Hello everybody, Andrew Mayesty here with Dental L. So let's talk about teeth whitening. So things that I have noticed that patients prefer, things that patients don't like, and just overall whitening and the different products out there and what actually works and what doesn't work. So I have been in the dental profession now for about 15 years, hasn't been 15 years? Wow, that seems like a long time. So I have seen my fair share of whitening products. Whitening products first became popular, I would say about 10 years ago. They really worked always around, but then once things started being advertised that you can whiten your teeth, then everybody wanted to do that because who does not want white teeth? And it is surprisingly easy to do it, anybody can do it. Not everybody can get the most amazing results as the next person, but anybody can truly do it. So what I find is the most popular is in-office whitening. So patients want to get in, do the whitening, get out and done, makes sense. In-office whitening is the more expensive one because you get immediate results within about 60 minutes depending on the whitening process you use, it could be up to two hours. But that is the most expensive, but that's what everybody wants. So money isn't everything, right? I know, who knew? And the take-home option, like in my practice, so I do own my own dental hygiene studio. In my practice, I actually offer both options. So I do offer an in-office option where I apply the whitening for them in about 45 to 60 minutes depending on their current shade, or they can have a package to take home. And that take-home package includes a tray, some whitening syringes, a light in some cases. I do have packages with the light, I have packages without the light, so I do have different options for them. And my take-home packages, they did not sell as well as I would have thought because the take-home packages are cheaper. So I would have thought that patients would have been all for that, but they're really not. I ended up giving away, well, not giving away, but I ended up giving my family those whitening take-home packages as like birthday presents, Christmas presents, because I didn't want them to expire before I ended up selling them. Or maybe it's just because everybody wants the in-office whitening option, which is fine by me because I love doing the whitening because it's easy, you know, easy, it is. And patients are so happy afterwards. So I do always suggest that patients have their teeth cleaned first. Usually that's what patients do. The only time that I've had patients opt to not have the cleaning is if they literally just had their teeth cleaned a couple months ago by somebody else. And they might have said, oh, I heard you do in-office whitening, I want my teeth whitened before the holidays, before the wedding coming up, before the party coming up, but I just had my teeth cleaned so insurance doesn't cover another one. That's the only time where I find patients say no to a cleaning because everybody knows if your teeth are as clean as possible first, then the whitening's going to be better, right? So the in-office is the most popular. There are whitening toothpaste out there also. I find most patients, when I tell them that there are toothpaste out there that will actually help to keep the whitening longer, they are all for that, which is awesome. But I do also tell them the whitening toothpaste that are on the market, like the ones you can buy from the store are useless. In my opinion, they're useless. Nothing has ever worked for me. I am a good guinea pig because I get stains very, very easily, tea and coffee, but like it looks pretty bad in my opinion. So there are a couple of toothpaste that I love and I will actually tell them, like this toothpaste, this toothpaste is amazing. Trust me, it works. I have one toothpaste that is $20 to $25. I have another one that has charcoal in it. If you want something not abrasive, but just a little more of a booster for $35. So with charcoal toothpaste, depending on the one you buy, so be careful, you should not use them every day. There's another toothpaste that I like, which is amazing and that's the $20 to $25 one, depending on if they pick up from me or if I ship out. That one is okay to use every day and it's amazing. But I actually like to suggest both of them. So the one toothpaste, I would show you guys if I had them. Actually, stay right there. Don't move. Let me show you guys. Okay, let's see. There we go. Sorry guys, I guess I couldn't stop the video, but this is real life. This is real informal. This is how it is, right? So this toothpaste, honestly, you guys, I love it for every single day. I love it. This is the best toothpaste that I have found out there that actually helps the stain not come back. But I like to use this charcoal one too. If I'm kind of feeling like I want my teeth to have a boost of the whitening without having a whitening treatment, this is seriously amazing. Be careful with charcoal toothpaste that you buy. They are messy. They are too coarse, too abrasive. So you want one that is made by a dental company. Trust me, don't go to China. Don't go to Japan to get your whitening products. That's another story for another day. But I love these ones in case you're curious. The in-office whitening that I use is Wicked White Pro. Amazing, amazing. I do have a lot of before and after photos on my Facebook business page. If you would like to have a look at those, it is truly an amazing product, limited from what I have found, limited to no sensitivity. And it is made by a dental hygienist. Like the company is made by a dental hygienist. So I would prefer to support them opposed to like Zoom, you know, another one out there that didn't really work well for me anyway, or just way too sensitive. So yeah, you guys, so that's what I find. The in-office whitening seem to be the most popular to take home not so much. I would not go and spend hundreds of dollars on take home kits because they just might be sitting there. But I've known other hygienists that have so much luck with them. So I guess it just kind of depends on how we sell it, I suppose. But my patients just want me to do the whitening for them, then they don't have to worry about it anymore. Okay guys, let me know of any questions. Thank you so much for watching. Click like if you haven't already. So I know people are watching, that would be super cool. And make sure to click subscribe. Thank you guys, have a nice day and happy holidays.


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This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener we could not do it without you, thanks to all of you, including Ms. Music Teacher, James C. Smith and Miranda Janell. Coming up on DTNS, be real and word all are over, sorry to tell ya, we'll explain. Plus, Jeff Dwaskin tells us how chat GPT has changed his podcasting life. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, April 14th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Revit, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And I am very pleased to have the host of Classic Conversations, the podcast and CEO of Stampede Social, Jeff Dwaskin. Welcome, Jeff! Hey! How are you? I have had the honor of being on Classic Conversations and it was very fun, so I'm so glad you came over to DTNS. I'm so glad to be here. That's episode 220 for anyone who wants to look it up. It's great and the highlight of that episode was me bringing up Tom's dad, Bill Merritt, who was not credited on his Wikipedia. But since we talked about it on our episode, I was able to go to Wikipedia, reference our conversation and get Bill Merritt the do for creating CoffeeMate. That's amazing. That's great. I'm glad that's in there now. Thank you for doing that. Alright, let's start today with the Quick Kits. Razer launched a $150 streaming deck called the Stream Controller Axe, powered by Loop Deck, with a slightly smaller but similar form factor to Elgato's Stream Deck MK2. The Stream Controller Axe has 15 LCD switchable key buttons and a faceplate that users can swap around. Also lets users program multiple actions into one button by dragging them into the custom action editor. It's compatible with apps like Twitch and Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator. Yeah, and it's totally different from the Stream Deck because the logo's underneath the keys. WhatsApp introduced new security measures to help prevent your account from getting hijacked. The next time you switch to a new phone, WhatsApp will send a prompt to the old device to verify that you indeed want to switch. It has also added a background device verification to stop attackers from using a stolen WhatsApp key to send unwanted messages. And key transparency lets you confirm if a chat is encrypted with just the QR code. You won't need to verify message content with the recipient anymore. All three of these measures are rolling out right now, so you'll get them soon if you don't have them already. A new advocacy group for good faith security researchers called the Hacking Policy Council launched this week. Its founding members include Bug Crowd, Hacker One, Google, Intel, Ingrid T, and Luta Security. The group will lobby for changes to the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act, which requires disclosing vulnerabilities within 24 hours of discovery, even if no patch is available. China's DD announced Friday that it plans to deploy its autonomous taxis 24-7, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by 2025.  DD also showed off Autonomous Maintenance Bays. They can wash the car, charge them, check them out for issues, all without having to have a human around. And DD announced its Autonomous Trucking Business Cargo Bot reached $14.6 million in revenue in March. The Windows 11 beta preview released today includes a privacy setting for Presence Sensing, which lets an app detect when you're actively using a Windows Power device. The new privacy settings let you decide which apps get to use the feature. Presence Sensing has positive uses, such as locking your device or speeding up authentication, extending battery life, but you might not want every single app on your machine to collect that kind of data about you, so you have that option. Yeah, nice. Good ad. All right, sad news in the land of people who like to play games and or use Spotify. Yeah, so have you heard? I don't know if it's a good word or not, but Spotify is closing down hurdle. That's H-E-R-D-L-E. It's the music guessing game like Wordle, but instead of six tries to guess a five-letter word, it's six tries to guess a popular song. Now, when Spotify bought hurdle last July, the company said it would remain free to play for everybody. You didn't have to be a Spotify subscriber. You didn't have to pay for the game. But I didn't really say it would keep working forever. Well, nah, we kind of know what's going on here because hurdle will shut down on May 5th. Spotify says it wants to focus on music discovery in other areas. According to web analytics firm at similar web, hurdle peaked at 69 million monthly desktop and mobile web visits. In March of 2022, it was it was hot had about 41 million around the time of the Spotify acquisition. So obviously it was dropping off, but still a lot of engagement. We don't know what the user numbers are now. Have to assume probably a lot less than that. So here's the question for the group. Is this a sign that Wordle-like game crazes are over? Or just that hurdle didn't prompt enough people to stream more Spotify tracks? Yeah, I kind of feel like it's the second one. That's what they wanted. They wanted people to use this as another discovery method, which is why they're saying we're going to focus on other things. Jeff, did you ever play hurdle or Wordle or any of these? I played Wordle. It was one of those things where I hate played for a long, long time. And then finally, we had a family text and we would go three, two, one. And the first time I got in two, I made a meme, local man, so I was a Wordle in two. It a big deal. But at some point, when the ones that are like, I can't even think of the right one, but it was like, oh, it's not funny. It's lummy. It's like different words, but 50 words that all have the same different first letter. So it's just a guessing game. It would just frustrate me. I couldn't do it. And Spotify, I can't do name that tune, so I'm not going to do that hurdle. Well, so Jeff, I am a Wordle. I'm Stan. I play it every morning before I do anything else. My mom also does and another friend of mine does. And we all sort of go like, okay, did you get it? How much did you get it in? Okay, now let's talk about what we used as our words. I am a very enthusiastic world user. Hurdle was