The selection committee for the 2013 Walter Hälg Prize is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2013 Walter Hälg prize is  Professor Joe Zaccai.
 

The Society of Chemical Industry and the Royal Society of Chemistry have jointly awarded their 2013 Rideal Lectureship to Professor Jeff Penfold of the STFC ISIS Pulsed Neutron & Muon Source and Oxford University. The Rideal Lectureship commemorates the great English physical chemist, Sir Eric Rideal FRS, whose work had such impact on the fields of electrochemistry, chemical kinetics, catalysis, electrophoresis, colloids and surface chemistry.

FibreFix is a well-established software package for the processing of fibre diffraction (and similarly oriented) data. It provides a platform integrating several programs. Two new versions of the package have just been released, one for Windows 7 and higher operating systems (fixing a legacy issue with Microsoft .NET Framework 1 in the original XP version), and another coded in Java (which it is hoped will facilitate future integration into ImageJ).

During the SAS2012 meeting in Sydney, a well-attended panel discussion was held to discuss two related matters:

A new release of the popular ATSAS program suite has just been announced. ATSAS 2.5 is free for download for academic users from http://www.embl-hamburg.de/biosaxs/download.html

The 2012 Guinier Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Small-Angle Scattering is awarded to Professor Otto Glatter of the University of Graz, Austria: for his dedicated development, application, propagation and dissemination of small-angle X-ray, light and neutron scattering methods over more than 40 years; for his pioneering work on the development of the indirect Fourier Transform method and its application to solve practical problems in real materials across many fields, especially in polymer science, soft matter and nanoparticle systems, and its extension to concentrated systems; and for hi

The aim of this workshop is to work on specific matters important to the canSAS community as decided in previous conference calls.  The three main themes are: data format, standardisation and development of this portal.

Reported in Neutron News and Synchrotron Radiation News

28-31 July 2012

Dr Sylvia McLain of the University of Oxford has been awarded the prestigious B.T.M. Willis Prize for neutron scattering in recognition of her studies of a wide range of biological molecules and their interactions at the atomic and molecular level in the presence of water.

Researchers at Monash University have used x-ray beams created by the Australian Synchrotron (AS) to discover how enzymes work to dissolve blood clots and clean up damaged tissue in the body - a finding that could ultimately lead to a reduction in the number of heart disease-related deaths occurring each year as a result of blood clots.

Bristol University team dissolve iron in liquid surfactant to create a soap that can be controlled by magnets. The discovery, published in Angewandte Chemie, could be used to create cleaning products that can be removed after application and used in the recovery of oil spills at sea.