The effectiveness of cryogenic specimen conditions for reducing soft X-ray radiation damage is explored. Cryo-conditions protect against mass loss, but less so against the loss of chemical bonds as measured using oxygen X-ray absorption near-edge structure or XANES on poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA).

Carbon K-edge XANES are presented for a variety of carbonate minerals, with a discussion on their use to identify mineral phases within spectromicroscopic studies of environmental samples.

A fast (∼12 ms) shutter for UHV beamlines is described. In the closed position the beam is blocked by an electrically isolated aluminium piece. The total yield photocurrent in this situation can be used to monitor the beam intensity.

The Bionanoprobe has been developed to study trace elements in frozen-hydrated biological systems with sub-100 nm spatial resolution. Here its performance is demonstrated and first results reported.

Data Exchange, a simple data model designed to interface, or `exchange', data among different instruments and to enable sharing of data analysis tools, is presented. Its successful application to a variety of X-ray techniques, including tomography, fluorescence spectroscopy, fluorescence tomography and photon correlation spectroscopy, is described.

Nanoscale X-ray scanning microscopes, or X-ray nanoprobes, will benefit greatly from diffraction-limited storage rings. Here the requirements for nanoscale fluorescence tomography are explored to gain insight into the scientific opportunities and technical challenges that such sources offer.

A fast charge-integrating detector has been showcased for high-resolution X-ray ptychography. The advancement in developing detectors of this kind, with rapid framing capabilities, holds paramount significance in harnessing the full potential of emerging diffraction-limited synchrotron sources for X-ray nanoimaging.

Different studies in X-ray microscopy have arrived at conflicting conclusions about the dose efficiency of near- and far-field imaging approaches. X-ray far-field ptychography is compared with near-field holography and near-field ptychography in computer simulations. All three methods are highly dose efficient, with far-field ptychography offering slightly better low-dose imaging characteristics.

Using the `deep image prior' characteristic of generative neural networks, a post-processing method that mitigates the inter-slice crosstalk issue in multislice ptychography has been developed. Under certain scenarios, crosstalk can be suppressed effectively in slice images reconstructed using ptychographic diffraction data alone.

In the era of diffraction-limited storage rings, can X-ray nanoimaging be extended to millimetre- or even centimetre-sized specimens such as whole mouse brains? The authors believe so and provide size-dependent imaging time and resource estimates based on calculated flux requirements and recent method developments in related disciplines.

A collaborative framework for the analysis of synchrotron tomographic data which has the potential to unify the effort of different facilities and beamlines performing similar tasks is described. The proposed Python-based framework is open-source, platform- and data-format-independent, has multiprocessing capability and supports functional programming that many researchers prefer.

Differential phase contrast images acquired simultaneously with fluorescence images offer a robust method for alignment in low-dose X-ray nanotomography data acquisition.

A segmented transmission detector has been developed and installed at sector 2 instruments at the Advanced Photon Source for differential phase-contrast imaging in parallel with absorption and fluorescence measurements.

A lossy adaptive encoding scheme that can be implemented on a per-pixel basis in hybrid pixel array detectors is described. It is shown that this lossy compression scheme has no effect on X-ray ptychographic images even at low signal levels.

X-ray ptychography is being utilized for a wide range of imaging experiments with a resolution beyond the limit of the X-ray optics used. Here, strategies for data sampling and for increasing imaging throughput when the specimen is at the focus of an X-ray beam are discussed, and the tradeoffs between large and small illumination spots are examined.

The planarity of the 4,8,12-trioxa-4,8,12,12c-tetrahydrodibenzo[cd,mn]pyrenylium cations in several salts and their structural chemistry are described.