very difficult for me. I tried it a couple times and I was like, I'm just not good at this. So it dropped off from my radar. But I like the idea of sort of the daily game. It just has to be part of your routine. If you don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it. Hurdle was one of those things where I'm like, it's just not for me. And I feel like Spotify probably felt that enough other people felt that way, especially since Spotify is trying to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall of getting people to pay for Spotify and stay within Spotify and have fun within Spotify when it comes to just something besides listening to a song here and there or making a playlist or listening to a new album. But yeah, I think the company probably said there's no real incentive for somebody who wants to play this game to be part of the rest of the Spotify experience of which it is ramping up all sorts of new features. I mean, they hoped it would, but it didn't turn out to be that way. And they're not telling us how many people are using it, but I bet there's some people in our audience who use Hurdle and are sad about this news. I say that because everybody covered this, like TechCrunch, Sarah Perez, The Verge, Game Developer, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter. I mean, part of that is just because it's Spotify doing something and they're such a big company in the entertainment space, but also I feel like there was a little shout and froida of people like, even if they didn't play Hurdle, they were sad that Spotify was ending it because I totally get what you're saying about, you know, this wasn't working for them. They hoped it would drive discovery. It didn't. So no, they shouldn't have to keep operating it. But even if there's only one million people still using it, that's a lot of people to suddenly let down. Like I wish there was another way. I wish they could like open source it or, you know, give it to pass it along to a foundation or sell it off to somebody. I don't know. I think what it's missing is maybe the community. Like Sarah mentioned how she does the wordle thing with her family. It's an event, you know, maybe the name, the Hurdle just didn't have that. And so, you know, it just loses its muster after a while. And maybe there's more people who like the idea of it than actually like playing it. Well, yeah, I mean, I don't want to say like I'm the best wordle player ever, but like I'm pretty good at it. When it comes to music, I feel like I'm pretty well versed in music. It just, it wasn't the same game, but it was, it was based on the same idea. So I think Spotify saying, ah, fewer and fewer people are using this and having fun with it. And that is not driving people to then go to the full track, right? Like let's say you win Hurdle. The idea is that you figure out the tracks. So it's like maybe you would like to go into Spotify and use that track to create a playlist or all sorts of fun things that Spotify wants you to do. And I think a lot of people are probably like, ah, I was just playing a game for like five minutes.  Yeah, I think a lot of people are using this as a signal that Spotify is, you know, short on cash. They're even killing Hurdle. And I don't know that it really means that. They've added a lot of other discovery things like smart shuffle and that TikTok style feed and stuff. So that they are still trying things. I don't think this means that they're desperate. Didn't they just kill their clubhouse too? They did though. Last month. They did kill that too. Yeah. But, you know, Spotify is also, you know. I don't think that was terribly successful either really. They had a, you know, redesigned mobile app recently with discovery feeds and, you know, they're trying out smart shuffle that helps people with playlist recommendations, podcast autoplay options and AI DJ that's supposed to learn what you like over time and give you more recommendations, you know, based on AI. It's all very, let's try things out. Let's see what people like. That's not bad. That's not bad at all. Because they try things and they don't work. Doesn't mean that they don't know what they're doing. Doesn't mean they do. God bless them. Sarah, would you get the same songs as I would get on a given day? I don't know. Jeff, I would guess not just because I have weird music tastes. So then the competition between us is missing, which is something that Wordle kind of has built. Yeah, because everybody's working off the stage. Exactly, right. Yeah, like music discovery is a very personal thing. It's not necessarily a fun game to play against others. Well, here's another thing that's over. Be Real. The New York Times has an article titled, They're Over Being Real. If you haven't run across it, Be Real is an app that leans into authenticity. Once a day, it prompts everyone at the same time to post a picture of what they're doing right then. It gives you two minutes to do it. Now, you can still post late. It doesn't stop you if you miss the two-minute window. It'll just mark the post as being however many minutes or hours late you were when you finally posted. When the next prompt comes, all the previous day's posts are cleared out and you only see the current one. You're living in the moment. It had huge update and then it got stale. Sensor Tower says downloads of Be Real have been falling since September. Aptopia says daily use dropped 61% between October and March and the problem seems to be that while we say we want authenticity, reality is just a bunch of pictures of people sitting at their laptops, not as compelling for the consumer or for the poster. Jeff, I'm not sure. Have you used Be Real? I haven't, but my kids have. To me, it never really made sense. It's kind of the opposite of what social media is. You go to social media to be someone else, right? I guess that's what it was. I feel like so much of, let's say Instagram, just to use an example, people saying, well, this isn't real life and people are spinning some sort of a narrative that they're having much more fun in Costa Rica than they really are and all the filters make everybody not real. I love the incentive to be like, okay, curate your friends and family or whoever you want to follow and want to follow you and just be yourself. I personally found it to be getting that notification when I just was in the middle of doing dishes or just otherwise like, I don't want anybody to see me right now or even see what I'm doing. That kind of turned me off at the beginning, but Tom, I know that you were having fun with it and you were enjoying the kind of non-Instagram version of life that you were getting from it. Yeah, I love the idea of like, let's not set it up. Let's actually see what you're doing. And I did get to the point where if I was just sitting at my desk, I'd be like, well, I'm going to hold off and do it when I'm not at my desk so it's not always a picture of my desk. The same thing. I would do some things where like, oh, in 15 minutes I'm going to be doing something more interesting, I'll be at a concert or a baseball game and I would tweak it that way. But I think that was still in the spirit of like, you're still not setting up the moment. You're not Instagramming. You're like, this is actually what I'm up to and you don't have to put on filters and all that. And I did like that and I like to see what other people were doing. My interest in it has been rejuvenated lately because Len Peralta just joined. So he's reacting to posts and I'm seeing new stuff from him. But actually before Len joined, I was starting to just be like, okay, take my picture. And I wasn't looking at anybody else.  So I think the best thing that came out of it is the Saturday Night Live Skit making fun of Be Real. It was really, really funny. And what annoyed me also about Be Real is when TikTok tried to copy it and put a kind of a Be Real thing into their app because I'm like, ugh, I just don't need this. But isn't that always the way it goes, right, Jeff? Like if TikTok's like, huh, Be Real seems to be popular with people. Let's just build this functionality into the app that is already popular. And that has worked for the bigger company in a lot of circumstances. And maybe that's what this is. Oh, no, I get that. I just met me personally. I was like, ugh, I don't need the deal with this. It was like forced upon me as well. I purposely hadn't gotten the Be Real. You know, my daughter's had it and all that kind of stuff. But you're right. I mean, all the apps kind of chase after each other when something's popular. Yeah. I think, Tom, you made a good point of like, well, I kind of always sitting at my desk. I don't want it to just be the same old monotonous thing. So there's that. I mean, that's reality, right? For a lot of us. Depending on the time of day. Sure. I'm not really going to be doing anything too crazy.  I'm going to be sitting here, you know, working or otherwise not doing anything super interesting. But also the, I don't know. I guess for me, notifications on my phone, sometimes I need them most of the time I do not because they're invasive. I don't want to be tapped on the shoulder to be like, do this thing. If I don't have to do it for work, I'm not doing it. Oh, I'm sorry. I was just busy looking at my Be Real. What are you saying? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Ryan Ozawa is at the dentist, apparently.  So they're not all pictures of people at their laptops. You know, it's good. No, no. And that's, I mean, that is, it's great to be real. Yeah. I just, you know, you kind of, you have to, you have to buy into it and say, I'm doing this. I'm just wondering if this is not the next wave of social media as a lot of people thought what is, or should Be Real be changing? And if it changes, can it stay authentic? Or does it have to like spice things up? And is it still being real? I'm curious where it goes from here. Hey folks, fighting misinformation online is a big deal. A lot of people talking about it. A lot of people wondering how they can do it. Well, we've got five ways you can do it in Tom's top five. I'm breaking down the top five things you need to know about technology every week. And this week it's top five ways to fight misinformation. Go get it at our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash daily tech news show. AI tools are moving into the optimization phase. Less about they exist. Oh my gosh. And more about, okay, what can we do with these? One example of that trend is the launch of the first open source instruction following large language model for commercial use. On Wednesday, Databricks released Dolly 2.0, which is confusing with Dolly the image generator. This one is D-O-L-L-Y and it's a text generator. Dolly 2.0 is open source, meaning you don't have to pay for an API. The training data was all crowdsourced from Databricks employees so you know where it came from. That training data has been released under a Creative Commons license so that you can go take it and do other things with it if you want. You've got the license to do that. Everybody signed up. They know it's in there. Also on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told an audience at an MIT event, I think we're at the end of an era where it's going to be these giant models and we'll just start making them better in other ways. He compared it to the gigahertz race of the early part of the computer era. He's like, we're not looking at the numbers anymore. We're looking at the uses. That's why he said they haven't even begun training GPT-5 yet. There's just lots to do on GPT-4. And there's lots of room for other projects outside of OpenAI like Dolly 2.0. Now that's the high level view. What about practical uses? What are actual people doing with these artificial people? Jeff is using Generative AI in his productions. Jeff, how is this helping you? I love chat GPT. It's really the greatest thing ever. But what I use it for, I think a lot of times when you're watching these tutorials and stuff like that, it's like, just go and ask it. Give me five topics from my podcast. To me, that's not the right way to use it. Don't ask for it to give you back generic stuff. What I think it's great for and what I use it for a lot is helping me improve the stuff that I create. I'm a big fan of, we still have to use our brains and our creativity that we were blessed with. But we all can use a little help. Anyone can proofread something, do anything. With my podcast, for example, what I'll do is I'll write my