Another Day, Another Dewar

The BCSB is planning on starting a monthly User Forum to solicit feedback from users on the current and future use of the beamlines. We’d love to hear from you about the direction that the BCSB should be taking in terms of beamline upgrades, features, and general operations. If you are interested in participating in the forum, please contact Corie Ralston.

Sadly, today was Charlie Eigenbrot’s last PRT meeting, since he is retiring from Genentech in June. We will miss him! (But we do hope we comes back to visit us periodically at the synchrotron)

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.        

The BCSB had its first User Forum meeting on Feb 5. We discussed the possibilities for the new b3 software interface, showed some screenshots of new the new interface, and gathered information from our users on what they wanted in the “new b3”. It was a very productive discussion! The next User Forum will be…

We measured the temperature at the sample during warming of the pin base, and preliminary tests so far show that the heat is not transferred to the loop during two minutes of base warming. Tests are continuing now to determine how well the warmer removes ice and frost from the bases.

Images of a crystal in a loop before and after using the pin base warmer: