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A school science student has been awarded.
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Scientists have been using both I13 and ID17 at the ESRF, Grenoble, France to develop a new quantitative x-ray phase-contrast imaging method, based on the edge illumination principle, which achieves unprecedented nanoradian sensitivity. Using both very high and very low x-ray energies at the two facilities, the team showed that this highly sensitive technique can be efficiently exploited over a very broad range of experimental conditions. Not only that, it is simple, scalable, and relatively ...
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Scientists from the University of Sheffield have used Diamond's I22 beamline to develop intensely coloured iridescent materials by mixing block co-polymers in varying proportions.
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Transition metal oxides (TMO’s) containing a 5d element are increasingly attracting attention in the quest to discover and exploit novel electronic states. In the case of the 5d TMOs, these states arise from the strong spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which entangles spin and orbital moments. Iridium-based compounds have recently excited particular interest, including layered perovskite structures isostructural to the cuprate superconductors. Reporting in Physical Review Letters, an ...
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New foot-and-mouth vaccine signals huge advance in global disease control
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The 2001 Foot and Mouth disease virus (FMDV) outbreak in the UK caused the deaths of over 7 million livestock and cost the economy in the region of £2bn. Globally it remains one of the most economically important diseases in livestock worldwide, with approximately 3 to 4 billion doses of vaccine administered every year. A group of scientists have been using Diamond’s microfocus beamline I24 to help develop a new type of vaccine that is safer to produce, more stable and easier to transport ...
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Scientists have developed a new methodology to produce a vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV).
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Chalk and other sediments found at the bottom of the ocean are largely made up of microscopic shells. These shells contain important chemical clues to the environment in which the animal lived, such as temperature, ocean pH, ocean productivity, ocean circulation, global ice volumes and much more. But there are questions as to how to interpret these clues, particularly in understanding how the shell chemistry changed after the animal dies, over the millions of years it lies in the sediments. ...
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Since the middle of the 20th century, infrared (IR) spectroscopy coupled to microscopy has been used as a non destructive, label free, highly sensitive and specific analytical method to reveal molecular structure. Nowadays, synchrotron based IR microspectroscopy offers a signal-to-noise spectral quality unreachable by other broadband sources, and achieves the highest optically attainable IR spatial resolution on microscopic scale samples. This is particularly relevant in Life Sciences, with ...
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Accurate detection and classification of materials, such as diseased tissues or illicit substances, is critical and misclassification can sometimes have life threatening consequences. Infrared (IR) absorption spectroscopy has been widely adopted as a simple but powerful characterisation tool, effectively producing a fingerprint of the samples’ molecular composition and aiding classification. IR absorption spectroscopy is quantitative and highly sensitive, but some measurement configurations, ...
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The high energy and short wavelength of X-rays make them ideal for imaging inner features of samples at the sub-micrometer scale. Over the past twenty years, imaging techniques exploiting the phase of X-rays have progressively developed, pushed by the desire of achieving higher resolution, and to image light materials such as biological soft tissue. X-ray grating interferometry (XGI) is one such successful technique that has seen its user community growing both at synchrotrons and lab-based ...
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Whole grains fundamental to prevention of chronic disease
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This new video from Diamond Light Source tells the behind the scenes story of the installation of a key component in our 562m accelerator. Meet our engineers as they bring our giant machine to life.
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Micro-beam Laue diffraction is a versatile probe for orientation and elastic strain in individual grains of metallic polycrystals. It can help elucidate the dependence of macroscopic material behaviour (deformation response, fatigue, fracture etc.) on microstructure, defect population, macro- to microscopic load redistribution, etc. Furthermore, it can provide quantitative validation for the crystal plasticity models used to study structural engineering alloys. The application of micro-beam ...
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Aluminium hydroxide, Al(OH)3, is a lamellar material with octahedral vacancies in its layers. It has long been known that it can ‘imbibe’ LiX salts to form layered double hydroxides (LDHs) of the form [LiAl2(OH)6]X·H2O, where X is a generic anion. LDHs are important ion-exchangers, with applications in catalysis, biomedicine, and polymer science. Although size considerations should not be problematic, the incorporation of other metal ions into the octahedral vacancies in Al(OH)3 is ...
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To date, the development of inert anode materials has relied on the characterisation of samples which have been removed from their operational environment at various pre-defined points of interest1. This ex situ approach can be problematic, as conventional analysis techniques typically require some form of sample preparation, ranging from simply allowing the sample to cool, to more invasive procedures such as cutting and polishing. While any material studied outside of its operational ...
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Orthopaedic implants improve the quality of life of thousands of people every year, reducing pain and increasing mobility and function. In the past implants have been made of metal alloys and polyethylene, but these implants can fail, causing discomfort and, could ultimately mean further surgery. Recently implants have been developed made from irradiated and annealed ultra high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) that should have better performance. However, the molecular processes that ...
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New Diamond research facility will help scientists tackle diseases like AIDS, Hepatitis and Flu
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The Invisible Revealing the Dangerously Beautiful
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Nanoparticles (NP) are used in different applications such as cosmetics and medicine. To assess potential toxic effects and to design NP-based drug delivery systems it is critical to understand what happens to proteins upon interaction with these special particles. This information is difficult to obtain, but for the first time we have shown that using the B23 beamline, it is possible to detect and analyze structural changes of proteins in protein-metallic nanoparticle complexes1. By using ...