show notes. I'll take notes on all the different points that I want people to understand occurred in this particular episode. Then what I do is I create a prompt and I'll take that to chat GPT and I'll say, hey, master copywriter, I need a few things from you. Take what I wrote and SEO optimize it for Tom Merritt what the episode is. Then rewrite these bullet points for that. Do you just say SEO optimize it and that's good enough? I would say SEO optimize it. One I just did was for John Billings. I'll say SEO optimize it for John Billings and the monkeys. I'll give it some things to pivot on. But it understands SEO. It'll show up in a search engine or get all verbose about it. Yes, it'll write it so it's helpful for those tools. Then I say, all right, now that you have that information, provide me three versions of a killer summary that'll pull someone in. I usually ask for more versions that I'm going to use because some are better than others and some have ideas they scatter the ideas across. I think that's a really good point about these tools is that it's not the first response that's the best. They'll have different responses, even with the same prompts. Yes, and the great thing to do is one of the tools that I learned later is that when you build out, if you write something out and you generate it, you're like, hmm, don't necessarily reply to that the response to go, hey, can you try it again but with less verbs? Don't do that. You go to the original prompt and there's like a little edit button which I didn't know this was there for a while and you edit the original one and then just have it regenerate it. That way it doesn't start to get confused with what are you referring to and all that kind of stuff so you can just go right back to the source. But I also do the summaries and then I say, create in my WordPress it has SEO thing where it's like a 160 character description and like a 60 character title so I say make me three of each of those. I say provide me five great tweets that highlight the gas and end with listen here and I'll insert a URL so it'll kind of format it that way. Then I'll say give me some title suggestions. It's not very clever with title suggestions. It's always the tech news today, Colin, Tom Merritt. Even no matter how much I try to tell it not to do that, that's all it can do. We get our title suggestions from the audience so what you're saying is the audience is safe. They will not be replaced by a chat. The audience is not going to be replaced by AI. Then I'll be like, hey, give me some hashtags and I tell it how to give it to me so I can just copy and paste it to the first comment and Instagram and I say add these. I want you to just add these but don't count them in the 10. Then give me a couple just teasers I can use on LinkedIn or Facebook and stuff like that. Then I have this whole variety of what I wrote but then it rewrites it and makes it better and a lot of times comes up with kind of tweaks on it and sometimes it comes up with an analysis and pulls out something that I didn't necessarily think of or like, oh, that is a theme. Because sometimes you're just too much. It recognizes things, yeah, that's interesting. Does it ever add things that weren't there? It does. It's funny you say that in the thing I write, please cover all topics mentioned in the info provided but please do not make up any facts. Please just stick to the facts provided. Interesting. I did something once where I was like, hey, write this. I was like, here's how to log into Facebook. It started to add way more information than I had given it and I was like, whoa, because it probably just had been trained on it so it knew about it. The interesting thing is that if you don't like the results you just say regenerate again and it's like the butterfly effect type thing. All these different things change it and it impacts even if you just regenerated a second later it's like you get completely different response. Those are good tips. I picked up a couple of things just now that I didn't realize he could do. I mean, I feel like this is not unlike the way that we as humans collaborate on DT&S rundowns every day, right? It's like Sarah writes something, but maybe I kind of know a little bit more about the topic or I know where I want to go with it. So just give me a place to jump off of and then we can check each other's work. Yeah, or vice versa. I'll write something, I did this today. This question, I don't think it's very good, but I bet you could make it better because you just need a second pair of eyes or a second pair of AI brains. The other thing I started doing is if you take the title you have and say is this title any good and then just put in the title and it'll say yeah, I think that's pretty good. It explains that this is who it's about and it should be compelling enough and all the punctuality is correct. So there's all those kind of little things. I think if you look at chat, it's kind of like your little assistant, your little buddy. Friendly assistant. Yeah, friendly assistant, but not the guy that comes up with your ideas. It's clippy, but good. Yeah, right.  So if I'm saying you need... That's how humans are too. I know. You might say, well, thank you, Sarah, but no thanks. I'm not going to use your suggestion, but you know what? I appreciate your input. Right, it's just like anything. It gets a certain angle that it wants to take and that's not the angle I want to take. You know, you have to kind of go back and kind of say, all right, focus it on this or something like that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's... Overall though, I think it's extremely helpful. There's so many different ways you can... Another kind of way is like if I'm emailing someone like a sales email and let's say Tom hasn't responded to me in 50 times, I'll put like the emails that I've sent and I'll say Tom hasn't responded to me for months, can you rewrite this email in knowing that and to me to try and get his attention again and then it'll rewrite it so that you can create a follow-up that has... I really apologize for that. Yeah, well, I know. I just... I didn't mean to call you out live on your show, but yeah. But it was a good example. Well, a good example of something that you might want