Crystallography Online: the website of the International Union of Crystallography

Dear All,

I hereby would like to announce the takeoff of a SAXS-related weblog,  
focusing on small-angle X-ray scattering and tangential topics  
thereof. It will be maintained at least for the duration of my Ph.D.  
project (another 2.5 years), and input is always welcome. The website  
is located at: http://www.lookingatnothing.com/Introduction.html

The emergence of the internet has opened many new paths for  
communication. Whilst work-related weblogs have been around for a  
while, it is only in recent times that the (quite conservative)  
chemistry community has started noting down items of interest in such  
weblogs. These weblogs serve as agglomerations of items of interest,  
often other websites, ideas, opinions and article reviews. In other  
words, such weblogs work as sounding boards for the extrovert  
scientists.

My project focuses on the microstructural analysis of high- 
performance polymer materials, such as Twaron and Kevlar. Due to the  
many advantages of SAXS, I have employed that as my main technique.  
At the moment, I'm working on adapting (where necessary) the methods  
developed before the widespread availability of computing power, to  
take advantage of exactly that power available to us today. In  
addition to that, I am also going to employ many other techniques to  
substantiate and elaborate on the SAXS results. So far, this approach  
has resulted in a few items of interest, which have led me to the  
creation of this website. For example, there are two (ray-traced)  
movies available, schematically explaining the inner workings of a 1D  
and 2D SAXS set-up, that can be used by the community for  
illustrating the method.

Hopefully, I've captured your interest, and welcome you all onto the  
website, and perhaps this initiative will initiate more such weblogs.

Yours sincerely,


Brian R. Pauw. (brian at stack.nl)