China set to fire up X-ray light source

China is set to switch on one of the most powerful sources of X-ray light in the world. The High Energy Photon Source near Beijing is essentially a circular track around which electrons will be beamed at incredibly high energies, creating laser-like X-ray beams that can then be used to capture images of materials at the atomic scale.

Once the $657 million synchrotron gets its operating license, Chinese scientists hope to use the machine to study proteins and other tiny biological structures, like viruses. “It’s like getting a major new telescope. You can see things that were not observable before,” a quantum materials scientist at MIT told Science.