The BCSB had a good showing at the ACA in Philadelphia this year. Dr. Banu Sankaran ran a session on service crystallography, and the BCSB teamed up with other ALS scientists to run a booth at the conference.
We held a jelly bean counting contest at our booth at the ACA. Matt Clifton of Nurix was the winner. Good job, Matt!
Our second User Forum was on March 4, in which we discussed the purchase of a pixel-array detector for beamline 5.0.2. The exciting news since then is that we will be able to purchase a Pilatus 6M for the beamline. Expected delivery is in September of this year.
The third User Forum was on April 2, in which we discussed the diode-beamstop device which the BCSB is developing (allows measurement of flux during data collection), as well as the MiniKappa interlocks on beamline 5.0.2, which will now allow a full 360 rotation of omega (sometimes called Phi) with a maximum kappa angle of 55 degrees.
ALS is down for the month of July and the first week or so of August. We are taking the opportunity to do a bunch of preventative maintenance on our beamlines. Some of the items include: – cleaning the Be window on 502 (may help to decrease scatter in images) – replacing air lines –…
Once again, the BCSB teamed up with several other groups at the ALS to host a booth at the ACA. It was great to hang out with our ALS colleagues and to see many of our users.
