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Kevan Anderson and the BCG Receive 2022 Renner User Services Award

At this year’s ALS User Meeting, Kevan Anderson, on behalf of the Beamline Controls Group (BCG), was honored with the 2022 Tim Renner User Services Award. The ALS Users’ Executive Committee made the selection for “broad expertise in control systems and software development, and professional judgment and decision-making, which have greatly contributed to the research and development program of the Advanced Light Source.” Read more »

Disorder Drives Long-Range Order in “Tetris Ice” Nanomagnet Arrays

Long-range ordering is typically associated with a decrease in disorder, or entropy. Yet, it can also be driven by increasing entropy in certain special cases. In a recent DOE-funded study, researchers demonstrated that certain artificial spin-ice arrays—nanomagnets lithographically patterned to form Tetris-like shapes—can produce such entropy-driven order. Read more »

Deep-Learning AI Program Accurately Predicts Key Rotavirus Protein Fold

Rotaviruses are the major causative agents of gastroenteritis worldwide. Attempts to design vaccines are complicated by the rotaviruses’ enormous genetic and immunological diversity. At the ALS, researchers validated the novel structure of a key rotavirus protein, predicted using AlphaFold2, a deep-learning artificial-intelligence program. Read more »

Jinghua Guo to Receive the 2022 Shirley Award

ALS senior scientist Jinghua Guo is the recipient of this year’s Shirley Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement at the ALS. Guo is being recognized for pioneering the development of operando soft x-ray spectroscopy, work that’s enabled studies under realistic conditions, which is of great importance in environmental and energy research. Read more »

Operando Study of CO2 Reduction by Copper Nanoparticles

Since copper is necessary to catalyze the reduction of CO2, a greenhouse gas, to valuable products, scientists are working hard to improve its selectivity and activity. Now, researchers have developed an operando capability that can help in this effort by simultaneously probing chemical valence and interparticle dynamics. Read more »

Designer Materials to Keep Plastic Out of Landfills

Scientists have designed a new material system to overcome one of the biggest challenges in recycling consumer products: mixed-plastic recycling. Their achievement will help enable a much broader range of fully recyclable plastic products and brings into reach an efficient circular economy for durable goods like automobiles. Read more »

New Insight into Titan’s Hazy Atmospheric Chemistry

Researchers simulated the complex chemistry that may be occurring in the hazy atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and analyzed the reaction products at the ALS. The work provided new insights into what future Titan probes may encounter upon arrival and what the atmosphere of Earth may have been like eons ago. Read more »

Cheng Wang Wins RSC Stephanie L. Kwolek Award

Recently the Royal Society of Chemistry awarded its Materials Chemistry Division Horizon Prize: Stephanie L. Kwolek Award to a team of scientists, including ALS Staff Scientist Cheng Wang, for the discovery of chiral organic materials that allow high control of photon and electron spin. Read more »