After our last PRT meeting on Nov 4, Steve Rossi took a group on a tour inside the ALS ring to point out the future site of the Gemini insertion device. This month and next are a great time to visit the ALS, since the ring tunnel is open and available for touring.
It turns out there is a small cyclotron at LBNL! It is used to produce medical isotopes used for PET scans. Some of the BCSB staff were lucky enough to be invited on a tour of the cyclotron, which is in building 56, not too far away from our more familiar synchrotron in building 6.
A special welcome to our SULI student, Sayan Roychowhury, who is majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He is here with us for the fall term, and writing code to process visual images of protein crystals and center them automatically in the x-ray beam. SULI is the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program in which the host lab (in this case, LBNL) pays for a student to work for a few months to gain experience at a national lab and to encourage students to remain in STEM fields.
The robot dewars have been taken off of 502 and 503 in order to replace the motors and perform maintenance on the stages.
Recently, Marc helped a user run some crystals which the user had arranged to have grown in zero-gravity. Here are pictures of the crystal capillaries mounted at the beamline, and the raster grid used to locate crystals within a capillary.
We celebrated our student James Tyler’s last day of his internship by making liquid nitrogen ice cream. James presented his poster while participants enjoyed strawberry ice cream.
