And… it works!

We held a jelly bean counting contest at our booth at the ACA. Matt Clifton of Nurix was the winner. Good job, Matt!

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.

From July 2017 to May 2018, the BCSB received (and shipped back after beamtime) 758 dewars. Most of these were handled by Anthony. Wow!

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.

During the January shutdown, we decided to test the two Q315R detectors that used to live in beamlines 5.0.1 and 5.0.2. Fortunately, they still work! Once Gemini is commissioned (at the end of this year, if all goes well) then we will have to take the Pilatus out of 5.0.1 and move it over to Gemini. Therefore, good to know that the Q315R is still good. Here it is being tested on the floor at 5.0.1.

Dectris was here at the ALS during the recent 2-bunch mode, and re-installed two of the modules on the Pilatus detector on beamline 5.0.2. Users may not have noticed, but the detector was previously missing panels on the far edges. These are now in good working order, and several test data sets have been collected…