I was listening to the podcast Left, Right & Center from Santa Monica’s NPR station, KCRW, on my way to the airport today. I have mentioned this podcast before because it provides a range of perspectives on many topics. One interesting feature is the rant/rave at the end, where the panelists basically do highs and lows for the week. This past week, one of the panelists ranted that January seemed like it was 5000 days long, and she was ready for February. I am ready for the vernal equinox.
You will notice we have many activities planned this spring, starting with an electron diffraction webinar series, workshops at Northwestern and Yale, and the usual conferences. Speaking of Yale, we have a link to an Expert Interview with Brandon Mercado below. Finally, don’t forget the ACA Summer Course in Chemical Crystallography at Northwestern University this year.
Jakub provides the month's tip on a fourth, easy method to generate crystal faces in CrysAlisPro. Jeanette is back with her first review of the year. I am sure you will do a double take at the compounds contained in your next packaged meal.
Discover how electron diffraction is revolutionizing structural analysis across pharmaceuticals, materials science, and chemistry. This webinar series explores its applications, workflows, and real-world impact on solving complex research challenges. Join us for the first episode.
In this session, we will review how electron diffraction is reshaping research in fields such as pharmaceuticals, metal-organic frameworks, synthetic chemistry and materials science by solving crystal structures that were previously unsolvable, screen hundreds of crystallization conditions and automate polymorphs and impurities identification and quantification over thousands of tiny crystals. Join us to see how MicroED is transforming research—register now!
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.
For a crystal-clear view of cutting-edge science, step into Brandon Mercado’s lab in the basement of Kline Chemistry Laboratory.
Brandon Mercado, the director of Yale’s Structural Science Facility, has played a key role in bringing MicroED (microcrystal electron diffraction) to the university. This cutting-edge technology allows researchers to determine the atomic structure of tiny crystals that are too small for traditional X-ray crystallography. With its wide applications in structural biology, chemistry, and materials science, MicroED is opening new doors for analyzing small molecules, proteins, and nanomaterials.
Rigaku offers a crystal structure determination service with scientific support, with data collection on a XtaLAB Synergy-ED diffractometer in Rigaku's own laboratories.
Access our electron diffraction service delivering all structural information, datasets, raw data files and software to re-process at your own leisure. Electron diffraction can be carried out on samples with crystallites under 1 micron in size, meaning that crystallization trials for traditional X-ray analysis no longer have to become a bottle neck to structural analysis.
Researchers from Germany and Spain have synthesized and characterized the firstdiazadistiboylidenes, molecules containing an Sb-Sb bond in either a three or five-membered ring.
The 2025 ACA Summer Course, which will be conducted at Northwestern University from June 22-29, 2025, is open for registration at Application 2025 | ACA Summer Course.
The ACA Summer Course in Chemical Crystallography program is now in its third decade of instruction in the United States. The current incarnation of the course is directed towards single crystal chemical crystallography and powder diffraction techniques as applicable to small molecule studies. The course is designed to instruct attendees in the theory and practice of these two aspects of crystallography.
The course is held every summer, in even years at Purdue University and in odd years at Northwestern University.
No prior knowledge of crystallography is expected from attendees. However, a good understanding of undergraduate-level chemistry, physics and mathematics is desirable. While the course is geared towards graduate-level attendees, applications from strong undergraduate students will be considered. Past course attendees have included faculty members and industrial researchers.
Nowadays, the primary source on most single crystal diffractometers is no longer an X-ray sealed tube with a molybdenum target and nearly parallel beam, but rather a high-brilliance copper source with a beam converging to a spot smaller than two hundred microns on the crystal. With the paradigm shift of how crystals are measured in chemical crystallography, corrections based on the crystal shape become more important and often crucial for obtaining an optimal result. With longer wavelengths, absorption effects become more prominent, but even for a sample with a low linear absorption coefficient (μ), the beam profile correction has proven to be essential in many cases. There are three main tools for the interactive determination of crystal faces: drag, point, and snap. (1) Each of these has proven useful for different types of samples. But did you know there is a fourth method? And it may be the fastest one yet. Here’s how to use this fourth method:
Choose one of your favorite ways to open the Crystal Movie tool in CrysAlisPro. In the toolbox window, switch to theAdd shape (1)tab. Select theDraw height of crystal (2)tool by ticking the checkbox next to it. Using two lines, select the top and bottom of the crystal that has been mounted on top of the loop. After that, just clickCreate shape (3)button and leave the rest of the work to CrysAlisPro.
