Crystallography matters ... more!

KRYSTALLA PROJECT is an outreach project of CSIC - Triana - Discover Foundation, for the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr2014)
Contest Director: Juan Manuel García Ruiz
Production: MADRID SCIENTIFIC FILMS

The Schools Crystallization Contest, aimed at students and teachers in secondary and high schools, aims primarily to use the natural attraction of the phenomenon of crystallization to teach high school students how to make and enjoy science, and about working in the field of science. The contest format involves all the ingredients of the scientific method: from research laboratory to the presentation of results in a forum-type 'scientific conference'. The Contest values ​​creativity, experimental work, the work plan, analysis of results, design of the posters and their presentation.

The Final Contest was held in the Faculty of Science at the University of Granada May 11, 2013 with more than 200 high school students, from the provinces of Seville, Granada, Malaga, Cadiz and Cordoba, and was judged by a panel of highly respected researchers and representatives from scientific associations. Each of the 40 participating schools in the final was represented by a team of three students and a teacher who presented a selection of the crystals obtained, and a scientific poster detailing the objectives, materials, methods, results and conclusions.

The contest began in November 2012 with the organization of four courses for secondary school teachers in the provinces of Granada, Seville, Jaen, Cordoba, Malaga and Cadiz with the help of the CEP in these cities. In total, 63 teachers attended, and learned to use scientific-didactic tools for conducting crystallization experiments with their students. They also learned the importance of crystallography and crystallization in industrial troubleshooting and drug development, among other applications.

During the months of January to May, teachers and over 1,500 students conducted crystallization experiments in the classroom in the four aspects of the contest: a) crystallizing ammonium monophosphate, b) formation of geodes, c) crystallization from common salt, d) crystallization gels. Students used an educational kit to grow attractive monoammonium phosphate crystals. The kit demonstrated basic concepts of crystallization (e.g. solubility, supersaturation, nucleation, morphology) relevant to many processes in any area of science and engineering.

This was a project of: Laboratory of Crystallographic Studies IACT (CSIC-UGR joint center) Crystallization Factory (Project Consolider-Ingenio 2010, http://lafactoria.lec.csic.es/ ) and was sponsored by: National Research Council; Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology; University of Granada; Discover Foundation; Triana Science and Technology

See the photos of the event. 

Showcasing Integrative Structural Biology

The first Instruct Biennial Structural Biology Meeting at EMBL Heidelberg Advance Training Centre, 22nd to 24th of May 2013, will showcase integrative structural biology and its impact on biological research. The program includes sessions that represent recent structural biology highlights, emerging methods and technologies and results of biomedical importance.

Confirmed speakers include: So Iwata (Imperial College, Diamond), Dinshaw Patel (Sloan-Kettering Institute), Roger Sunahara (University of Michigan), David Eisenberg (UCLA), Philip Selenko (Leibniz Institut), Elena Conti (MPI Martinsried), Carol Robinson (University of Oxford), Stephan Sigrist (FU-Berlin) and Henry Chapman (European XFEL).

A special session, jointly organised with the ESFRI project Euro-Bioimaging, will focus on the bridge between structural and cell biology provided by recent developments in electron, light and X-ray microscopy. Confirmed speakers for this session include Gerd Schneider and Wolfgang Baumeister.

The position of Instruct in the wider context of integrated European infrastructures such as Elixir (bioinformatics) and Euro-Bioimaging will also be presented. Young scientists who want to know where structural biology is and where it is going are especially encouraged to attend; some student bursaries are available. For more information visit the meeting website www.structuralbiology.eu/ibsbm2013

This year's exhibition at Carolina Rediviva, Platonic Solids and Quasicrystals, is all about crystallography and shows how this science has been perceived over time. By collaborating with the Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University, we can exhibit books side by side with real crystals, models of crystals and instruments that have been used to measure the angles of these strange formations that seem to have been cut and polished by human hand whereas in fact they have been shaped by uniform atomic structures.

Welcome on a beautiful journey through this collection of historical scientific books and artifacts.