In a pink-walled room of a government office, they spend their days cancelling the passports of runaway husbands.

In shabby backyards and dusty barns, in deserted fields and thick forests, Dieter Klein roams strange and isolated places to find once gleaming vehicles left to rust and ruin. From a dented Porsche to a faded Cadillac, a battered VW Beetle to a whole fleet of abandoned military jeeps, Klein's subjects creak with bygone glamour and might. As moss and gnarled branches transform motors into eerie artifacts, Klein's award-winning automobile photography is not only a tribute to classic cars, but also to the transformative power of nature and the enduring intrigue of people and incidents unknown.The mesmerising results appear in stunning new coffee table book Lost Wheels - The Nostalgic Beauty of Abandoned Cars, which is out next month.Scroll down to see some of the wonderful pieces.

Vande Bharat Mission: Indian citizens arrive at London airport to board eva...

A few days ago, Martín Borthiry contacted me with a question. He had been using the optimized asynchronous Google Analytics snippet for a while, and noticed an additional speed gain when wrapping it inside a setTimeout() with a delay of 0 milliseconds. His tests made it pretty clear that this technique was indeed slightly faster, but Martín had no clue why.

In total, around 1,373 Indians returned to their native places from foreign countries on May 10 as eight 'Vande Bharat' flights from Dubai, Kuwait, Muscat, Sharjah, Kuala Lumpur, and Dhaka landed in India.

With the nationwide lockdown in place to fight the spread of COVID-19, the first condolence meeting held on virtual platform. Banerjee had died on March 20 after a prolonged illness while Goswami succumbed to cardiac arrest on April 30.

Collecting back-scattered X-rays from vacuum windows using a pinhole X-ray camera provides an efficient and reliable method of measuring the beam shape and position of the white synchrotron beam. In this paper, measurements are presented that were conducted at ESRF beamline ID6 which uses an in-vacuum cryogenically cooled permanent-magnet undulator (CPMU18) and a traditional U32 undulator as its radiation sources, allowing tests to be performed at very high power density levels that were adjusted by changing the gap of the undulators. These measurements show that it is possible to record beam shape and beam position using a simple geometry without having to place any further items in the beam path. With this simple test setup it was possible to record the beam position with a root-mean-square noise figure of 150 nm.

Beamline 8A (BL 8A) is an undulator-based soft X-ray beamline at Pohang Accelerator Laboratory. This beamline is aimed at high-resolution ambient-pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (AP-XPS), soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy (soft-XAS) and scanning photoemission microscopy (SPEM) experiments. BL 8A has two branches, 8A1 SPEM and 8A2 AP-XPS, that share a plane undulator, the first mirror (M1) and the monochromator. The photon beam is switched between the two branches by changing the refocusing mirrors after the monochromator. The acceptance angle of M1 is kept glancing at 1.2°, and Pt is coated onto the mirrors to achieve high reflectance, which ensures a wide photon energy range (100–2000 eV) with high resolution at a photon flux of ∼1013 photons s−1. In this article, the main properties and performance of the beamline are reported, together with selected experiments performed on the new beamline and experimental system.

Fast trashion: Exhibition of garments made from street-litter opens at Imperial | Imperial News  Imperial College London

Impacts on groundwater quality from abandoned hydrocarbon wells  GOV.UK

London soil pollution worst on former Blitz bomb sites  Chemistry World

UK's only active fracking site near Blackpool records largest ever earth tremor as homeowners complain of windows shaking  iNews

The title compound, C16H24N2O2, previously obtained as a yellow oil, exhibits a rather low melting point close to room temperature 297–298 K). In the mol­ecule, the isoindoline ring system is approximately planar and coplanar to the nitro group, forming a dihedral angle of 5.63 (15)°. In the crystal, only weak N—H⋯O and C—H⋯π inter­actions are observed, linking mol­ecules into chains parallel to the [101] direction.

In the title mol­ecule, C17H23NO2, the di­hydro­indole portion is planar (r.m.s. deviation = 0.0157 Å) and the nonyl substituent is in an `extended' conformation. In the crystal, the nonyl chains inter­calate and the di­hydro­indole­dione units are associated through C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds to form micellar blocks. Based on the Hirshfeld surface analysis, the most important inter­molecular inter­action is the H⋯H inter­action.

The syntheses and crystal structures of the title compounds, C14H8F4N2O2 and C14H8F4N2O3, are reported. In each crystal, the packing is driven by C—H⋯F inter­tactions, along with a variety of C—H⋯O, C—O⋯π, and C—F⋯π contacts. Hirshfeld surface analysis was conducted to aid in the visualization of these various influences on the packing: they showed that the largest contributions to the surface contacts arise from H⋯F/F⋯H inter­actions, followed by H⋯H and O⋯H/H⋯O.

The title compound, C14H15BrClNO4, consists of a 5-bromo­indoline-2,3-dione unit linked to a 1-{2-[2-(2-chloro­eth­oxy)eth­oxy]eth­yl} moiety. In the crystal, a series of C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the molecules to form a supramolecular three-dimensional structure, enclosing R22(8), R22(12), R22(18) and R22(22) ring motifs. π–π contacts between the five-membered dione rings may further stabilize the structure, with a centroid–centroid distance of 3.899 (2) Å. The Hirshfeld surface analysis of the crystal structure indicates that the most important contributions for the crystal packing are from H⋯H (28.1%), H⋯O/O⋯H (23.5%), H⋯Br/Br⋯H (13.8%), H⋯Cl/Cl⋯H (13.0%) and H⋯C/C⋯H (10.2%) inter­actions. Hydrogen bonding and van der Waals inter­actions are the dominant inter­actions in the crystal packing. Density functional theory (DFT) optimized structures at the B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) level are compared with the experimentally determined mol­ecular structure in the solid state. The HOMO—LUMO behaviour was elucidated to determine the energy gap. The chloro­eth­oxy­ethoxyethyl side chain atoms are disordered over two sets of sites with an occupancy ratio of 0.665 (8):0.335 (6).

