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https://www.science.org/content/article/china-poised-turn-one-world-s-most-powerful-sources-x-ray-light>
"China is set to fire up a powerful new x-ray light source that will reveal the
atomic-scale structure of proteins and materials. By the end of December,
operators expect light to begin to stream into experimental beamlines at the
High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) near Beijing, which will become one of just a
handful of “fourth-generation” synchrotrons in the world.
HEPS revs electrons up to high energies and bends them around a circular track
so the particles emit synchrotron radiation—mostly short-wavelength “hard”
x-rays. The intense, laserlike x-rays are siphoned off into 14 beamlines that
scientists will use to image materials and biological structures at atomic to
nanometer scales and take snapshots of chemical reactions over nanosecond time
frames.
“It’s like getting a major new telescope. You can see things that were not
observable before,” says Mingda Li, who studies the quantum properties of
materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chairs the users’
executive committee for the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of
Energy synchrotron at Argonne National Laboratory. “This is a very exciting
time for the synchrotron community.”
In structural biology, for example, HEPS will allow scientists to study
cellular machines, such as the protein-assembling ribosome, in addition to
imaging whole cells and viruses. “We’ll be able to see the protein machines in
their natural environment, at high resolution,” says Dong Yuhui, deputy
director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy
of Sciences, which will operate HEPS. The big challenge, Dong says, will be
managing “the huge data” such experiments generate."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/279-breakneck-solarisation/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
