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.