Read about the launch of new products, global installations, a Bioscience lab opening in Cambridge, and Rigaku's listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, alongside insightful articles and reviews!
I missed a couple of the big crystallography conferences this year, but Rigaku was at all of them. Mark Benson provides a report on AsCA from Kuala Lumpur farther down.
This month’s product in the spotlight is the Intelligent Optics Module (iOM), which provides nearly automatic alignment of the beam on the XtaLAB Synergy-DW. Khai provides the tip of the month, a handy one, on keeping your disk clean.
I came across an interesting paper on bioRχiv that addresses a pet peeve of mine – the misuse of bar graphs. It is a short read and suggests controls to prevent further misuse.
Jeanette reviews The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life. This might well be Jeanette’s last review for a while since she is now working for a large publishing house and has a conflict of interest. Thank you, Jeanette, for all the great reviews! Dear Reader, you’ll have to suffer with my reviews unless some of you volunteer.
Let me digress. Last weekend I was at the grocery store, and an older lady came in with a shopping cart with a wheel that would not cooperate with her. I offered her my cart, and she said, “Oh, you’re being nice because it is Thanksgiving.” I told her, “No, wouldn’t we all be better off if we were nice to each other all year round?” She smiled and agreed.
The RSfPC is a course aimed at newcomers to crystallography and focuses on the practical aspects of crystallography with 10 lectures covering approx 10 hours and a course exam at the end.
The Rigaku School for Practical Crystallography was created during the pandemic to help fill the gap left by the cancellation of many regional crystallographic teaching schools. Thanks to the positive response over the past four years, it has continued to grow. Now offered on-demand, the course aims to make learning more accessible by overcoming time-zone challenges and reaching a wider audience.
We’re excited to welcome new students to the Rigaku School for Practical Crystallography.
Our LinkedIn groupshares information and fosters discussion about X-ray crystallography and SAXS topics. Connect with other research groups and receive updates on how they use these techniques in their own laboratories. You can also catch up on the latest newsletter or Rigaku Journal issue. We also hope that you will share information about your own research and laboratory groups.
Atrigakuxrayforum.comyou can find discussions about software, general crystallography issues and more. It’s also the place to download the latest version of Rigaku Oxford Diffraction’sCrysAlisProsoftware for single crystal data processing.
A team from Rigaku attended the 18th Conference of the Asian Crystallographic Association, AsCA 2024, in Kuala Lumpur. For single-crystal enthusiasts, we marked the occasion by adding molybdenum to the available wavelengths of our new PhotonJetMAX sources, offering more than twice the diffracted intensity with no increase in operating costs!
While our European office slept, we remotely logged into the XtaLAB Synergy-ED in Frankfurt to deliver live demonstrations of electron diffraction and showcase our incredible workflow.
Our colleagues also invited delegates to bring their own powder samples to the conference, where data was collected live at the booth on a MiniFlex. This activity proved to be extremely popular, keeping the team busy throughout the meeting.
It was tempting to offer electron diffraction data collection on some of these powder samples. However, I suspect my colleagues in the lab would not have appreciated adding to their already long list of ED measurements!
It was fantastic to catch up with our customers from across the region. Hearing their feedback and discussing how our instruments support their science was a real highlight of the event.
It had been eight years since I was last in Kuala Lumpur. Hopefully, it won’t be so long until next time.
Achieve peak source performance at any time with the Intelligent Optics Module (iOM) automated alignment
For automatic beam alignment and consistent performance, the XtaLAB Synergy-DW VHF can now be equipped with our new IOM device for fully motorized automatic beam alignment. With encoders on every axis, iOM puts the beam exactly where you need it with high reproducibility, perfect for the smaller samples commonly studied today. iOM also lets you achieve maximum intensity from your source by automatically maximizing the intensity so you can achieve peak performance at all times.
Intelligent Optics Module (iOM) Overview
Peak Performance
With automatic alignment, your source can maintain peak performance all the time. Perfect alignment can be achieved within a few minutes to keep your system ready for the smallest and most challenging samples.
Precision Engineering
Reproducibility
The iOM device has been designed with encoders on each motor to ensure it knows its exact position. When aligning the beam, this enables the best position to be automatically found and remembered so optimal alignment can be easily recovered.
Safety
Manual alignment of X-ray sources often requires direct access to knobs and screws inside the radiation safety enclosure. This represents a risk of exposure to X-ray radiation and thus is often left to service engineers to perform. The iOM device allows fully remote alignment of the X-ray optic while the X-ray safety enclosure is safely interlocked.
Simplicity
X-ray source alignment has never been easier with the iOM device attached to your source. The X-ray optic can be aligned either using manual point and click to point the beam at the sample or automatic alignment for maximum intensity in just a few minutes.
More independence
The iOM gives unprecedented control over the optic position, all controlled via a software interface. This means that service engineers no longer need to be present on-site to accomplish full optic alignment. Either use our automatic routine or adjust the alignment yourself with an easy-to-use, intuitive software interface. Still not confident? Our service engineers can step in and perform alignment and source diagnostics over the Internet, minimizing your service costs.
Tip of the Month
Experiment cleanup
By Khai-Nghi Truong
Why should I use it?
Every disk has only limited storage space. Running one data acquisition after another over several months or years can lead to a few giga-/terabytes of data. CrysAlisPro can help you free up data space from any disk by removing unnecessary tmp folders, large log files, or whole experiments with ease. It is also possible to compress images or zip and move certain experiments to a selected folder with the Experiment Cleanup feature built in CrysAlisPro.
How do I use it?
Open any *.par file in the offline version of CrysAlisPro. There are now two ways to open the dialog window: (1) click on the power tool Command shell, type xx cleanup into the command line and press <Enter>, or (2) click on the power tool Service utility and select <Exp. cleanup>.
Figure 1. Different ways to access the Experiment Cleanup feature.
The dialog allows you to clean up your folders from CrysAlisPro tmp folders that were created during the data reduction process, or large log files. It can additionally compress images to the more effective CCP4-based bitwise compression, and many more.
First, choose the root directory that you would like to clean up. Then select your choice of settings and press <Start Cleanup>. Depending on the number of experiments and which options were selected, it might take a while.
Note: Please do not delete log files from recently performed experiments. Up to 30% can be freed up from each experiment when you choose “Empty tmp folder” and “Delete large log files”.
Nathalie A. Cabrol’s The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life is a fun introduction to astrobiology and the search for life beyond our Earth. At only 264 pages–not counting image credits, notes, and the index–The Secret Life of the Universe is by no means a deep dive. It is an accessible read, well-written for those not familiar with the everyday jargon of Cabrol’s career. Cabrol touches on everything from biogeochemical theories on the origin of life to the mystery of phosphine on Venus to far-off planets that scientists predict would resemble something straight out of popular science fiction (think icy Hoth and lava-covered Mustafar from Star Wars). The search for life of any kind–but especially what we would classify as intelligent life–is a cerebral path of study, and one that can be hard to wrap one’s brain around. Cabrol holds the reader’s hand from start to finish, with her passion for her research radiating off the page.
