I am on holiday, these entries were generated in advance. I cannot respond to e-mail whilst abroad.

Recently, more and more people have started talking about results from scattering and diffraction experiments from coherent X-ray sources. Wondering what all the commotion was about, I found this article. It offers, amongst a bit of theory, some nice insights.

I understood, for as far as I read it, that for very small “packets” of X-ray light, all X-Ray waves are in phase. Upon detection, one can then detect the scattering amplitude, instead of “merely” the scattering intensity. Thus, phase information is preserved in that information.

With this information, in combination with reasonably fast detectors, one can obtain “speckle dynamics” information, that can be directly correlated to the real-time fluctuation s in dynamic processes in a sample.

As I understand, this information is comparable to dynamic light scattering experiments, albeit on a different scale. Thus I think, for my experiments this technique holds little merit over non-coherent experiments. It feels good, though, to finally understand what the talk is about.

I am on holiday, these entries were generated in advance. I cannot respond to e-mail whilst abroad.

I stumbled across this fairly short (only 9 pages) review of research done on the microstructure of carbon fibres. It has a nice overview figure relating the tensile strength to the tensile modulus for many high-performance fibres.

Thus, it is easily seen that PPTA fibres has a similar strength to modulus ratio as glass fibres, whilst it is slightly stronger. PAN(Poly-Acrylo Nitrile)-based carbon fibres on the other hand span the lower regions, stretching a little more than the PPTA fibres do under stress.

I myself also compiled a table showing this, which contains a few more fibre types, but I’ll compile a convenient image out of the data as soon as I have any idea in what illustration package I’ll make it.

Anyway, the article offers much insight into the applied techniques for the determination of the microstructure of Carbon fibres and thus offers a little guidance for me and my project, as it might for others.

Nope, not papers as in publications, but Papers as in the product of two enthousiastic biochemists (page not updated recently). Just today, this morning, Papers version 1.1 was released, meaning it is in active development.

Papers is a sort of library manager, like Bibdesk. However, its purpose deviates from that of Bibdesk, and (hopefully, after tighter integration development), can be used side-by-side. Perhaps Papers can be better described as a scientific article reading workflow integrator thingie. It allows you to easily match articles with information (meta-data), and it organises the PDF library according to your preferences in a comprehensive directory and file structure.

Then it allows you to go fullscreen. Fullscreen should really have been written with a capital F, because if you want, you only see the contents of the PDF file on your screen, no clutter or anything else. Info- and note-windows and control bars can be made to appear if wished, but perhaps the uncluttered version is what we need to enjoy reading our articles on a screen.

It has a good integration with PubMed, which is not really of interest to non-bio or -med folk. It does have an internal browser plugin (which uses Safari), with which you can search for what you want, and upon encountering a PDF file, (allows you to) downloads it automatically, and adds it with its metadata to the library.

It has some more functionality, but if you’re interested, head over to their website.

There are still some usability issues here and there, but all in all, this package shows much promise! I have requested a few more features here and there, and it’d be interesting to see if they will appear. So far, response from the authors has been swift, personal and informative.

Oh, by the by, students get a 40% discount on the total price of 29 euros.

The two meetings of last week turned out to be very informative indeed. Whilst my poster didn’t attract the attention I had hoped it would, the whole Dansync meeting was a very good way of meeting many people, even though many of them spoke Danish. One of the most interesting posters was a poster contribution by Emil Makovicky entitled: “The blue tomb of Maragha, a site of the first quasicrystal, revisited”. This man investigated the quasicrystallinity of the pattern on the sides of the tomb-tower Gunbad-e-Qabud in detail, realising that in the 12th century, many aspects of quasicrystallinity were known (c.f. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5815/1106). It is nice to see that sometimes, art can be an inspiration to scientific research.

Whereas the Dansync meeting was mainly filled with more individual, topical research, the symposium in honour of Jens Als-Nielsen’s birthday the following day was replete with talks on the future of “light” (read: X-Ray) sources, and overviews of results of many X-Ray physics related project groups. Thus, this proved to be a great wealth of background information more in line with my own topic, and was thus very enjoyable. It also helped that the talks were held at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, with comfortable leather chairs, some nice bookshelves and a heavy “gentlenman’s club”-like atmosphere. That said, in my opinion, the first meeting was the most useful for making new contacts.

One final remark: It is frustrating to see that some presenters interpret the “you are now out of time, finish ASAP”-bell as a “half-time, plenty of time”-bell. I think it is unfair towards the (usually younger) presenters who did prepare their presentations just so that it would fit into the designated time.