The Argonne National Laboratory video entitled “Acoustic levitation” that shows Advanced Photon Source physicist Chris Benmore demonstrating “a way to use sound waves to levitate individual droplets of solutions containing different pharmaceuticals” is a Web sensation.

Volker Rose, assistant physicist with the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source and Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory is one of four Argonne researchers to receive 2012 Early Career Research Program awards, granted by the Department of Energy to exceptional researchers beginning their careers.

Paging Peter Parker: Scientists have taken another step closer to producing viable artificial spider silk by zooming-in on the nanoscopic structure of the natural, spider-made stuff, using the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.

The Advanced Photon Source Users Organization has named Damian C. Ekiert as the winner of the 2012 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award. The prize recognizes Ekiert’s work on broadly neutralizing antibodies, which holds promise for structure-based design of a universal vaccine for influenza. The award is to be presented at the APS Users Meeting on May 7, 2012.

Research at the Advanced Photon Source that is helping us understand dinosaur tissue was spotlighted on Clever Apes, the “Science Experiment” hosted by Gabriel Spitzer on Chicago’s WBEZ-FM 91.5 public radio station.

Efim Gluskin of the Argonne Accelerator Systems Division has been elected to Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for leadership in the development of ultra-bright x-ray sources utilized at third generation synchrotron sources and x-ray lasers.”

“Seminal contributions to x-ray microscopy” have earned Chris Jacobsen, of the Argonne National Laboratory X-ray Science Division, election to Fellowship in the American Physical Society.

Prof. Keith Moffat of the University of Chicago has been appointed Senior Advisor for Life Sciences at the APS to provide a stronger linkage between the Advanced Photon Source and the life sciences community.

Karena Chapman, of the Advanced Photon Source X-ray Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, won the 2011 Oxford Cryosystems Poster Prize for “11-ID-B, a Dedicated Instrument for X-ray Pair Distribution Function Measurements.” Oxford Cryosystems gives this cash prize to the best poster describing work in low-temperature crystallography.

On Thursday, September 15, 2011, William Brinkman, Director of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science gave his approval for Critical Decision 1 (CD-1) for the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade (APS-U) project.

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory broke ground on August 30, 2011, for a $34.5 million Advanced Protein Crystallization Facility (APCF) that will enable scientists from Illinois and around the world to produce, purify, and characterize a wide range of proteins more rapidly and play a critical role in the development of important medical therapeutics.

Argonne National Laboratory Director Eric D. Isaacs announced today that Brian Stephenson has been appointed Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Photon Sciences, effective September 1, 2011. The directorate comprises three research and support divisions centered on Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS).

Powerful x-ray technology developed at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s (DOE-SC’s) national laboratories, including the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory, has enabled the discovery of a groundbreaking new drug treatment for malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

A paper authored by two Advanced Photon Source scientists, on “two new methods for forming amorphous solids from molecular liquids and solutions of a wide range of pharmaceutical drugs of varying chemical structures and different functions,” is one of the first five papers published in volume 1, issue 1 of Physical Review X (PRX) a new, open-access journal.

From the Art Institute of Chicago ARTicle blog entry by Francesca Casadio, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Conservation Scientist, Art Institute of Chicago. © 2009 The Art Institute of Chicago

Argonne Distinguished Fellow and Argonne National Laboratory X-ray Science Division (XSD) Director Linda Young has been elected vice chair of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (DAMOP).  The position became official at the 2011 DAMOP Meeting held at Atlanta, Georgia, on June 13-17. The four-year-term position starts with vice chair and progresses to chair elect, chair, and then past chair.

Keith Moffat has been selected as the recipient of the 2011 Patterson Award from the American Crystallographic Association (ACA). Moffat is Principal Investigator for the BioCARS research facility at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. From 2002-2010 he was the Deputy Provost for Research at the University of Chicago.

Paul Fenter, a physicist in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, has been named the next recipient of the American Crystallographic Association’s (ACA) Bertram E. Warren Award, which recognizes contributions to the physics of solids through the use of diffraction-based techniques.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) and the APS Users Organization (APSUO) announce that the 2011 Arthur H. Compton Award will be presented jointly to Edward Stern, Farrel Lytle, Dale Sayers (posthumously), and John Rehr for their development of the technique of x-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy (XAFS), whereby information can be acquired on local structure and on unoccupied electronic states in non‐crystalline materials.

Lahsen Assoufid has been elected a Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He is Section Leader for Mirror Multilayer and Metrology in the X-ray Science Division (XSD) Optics and Detectors Group of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.