonne on May 3-6, 2004.

Researchers using the BioCARS sector 14 beamline at the APS have determined how changes in a pair of proteins lead to the family of neurological disorders that includes Tay-Sachs disease.

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).

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.

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.

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.