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ACA 94, Atlanta, Georgia

The 1994 American Crystallographic Association meeting began with workshops on Isomorphous Replacement, Synchrotron and Neutron Facilities, and the Cambridge Structural Database. Plenary lectures each morning covered a wide range of topics. The Bertram E. Warren Award lecture, presented by M. Bedzyk, was  entitled "X-ray Standing Waves of a Reflection Mirror Surface". The Martin J. Buerger lecture, "The New Synchrotron Radiation Crystallography", was presented by the Buerger Award Winner, P. Coppens. S. K. Ealick began the workshop on North American Synchrotron X-ray and Neutron Facilities with an overview of synchrotron sources available in the USA. A. Clearfield described the benefits of using those sources for powder diffraction studies of structurally complex materials. J. Badger explained the advantages of neutron single crystal diffraction for macromolecules and A. Wilkenson presented a comprehensive review of neutron facilities available for materials research.

Old Guard and Past President Marsh make up Table 5 at the ACA banquet. Front Row: F. Fronczek, W. P. Schaefer, M. Schaefer, A.Destro. Back Row: D. Britton, H.-B. Bürgi, N. Jones, R. Marsh, D. Voet, J. Dunitz.

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center Workshop, presented by F. Allen, D. Watson, P. Edgington, and S. Rowland, included a general overview and practical demonstration on a big screen. The new VISTA program with interactive graphics for numerical and statistical analysis was presented and sparked considerable interest. The latest version  of PLUTO was also demonstrated. The CSD system was available for use all week in the Exhibition area.

The 1994 Transactions Symposium Entropy, Likelihood, Bayesian Inference, and their Application to the Solution of New Structures opened with a plenary lecture by the organizer (G. Bricogne) describing a general mechanism for recovering missing phase information by generating, evaluating and testing hypotheses, together with mathematical techniques for carrying out these steps optimally when phase information is to be recovered.

The eighteen sessions organized by the special interest groups of the ACA covered a wide range of topics and included microsymposia on Structural Aspects of New Glass Applications, Laue Diffraction and Cryocrystallography, Effective Presentations and Research Proposals, Growth of High Quality Macromolecular Crystals, Structure and Function in the Immune System, Conformation Changes in Proteins, The Role of Water in Biological Macromolecules, Powder Diffraction of Superlattices, Incommensurate and Quasi Crystals, Advances in Scattering Instrumentation at Low Momentum Transfer, Practical Electronic Communication, and Nucleic Acid Protein Interactions.

A detailed report on the meeting appeared in the ACA Newsletter and can be accessed on the ACA homepage of the WWW (http://nexus.hwi.buffalo.edu/ACA/).