Another Day of Lectures

Lunch! It took me a while to figure out, but I'm fairly sure that dark greenish thing in the upper-left box is a piece of cooked okra. I'm beginning to recognize my food.
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Today I attended two keynotes, one on nanostructures in the morning, and another on neutrons and synchrotron X-rays (both are high energy diffraction systems) in the afternoon.  I spent the majority of the morning listening to talks on magnetic crystallography, including a fascinating talk on magnetic space groups by a professor from Penn State.  He was an excellent speaker, the best I've heard all week.  He's compiling a new set of International Tables (the Crystallographer's Bible) for magnetic structures.  Jenny Glusker was speaking in the last session of the morning, so Dr. Lake and I went to hear her.  It took us nearly 20 minutes to find the room, and we missed half of the talk!  It's the biggest room in the building, so you'd think it would be easy to find, but no.  It takes up two or three floors, but all of the entrances are somewhat hidden.  We had to go into one room on the fifth floor, walk to the back and around a corner, then up some stairs.  It was a bit strange, but we did find it at last.

The sign for our hotel, Super Hotel City Osaka.
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Lunch was another bento box, and the talk was given by one of the upper-ups at SPring-8 (yes, that's not a typo, it's short for Super Photon ring - 8 giga eV ), one of the world's most powerful synchrotron facilities.  A synchrotron creates very powerful radiation by accelerating electrons to near the speed of light. It was an interesting and funny talk; the speaker had quite the sense of humor.  It was also amusing because he showed a short video about the facility and a piano-violin duet of "Memory" from "Cats" was playing in the background... not quite the song I would have picked to hear while seeing images of heavy equipment...

He was an excellent speaker, the best I've heard all week.

The IUCr banner.
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After lunch, I wandered around the exhibition hall to see the posters.  Jim Kaduk, a powder diffraction expert and all-around nice guy who has helped with the ACA course for several years, had a poster, so I checked it out.  I also asked a few questions about a twinning poster, and I read a poster about using protein and membrane structures to learn how Celiac disease occurs.

In the afternoon session, I learned more about synchrotrons and then heard a few lectures on co-crystals.  This spring Nicole Morozowich gave us a co-crystal to find the structure of.  I didn't know much about them at the time.  I still don't know *much,* but I know more than I did before.