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ESRF hosts EMBO Master Class 2013
From 10-14 June, the ESRF hosted the tenth edition of the EMBO practical course on anomalous scattering in macromolecular crystallography. The course gave students the opportunity to benefit from the ESRF's state-of-the-art beamlines for hands-on tutoring as well as providin…
Room temperature magnetic semiconductor for spintronics
Materials for spintronic applications need to have both magnetic and semiconducting properties. But an intrinsic semiconductor that is magnetic at room temperature has yet to be found. The europium chalcogenides (EuO, EuS, EuSe, EuTe) are promising wide band-gap semiconducto…
Beauty of science: ancient oceanic crust
The image shows a multi-element distribution map (red: Fe, green: Ni, blue: Ca) superimposed on an optical image of a sample of peridotite (mantle rock), partially altered to serpentinite, from the ophiolite of New-Caledonia. …
Oldest primate fossil rewrites evolutionary break in human lineage
The study of the world’s oldest early primate skeleton has brought light to a pivotal event in primate and human evolution: that of the branch split that led to monkeys, apes and humans (anthropoids) on one side, and living tarsiers on the other. The fossil, that was unear…
10th anniversary celebrations for Grenoble's Partnership for Structural Biology (PSB)
On 4th June more than 150 specialists from all across Europe gathered in Grenoble to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Partnership for Structural Biology. The day was centred around talks by prestigious guests including David Stuart from the University of Oxford, UK, and…
Direct observation of the self-assembly of surfactant micelles
Surface active agents or surfactants are ubiquitous in consumer products as important ingredients performing as detergents, solubilisers, emulsifiers, etc. Their self-assembly into micelles occurs on very short time scales of typically some milliseconds and therefore the und…
South Africa joins the ESRF
On 21st May, South Africa signed a medium-term arrangement with the ESRF at a level of 0.3% and, in doing so, became the 20th country to join the European synchrotron. South Africa’s affiliation is a major milestone in its long-standing determination to reinforce ties wit…
ESRF lays "grey gold" paving in new experimental halls
State-of-the-art technology is commonplace at the ESRF and this rule does not just apply to instrumentation. Today, one of the seemingly most basic and fundamental ingredients of construction, and certainly the most used man-made product in the world, namely concrete, has be…
Phonon anomalies and the Verwey transition in magnetite
The Verwey transition in magnetite is one of the longest unsolved problems of solid state physics, where the otherwise excellent theories fail to capture the collective nature of the first-order phase transition. A recent inelastic X-ray scattering (IXS) study revealed an an…
Dutch industry trade fair at the ESRF