Three title compounds, namely, 2-(4-chloro­benz­yl)-5-[(1H-indol-3-yl)meth­yl]-6-phenyl­imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole, C26H19ClN4S, (I), 2-(4-chloro­benz­yl)-6-(4-fluoro­phen­yl)-5-[(1H-indol-3-yl)meth­yl]imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole, C26H18ClFN4S, (II), and 6-(4-bromo­phen­yl)-2-(4-chloro­benz­yl)-5-[(1H-indol-3-yl)meth­yl]imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole, C26H18BrClN4S, (III), have been prepared using a reductive condensation of indole with the corresponding 6-aryl-2-(4-chloro­benz­yl)imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole-5-carbaldehydes (aryl = phenyl, 4-fluoro­phenyl or 4-bromo­phen­yl), and their crystal structures have been determined. The asymmetric unit of compound (I) consists of two independent mol­ecules and one of the mol­ecules exhibits disorder of the 4-chloro­benzyl substituent with occupancies 0.6289 (17) and 0.3711 (17). Each type of mol­ecule forms a C(8) chain motif built from N—H⋯N hydrogen bonds, which for the fully ordered mol­ecule is reinforced by C—H⋯π inter­actions. In compound (II), the chloro­benzyl unit is again disordered, with occupancies 0.822 (6) and 0.178 (6), and the mol­ecules form C(8) chains similar to those in (I), reinforced by C—H⋯π inter­actions involving only the major disorder component. The chloro­benzyl unit in compound (III) is also disordered with occupancies of 0.839 (5) and 0.161 (5). The mol­ecules are linked by a combination of one N—H⋯N hydrogen bond and four C—H⋯π inter­actions, forming a three-dimensional framework.

The title compound, C24H18FNO3, crystallizes in the monoclinic centrosymmetric space group P21/n and its mol­ecular conformation is stabilized via C—H⋯O intra­molecular inter­actions. The supra­molecular network mainly comprises C—H⋯O, C—H⋯F and C—H⋯π inter­actions, which contribute towards the formation of the crystal structure. The different inter­molecular inter­actions have been further analysed via Hirshfeld surface analysis and fingerprint plots.

The application of thermoelectrics for energy harvesting depends strongly on operational reliability and it is therefore desirable to investigate the structural integrity of materials under operating conditions. We have developed an operando setup capable of simultaneously measuring X-ray scattering data and electrical resistance on pellets subjected to electrical current. Here, operando investigations of β-Zn4Sb3 are reported at current densities of 0.5, 1.14 and 2.3 A mm−2. At 0.5 A mm−2 no sample decomposition is observed, but Rietveld refinements reveal increased zinc occupancy from the anode to the cathode demonstrating zinc migration under applied current. At 1.14 A mm−2 β-Zn4Sb3 decomposes into ZnSb, but pair distribution function analysis shows that Zn2Sb2 units are preserved during the decomposition. This identifies the mobile zinc in β-Zn4Sb3 as the linkers between the Zn2Sb2 units. At 2.3 A mm−2 severe Joule heating triggers transition into the γ-Zn4Sb3 phase, which eventually decomposes into ZnSb, demonstrating Zn ion mobility also in γ-Zn4Sb3 under electrical current.

Two commonly encountered bottlenecks in the structure determination of a protein by X-ray crystallography are screening for conditions that give high-quality crystals and, in the case of novel structures, finding derivatization conditions for experimental phasing. In this study, the phasing molecule 5-amino-2,4,6-triiodoisophthalic acid (I3C) was added to a random microseed matrix screen to generate high-quality crystals derivatized with I3C in a single optimization experiment. I3C, often referred to as the magic triangle, contains an aromatic ring scaffold with three bound I atoms. This approach was applied to efficiently phase the structures of hen egg-white lysozyme and the N-terminal domain of the Orf11 protein from Staphylococcus phage P68 (Orf11 NTD) using SAD phasing. The structure of Orf11 NTD suggests that it may play a role as a virion-associated lysin or endolysin.

Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) was recently applied to the in situ and operando study of the charge/discharge process in Li-ion battery full-cells based on a pouch cell design. Here, this work is continued in a half-cell with a graphite electrode cycled versus a metallic lithium counter electrode, in a study conducted on the SANS-1 instrument of the neutron source FRM II at the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum in Garching, Germany. It is confirmed that the SANS integrated intensity signal varies as a function of graphite lithiation, and this variation can be explained by changes in the squared difference in scattering length density between graphite and the electrolyte. The scattering contrast change upon graphite lithiation/delithiation calculated from a multi-phase neutron scattering model is in good agreement with the experimentally measured values. Due to the finite coherence length, the observed SANS contrast, which mostly stems from scattering between the (lithiated) graphite and the electrolyte phase, contains local information on the mesoscopic scale, which allows the development of lithiated phases in the graphite to be followed. The shape of the SANS signal curve can be explained by a core–shell model with step-wise (de)lithiation from the surface. Here, for the first time, X-ray diffraction, SANS and theory are combined to give a full picture of graphite lithiation in a half-cell. The goal of this contribution is to confirm the correlation between the integrated SANS data obtained during operando measurements of an Li-ion half-cell and the electrochemical processes of lithiation/delithiation in micro-scaled graphite particles. For a deeper understanding of this correlation, modelling and experimental data for SANS and results from X-ray diffraction were taken into account.

Each year thousands of vacationers enjoy the scenery along Virginia’s Skyline Drive, little knowing that for a few brief moments they are passing through the territory of an endangered […]

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