More than 180 participants from around the world crowded the Clark Kerr Campus of the University of California, Berkeley, from August 1-6, 1999 for the Sixth International Conference on X-Ray Microscopy (XRM99). Held every three years since 1983, the XRM conferences have become the primary international forum for the presentation and discussion of advances in high-spatial-resolution x-ray imaging and applications (including the use of x-ray spectroscopic and analytical techniques) in biological and medical sciences, environmental and soil sciences, and materials and surface sciences.

Science took the front seat as 219 Advanced Light Source (ALS) users and staff gathered on Monday and Tuesday, October 18 and 19 for the twelfth annual users' meeting. The bulk of the meeting was dedicated to reports on science at the ALS. Packed into two busy days were 31 invited oral presentations and 80 submitted poster presentations, as well as time to visit 24 vendor booths. The oral sessions were dedicated to environmental science, chemical dynamics, biosciences, magnetic materials, and atomic and molecular science. In addition, there was an ALS highlights session that emphasized new results and a session comprising highlights from the young scientists who will carry the ALS into the future.

Scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have generated 300-femtosecond pulses of bend-magnet synchrotron radiation at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) with the aid of a laser "time-slicing" technique. This technique allows an ultrashort portion of an electron bunch in the ALS storage ring to be spatially displaced in such a way that the synchrotron radiation from the displaced portion can then be collected separately. Their proof-of-principle experiment demonstrates that this technique is a viable one for producing ultra-short pulses of x-rays. An ALS bend-magnet beamline is already under construction that will be dedicated to time-resolved x-ray diffraction, EXAFS, and other techniques capable of probing the long-range and local structure of matter on a femtosecond time scale. A proposed undulator beamline based on the same technique would further enhance the flux and brightness by orders of magnitude.

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) of the University of California is a "third-generation" synchrotron radiation source optimized for highest brightness at ultraviolet and soft x-ray photon energies. It also provides world-class performance at hard x-ray photon energies. Berkeley Lab operates the ALS for the United States Department of Energy as a national user facility that is available 24 hours/day around the year for research by scientists from industrial, academic, and government laboratories primarily from the United States but also from abroad.

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) team drawing its members from the Materials Sciences Division (MSD), the Center for Beam Physics in the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division, and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) has succeeded in generating 300-femtosecond pulses of synchrotron radiation at the ALS synchrotron radiation machine. Though this "proof-of-principle" experiment made use of visible light on a borrowed beamline, the laser "time-slicing" technique at the heart of the demonstration will soon be applied in a new bend-magnet beamline designed explicitly for the production of femtosecond pulses of X-rays to study long-range and local order in condensed matter with ultrafast time resolution. An undulator beamline based on the same technique has been proposed that will dramatically increase the flux and brightness.

Forefront experiments in many scientific areas for which synchrotron sources provide sufficient flux are nonetheless hindered because detectors cannot collect data fast enough, do not cover sufficiently solid angle, or do no have adequate resolution. Overall, the synchrotron facilities, each of which represents collective investments from funding agencies and user institutions ranging from many hundreds of millions to more than a billion dollars, are effectively significantly underutilized. While this chronic and growing problem plagues facilities around the world, it is particularly acute in the United States, where detector research often has to ride on the coat tails of explicitly science-oriented projects. As a first step toward moving out of this predicament, scientists from the U.S. synchrotron facilities held a national workshop in Washington, DC, on October 30-31, 2000. The Workshop on Detectors for Synchrotron Research aimed to create a national "roadmap" for development of synchrotron-radiation detectors.