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Two coats are better than one to bring nanomagnetism out of its shell.
Diamond Light Source has been used to determine that at least two chromium atomic layers are required to stabilise important magnetic effects at the interface of iron-chromium nanoparticles. Understanding these new nanoscale effects should help efforts to develop advanced computer memory devices.
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Copper ions form an important part of everyday life, as they are incorporated into a number of proteins and enzymes, amongst which are some that help the body to respire, fight infections and maintain health bones and tissues. Understanding how these ions are accommodated in a solution of water is key to understanding many of these processes.
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Much as some materials exhibit ferromagnetic properties, meaning they form permanent magnets, some are known to exhibit ferroelectric properties, where the material possesses a spontaneous electric polarization. Rarely, materials possess both these properties, and are known as multiferroics. Scientists working at the Diamond Light Source have now been able to probe the magnetic properties of a multiferroic using the beam line I16
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T-cells are a key component of our immune systems, patrolling the body, interacting with proteins on the surface of cells which display small fragments from the cell interior. Usually, these fragments are ‘self’ – small parts of our own proteins. Where infection occurs, the cell displays fragments of the infectious agent, alerting T-cells to the presence of a pathogen. This activates the immune system, and allows the body to act against the invader and destroy the infected cell without ...
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The mis-folding of proteins within our bodies has been linked to a number of wide ranging effects, from common allergies to neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, the protein α-synuclein has been linked to Parkinson's disease. Curcumin (the chemical that gives the Indian spice tumeric its bright yellow colour) has been shown to be a potentially useful treatment, as it is anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory and has an ability to prevent the build-up of these mis-folded proteins. ...
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Building bodies is a complicated business. Thousands of growing cell types, which all need to end up in the right place, doing the right job. Even when we are fully grown, our cells and tissues still need to communicate, and new cells grow and migrate to repair and renew our tissues. To assist with this huge task, the body uses signalling molecules and receptors to direct and guide cells, and to allow communication between different cells in the body. These signals act like traffic lights, ...
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All cells have a cell membrane, made up of a lipid bilayer. Through this membrane sit the membrane proteins; a vital family of proteins which control how the cell interacts with its environment, and control passage of materials in and out of the cell. The family are challenging to study, as the process of crystallisation – the first step to determining a protein’s atomic structure – is incredibly difficult to perform with lipid soluble proteins. Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have ...
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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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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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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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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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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 ...