is the Asus ROG Phone 7, which is a gaming phone available for pre-order now in Europe, starting at 999 Euros for the ultimate version. You might say, okay, well, what is this? Both versions have a 6.78 inch screen with a 165 Hertz refresh rate. They run on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processors with a 6000 mAh battery. Both have some fun gaming features like vapor chamber cooling, a boron nitride thermal compound to cool the CPU. The ultimate version has more RAM, storage and increased thermoelectric cooling with the Aero Active Cooler 7 accessory that can lower the temperature of the surface of the device as much as 25 degrees, so pretty significant. But Andy Boxall over at Digital Trends points out that the video and audio quality make it a great multimedia phone as well. It has two front-facing speakers, and in the ultimate version, the cooling accessory also includes a subwoofer. He also raved about Snapdragon Sound and Dirac Virtuo's digital signal processing, which makes headphone audio sound great. And the ROG Phone 7 also has a headphone jack. Ah, you just sold it to like a dozen people in the audience. I know, I saved it best for last. Headphone jack? Yeah, I like to this review because a gaming headphone has an audience. I know that, but it's not a huge one. But if you look at this and be like, oh, for watching, you know, videos, watching YouTube, maybe even movies if you're on a plane because you don't want to take up a lot of space, stuff like that, yeah. That sounds like a pretty decent phone. Good job, Asus. Also, good job, Len Peralta. You have been illustrating today's show. You went high-concept today. I like this. Explain what you drew today. Sure thing. Well, first, you know, it's been a very sad week, and it's only added to the sadness knowing that I just joined Be Real last week and it's being done. We're already talking about it. Yes. It's not done. I don't know. It's not done. Spotify Killing Hurdle, which is, I do that every night with Whirtle and also Framed. But also the biggest, the saddest news of this week, of course, is that Mad Magazine artist Al Jaffe passed away at age 102.  Probably a lot. So this afternoon, I'm getting ready for the show and I'm thinking, you know what? I'm going to do a mad fold-in of Al Jaffe, and that's exactly what I did. This is a DTS fold-in. It actually does work. So if you want to know what the answer is and what's the fold-in, you're just going to have to go. I'm not going to give anything out here. You're going to have to go and check. Explain the fold-in if somebody's never run into it. Sure thing. Because it's a fun concept. So the fold-in is something that happened on the back of Mad Magazine. Al Jaffe was the creator of it. Basically, it was a response to the center fold and playboy instead of folding out. You fold it in. And when you fold it in, you've got a totally new piece of art with also a joke in there, which is really amazing. So the fact that I pulled this together in two hours is just kind of crazy. I love that it actually folds, too. That's great. If you want to see the answer, you can go to my patreon.patreon.com where you will get this image immediately just for joining and becoming back in me at the DTS lover level. You can also go the old-fashioned way, purchase it from my online store. You can fold it over that way or order a print for me, and I will pre-fold it for you and you can see what the answer is. Oh, pre-folded by Len. Or no, I don't want to take the fun out of it. I won't pre-fold it. You can fold it on your own and see what it is. But check it out. Thank you so much. It's over at lenporaldestore.com. Good stuff. As always, Len, also good stuff from you, Jeff Dwaskin. So nice to have you on the show today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. You can keep up with me at Classic Conversations. That's my podcast. You can get it on. There it is. Jeff is funny.com is the website. Also, Classic. Classic-conversations.com. You can listen to me talk to famous people like Lou Grant, Tom Merritt, Burt Ward. If you like pop culture, if you like the Orville, you guys like the Orville. I had a few people from there on. That's just all across the board. A lot of fun things. Yeah? Well, we are so glad to have you on with us today. We also want to thank a brand new boss that we got over the last week. It was a little bit of a slow week for Patreon, but Russ is our new patron. Russ just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Russ. Good to have you. Yeah, be like Russ. Join in the Patreon.  You get some stuff early. You get editors' desks from me. And patrons get the extended show, Good Day Internet. It's Friday. So we're going to have a little fun on Good Day Internet and do a Roger Tech quiz. This one will test our panelist knowledge of the intersection of music and social media from YouTube to TikTok. So please stick around, patrons, to join in on the fun. It will be fun. I'm just not good at this. Okay, but yes. That's the fun. Well, yeah, when you win, Tom, that's fun for you. No, nobody wins. It's all about the fun. Well, somebody wins. Somebody has to win. That's the point of a quiz. You can join the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. That is when DTNS is live. Of course, you can always catch us after the fact, but we'd love to have you join us live if you can. DailyTechNewsShow.com. Live is where to find out more about that. We will be back Monday with just from Robert Young joining us. Have a great weekend, all. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host producer and writer, Sarah Layton, executive producer and booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Strafilino, video producer, Twitch producer, Joe Coontz, technical producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter, science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterday. Our moderators, Beatmaster, W.S. Goddus One, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Godorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Contributors for this week's shows include Justin Robert Young, Scott Johnson and Patrick Norton, and our guests this week were Dr. Enrique Rio and Jeff Dwaskin. And thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com.


