I have another blog posting ready, dealing with the determination of the first three-dimensional structures of viruses in late 1970’s and early 1980’s. I am just waiting for a copyright permission to reproduce an image. Hopefully, it will not be

I need to apologize to the reader for not having written anything during the last few months. They have been months of frantic traveling and activity in the professional front, related to the celebration of the IYCr2014 at the UNESCO

The end of the holiday season is always a time for reflection and even more so when combined with the end of the year and the prospects for the new one. Ever since I became a resident of Lake Forest

As the year 2014 approaches, more and more institutions all over the world prepare to celebrate the International Year of Crystallography  (IYCr2014) with all kinds of activities and media to communicate to the lay public the importance of this obscure

The end result of the efforts of the crystallographic community is a set of Cartesian coordinates (x,y,z,  for each atom) that represent the arrangement of the atoms in the molecules inside the crystal.  These results have been stored since the

An op-ed article by Manil Suri (Professor of Mathematics, University of Maryland) in the New York Times on Monday, September 16 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/opinion/how-to-fall-in-love-with-math.html) eloquently expresses the dismay of the author when he faces the shallow perception that the general public have

  In the vernacular usage, the word ‘crystal’ resonates with purity, perfection, transparency and even durability. In ‘crystalore’, crystals are supposed to have special properties to energize and heal people. These exceptional attributes of crystals are stretched to the limit