Filming ultrafast molecular motions in single crystal

A striking milestone unveiled the molecular reaction, shedding light on the intricate dance of atoms and the secrets of chemical transformations

27-Mar-2024 - Understanding the behavior of matter is crucial for advancing scientific fields like biology, chemistry, and materials science. X-ray crystallography has been instrumental in this pursuit, allowing scientists to determine molecular structures with precision. In traditional X-ray crystallography ...

Imaging the smallest atoms provides insights into an enzyme's unusual biochemistry

This could help in the design of enzymes for the chemical industry

29-Sep-2023 - When your wounds heal and your liver detoxifies a poison such as histamine you ingested, you can thank the class of enzymes known as copper amine oxidases for their assistance. Identifying the exact positions of the smallest hydrogen atoms in these enzymes is challenging with commonly used ...

Materials synthesis research and study in terapascal range for the first time

Traveling to the centre of planet Uranus

13-May-2022 - Jules Verne could not even dream of this: A research team from the University of Bayreuth, together with international partners, has pushed the boundaries of high-pressure and high-temperature research into cosmic dimensions. For the first time, they have succeeded in generating and ...

Crystallography for the misfit crystals

Advanced algorithms plus an exceptional X-ray laser can reveal the structures of not-so-neat-and-tidy materials unattainable by other techniques

24-Jan-2022 - Francis Crick, who famously co-discovered the shape of DNA, once said: “If you want to understand function, study structure.” Many decades later, this remains a tenet of biology, chemistry, and materials science. A key breakthrough in the quest for DNA’s structure came from X-ray crystallography, ...

Tiny spiders, big color

15-May-2018 - There's plenty that's striking about Phoroncidia rubroargentea, a species of spider native to Madagascar, starting with their size - at just three millimeters, they're barely larger than a few grains of salt. But the reason they caught Sarah Kariko's eye had more to do with their color. Unlike ...

CCDC Launches The FAIRE Programme to Support International Crystallography

31-Aug-2017 - The Frank H. Allen International Research & Education Programme to provide long-term grants to enable academic structural chemistry studies in developing countries. The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (The CCDC) announces the creation of a programme to support structural chemistry research ...

The complexity of modeling

05-Nov-2015 - In recent years, advances in materials synthesis techniques have enabled scientists to produce increasingly complex functional materials with enhanced or novel macroscopic properties. For example, ultra-small core-shell metallic nanoparticles used for catalysis, high entropy alloys made of 6 or 7 ...

Physicists determine 3-D positions of individual atoms for the first time

23-Sep-2015 - Atoms are the building blocks of all matter on Earth, and the patterns in which they are arranged dictate how strong, conductive or flexible a material will be. Now, scientists at UCLA have used a powerful microscope to image the three-dimensional positions of individual atoms several times ...

Researchers combine disciplines, computational programs to determine atomic structure

27-Aug-2015 - A team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Indiana University combined two techniques to determine the structure of cyanostar, a new abiological molecule that captures unwanted negative ions in solutions. When Semin Lee, a chemist and Beckman Institute postdoctoral fellow at ...

Rotational X-ray tracking uncovers hidden motion at the nanoscale

21-May-2014 - Over the past two decades or so, there has been increasing interest and development in measuring slow dynamics in disordered systems at the nanoscale, brought about in part from a demand for advancements in the food and consumer products industries. Some of the techniques that have been developed ...