When it comes to fueling up for sports, science has produced numerous sure-fire strategies, each designed to contain the ideal balance of proteins, fats, carbs, and other nutrients for different athletes. But scientists are only beginning to understand a critical player in this balancing act, the gut microbiome. The gut microbiome refers to the community of trillions of microorganisms that live throughout the gastrointestinal tract. Dr. Riley Hughes and Hannah Hulsher from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign compiled the available evidence to explore the known interactions between diet, exercise, and the gut microbiome in athletes. Their work highlights the role of diet in modulating the gut microbiome and, ultimately, health and performance. The composition of this microbial community is as unique to each person as their fingerprint. That's important because these organisms play an important role in converting nutrients gained from food into fuel for the body. So, understanding an athlete's unique gut microbiome provides vital clues on how it might be harnessed to maximize performance. The two researchers found numerous published studies suggesting that diet influences the behavior of gut bacteria. Certain bacteria ferment dietary fiber, yielding short-chain fatty acids, or SCFAs, in the process. Chain fatty acids are major byproducts of the breakdown of complex carbs, making them important in fueling muscles. Some articles also demonstrated that it's important for athletes who generally consume high-protein diets to consume adequate amounts of fiber. Doing so can prevent problems such as gastrointestinal distress and inflammation. But they also found more recent studies showing how diet-gut-exercise interactions run the other way around. How physical exercise influences the microbiome. These studies explore the effects of exercise type, intensity, and duration in shaping gut physiology. For instance, while exercise is generally tied to positive effects on gut health, there is evidence that long and high-intensity workouts can drain the gut of fuel, causing, for example, abdominal pain. However, only a limited number of studies have investigated the effects of combined exercise and dietary interventions on athlete's gut microbiome. Further research is needed to determine which dietary strategies may have the most synergistic or optimal effects on athlete health and performance. This area of sports science has uncovered several keys to optimizing athletic performance and still has much to offer. Future studies could provide recommendations on how athletes can design diets that fuel their microbes and give them a leg up on the competition.


A colposcopy is a diagnostic procedure involving a microscope which provides a magnified view of the cervix, vagina and vulva to identify cancerous lesions. Pre procedure, inform your doctor if you are on blood thinners or are pregnant and carry a sanitary napkin as you may experience spotting or slight bleeding post procedure. During the procedure, you will be asked to lie on an examination table and settled comfortably in a private area throughout. The doctor applies chemical agents on the cervix and vaginal area and a biopsy may be performed. The tissue sample is then sent to a laboratory for examination. For biopsy of the cervix, you may experience slight vaginal bleeding after the colposcopy. In most cases, one can return to normal daily activities immediately after the procedure and you will receive the biopsy report in a week.


Welcome again to the second day of this small angle neutron scattering course and today we will start talking a bit more of the practical details of performing a science experiment. So we are going to talk about things that happen and you have to take into consideration when you are planning and performing a small angle neutron scattering experiment. So let's see if I can actually get this to be a laser point, yes. So the first thing that I'm going to do today is start with a refreshment of some of the important concepts we saw yesterday. So as we explained yesterday, a small angle scattering arises from in homogeneities in the scattering and length density profile in the mesoscopic scale. So basically we have this amplitude of the form factor that has this scattering and length density distribution. And that's actually what we want to characterize because here's where the structural information is. So basically what happens is that we go to our experiment and we get some scattering intensity that is the macroscopic scattering cross section and then from there we have to reconstruct this scattering length density profile. But what actually happens when we do one of these experiments is that we get some scattering intensities that come from your sample plus some other things. So what we have to do is to apply some corrections to determine this macroscopic cross section which will ultimately be the data that we have to analyze. And today we're going to talk a bit more about how we get from this scattering intensity to this macroscopic scattering cross section. So with a small angle scattering we can measure, we can prove structures between one a few nanometers to hundreds of nanometers. And it's very important that we are in the right Q range because this will let's remind the length of scale that we are effectively proving using this experiment. And then there are some important aspects about contrast and composition that will tell us what we can measure with sands and if we can measure that sample with sands. So for example, if there is any, let's say, natural contrast in the sample, for example, if we are going to measure something that has some contrast by itself, or if we need to do some specific iteration or isotopic level in the schemes. And then if we can use some of these contrast variation approaches that I explained yesterday to enhance the information gain that we can get from this type of system. And then, and finally, some like other considerations. For example, if the use of isotopic substitution will affect the behavior of our system. So that's something that we have to keep in mind when we use one of these contrast variation methods. And the last important thing that I wanted to remind you was the scattering vector. So this is one of the most important concepts when it comes to a scattering