IYCr Down Under

From SCANZ Newsletter, No. 63, Feb 2014

SCANZ has allocated $20,000 to support various activities to celebrate the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr):

Crystal growing competition: SCANZ, the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Australian Chemical Inst. are supporting a National Crystal Growing Competition. States and territories that run individual competitions will send their winning entries for selection of national winners (jennyjonesdr@gmail.com).

Remote data collection: At the Australian Synchrotron (U. of Queensland) researchers will demonstrate remote data collection (coordinated by Brett Collins).

With the help of Citizen Scientists, Janet Newman hopes to develop software that can distinguish between drops containing crystals (left) and those without (right).

Citizen Science Crystal Drop Evaluation: Janet Newman is leading a citizen science project for ABC Science's 'National Science Week' to evaluate the results of crystallization trials to develop a robust computer algorithm that could identify subsets of trials that are interesting enough to require human examination. Participants will match dozens of images to a set of 10 standards. These data will be a training set for a machine-learning program to classify images into sets (www.scienceweek.net.au/abc-sciences-national-science-week-citizen-science-project-2014).

Left, crystal skull from the British Museum - picture taken by Rafal Chalgasiewicz. Right, the crystal structure of quartz, representation generated using Diamond (www.crystalimpact.com/diamond/). The images are from Hubert Chevreau's post on quartz (http://crystallography365.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/quartz-dear-indi-let-me-in-next-time/).

Crystallography365: Crystallography365, led by Helen Maynard, is an attempt to blog a crystal structure each day in 2014: http://crystallography365.wordpress.com. The goal is to draw attention to crystal structures useful to society. Anyone interested in writing entries for crystallography365 contact helen.maynard-casely@ansto.gov.au.

'Crystals in the City' is being planned by Neeraj Sharma for August 9-30, 2014 (National Science Week in Australia). A dozen 6 ft tall structural models will be exhibited in cities in Australia. The structures will 'reflect' their surroundings and inform the public of crystallographic achievements, with hands-on activities and an opening event organized by Chris Ling at the Verge Gallery (U. of Sydney).