The software will automatically identify the loop, find your sample on the loop, and generate faces automatically around the crystal in less than ten seconds using machine vision algorithms.
You can examine and edit the results on the Faces tab of the Crystal shape toolbox window. Although some faces may have higher Miller indices, the generated shape is perfect as it is for applying a beam illumination correction and even first absorption corrections for high-Z materials. Don’t forget to use the Description button to add CheckCif-required color and shape CIF entries.
Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food…and Why Can’t We Stop? is equal parts diet book, personal memoir, and research review. van Tulleken—a doctor with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) and a research academic at University College London—has long studied the obesity epidemic across the globe, especially in the United Kingdom. Early on, he presents obesity and being overweight as diseases, not descriptors. For example, a child with obesity—not an obese child. Labelling the condition as a disease and not an adjective—you would not call a pediatric cancer patient a “cancer child”—brings attention to obesity and being overweight as diseases and removes the blame from the patient. You wouldn’t treat a child with cancer like it was their fault, like a lack of willpower caused their disease—and the same should go for weight diseases. Researchers have long proven that a person’s healthiness is not directly tied to their weight, yet many doctors still use an outdated BMI scale to measure a person’s well-being—and shame their patients. Obesity and being overweight is not always directly correlated with the healthiness of someone’s lifestyle. van Tulleken posits that the obesity and overweight epidemic isn’t about blaming patients for their lifestyle and diet choices—it’s about how pervasive ultra-processed food (UPF) products are in the human food chain.
To prove his point—it’s less about how many calories you eat and more about where those calories come from—van Tulleken embarked on a special diet. He ate an 80% UPF diet for 4 weeks, while conducting extensive research and interviews trying to ascertain what exactly UPF is. After this, he found himself unable to eat them anymore. It seems van Tulleken was partly inspired to undergo this research because, for years, his identical twin brother had struggled with being overweight—and van Tulleken admits his own unhelpful role in blaming his brother for his condition, without taking into account other factors. By the end of the book—which van Tulleken claims is not a diet book—he also assures his readers that it’s not them, it’s their food, that is making them overweight because, arguably, it’s not really food.
One of the most obvious issues with pushing a whole or minimally processed food diet is that it is expensive—and van Tulleken addresses this off the bat. The obesity and overweight epidemics disproportionately affect impoverished populations who rely on buying cheaper food products with longer shelf lives and fewer requirements for preparation. It’s not as easy for someone on a restricted budget to just stop eating UPF and replace it with whole food; i.e., swapping a microwave chicken and rice meal for a freshly prepared one. Frozen and shelf-stable meals have a myriad of chemical additives—stabilizers and emulsifiers—all designed to reduce production costs, increase shelf life, and keep consumers coming back for more. van Tulleken goes so far as to tell his reader that UPF is addictive—because it’s designed to be, right down to the chemical composition of each potato crisp in that family size bag you find yourself eating in one sitting.
The paperback edition I read included an afterword, written by van Tulleken a year after the original hardback came out. He describes the number of paid speaking engagements he was offered at the major corporations who provide and push UPF, which initially struck him as odd. Why would the companies whose entire business model is built around pushing foods that make consumers unhealthy (even when the foods themselves are marketed as “light,” “low calorie,” “low-fat,” or “healthy”) want someone like van Tulleken to speak to their staff? It turns out, the answer was in the fine print.One of the companies sent van Tulleken a contract for a speaking engagement that was an NDA in disguise. By accepting the fee for the engagement, van Tulleken wouldn’t be allowed to speak negatively about any of the UPF that company produces. van Tulleken says he returned the contract unsigned—and any speaking arrangements or meetings he did engage in with these corporations were unpaid. Maintaining professional ethics is important to van Tulleken, and he calls out fellow researchers whose funding comes from “Big Food.” Those kinds of conflicts of interest should be avoided, and when unavoidable, clearly disclosed.
Ultra-Processed People is an excellent read. It’s accessibly written and relatable. By actually eating a high-UPF diet and detailing his negative experiences and results, van Tulleken is able to connect his voice with the reader in a powerful way. The fact that the very corporations whose financial lifeblood is providing and pushing UPF on consumers have tried to buy his silence suggests his is a voice worth listening to.