in general, but it's really important when it comes to a small angular scattering. If you have come across some crystallography data, especially x-ray, many times you can see that they plot their intensities against the scattering angle. So this is something not common in sands because we use the Q vector. What happens here is that we have some point of scatter, something common, wave vector, and a scattering wave at a given scattering angle. Okay, so by playing with the Bodil relationship, we can get that the scattering vector is a factor that contains information about the scattering angle and the wavelength of the radiation we are using. This means that the Q vector standardizes, I mean, this means that regardless of the instrument or configuration that we are going to use, we are going to get the same answer. So for example, let's say that we have a feature at 0.1 at Q equals 0.1 inverse sands. It doesn't really matter if we are going to measure it in one instrument, that it's time of flight, or in another instrument that has, I don't know, six sands from wavelength or four sands from wavelength, so it doesn't really matter because they are going to always appear at 0.1 inverse sands from. And that's because the Q vector kind of, it's used to standardize the region of interest of these experiments. And if we go back to Bragg's law and we replace this wavelength and this scattering angle by Bragg's law, we get that the Q vector is inversely proportional to the real space distance. So this means that if we're going to gain information about small objects, we have to go to high Q. If we want to gain information about small features in the system, we have to go to low Q. And that's something that we have to keep in mind also when we do a small-angle scattering experiment. So today we're going to build up a bit more some of those concepts and we are going to talk about what we have to keep in mind when we are planning a small-angle scattering experiment and what we have to look for when we are one of these experiments. Then we're going to talk a bit more about how we do the data collection and how we do the data treatment to get to that microscopic scattering cross-section that we want to use for the, which is data we are going to use for the analysis. And then I will give you just a brief introduction on how the different access schemes to these type of instruments, the different routes for accessing these instruments. So I think that Andrew explained you a bit more about the instrumentation of a small-angle scattering. So I'm just going to go to the important point. So this is the classical schematic representation of a small-angle scattering instrument. So basically we have incident bin. In our case it's going to be neutrons because it's the sound scores. We have our wave vector for the incoming bin. We have our sample and then there's some scattered radiation at a given scattering angle. And then we measure everything and we measure this scattered radiation in this 2D detector. Okay? So the first important thing that you have to keep in mind is the Q-range that you're going to measure. The Q-range of, we can call this like the figures of merit of a sound instrument. So what happens here is that the Q-range is a very important parameter because it will determine which length scale we are proving. So we have to know that whatever it's outside that Q-range we are not going to say it. So we have to keep in mind that for planning the experiment. Then the Flassox sample on sample means the amount of neutrons that we are getting in our sample. So the merrier, so it's important to keep in mind that when we are going to do an experiment this might be critical to determine if we are measuring five or 50 samples. Instrument resolution. This is something that I'm going to introduce a bit more in detail today. And basically when we are measuring a Q-value what happens is that we have contributions from Q-points around that Q-value. So it's not perfectly defined. And this is important because these will kind of tell us how sharp will be the features in our scattering curve. Then the instrument background is basically the noise and we want to keep that at the very minimum because the lower it is the more defined will be our small-angle scattering data. Then we have the sample environments and Judith will explain more about this in the next lecture. And basically we are going to have a series of different sample environments that can perform different different roles in experiments from just keeping the sample into position to controlling the sample temperature for example or to or some very advanced small-angle scattering sample environments where you can do complementary methods for example spectroscopy. And then another important aspect about the instrument is that if they are available and this is something that for example next year is going to become crucial because ILO and NICES are going into a shutdown. So means that their instruments are not going to be available. So we have to keep this in mind when we are considering which instrument we are going to use. Okay. So if we want to consider an instrument for an experiment one of the first things that we have to do to consider is the queue range. So how big and small are the things that we can measure in that instrument. And we have here for example some of the specifications of some of the of some instruments around the world. So we have LOQ and Sans2D which are time-out flight instruments. And we have D11 which is a dialo so it's a continuous source. And we can see here that they have different specifications. So for example the wavelengths that they use for the experiment and the momentum transfer that they can they can reach with with with these configurations. Okay. So when it comes to time with when it comes to queue range we have to the first thing that we have to ask ourselves is that are we going to use a time-out flight or a continuous source. Normally what happens is that with a time-out flight we use a set of different wavelengths and that means that with one detector position we can reach a relatively wide queue range because we are using different wavelengths. So if you think about the queue vector we have the scattering angle on top and then we have the wavelength at the bottom. So it means that at a given scattering angle we are getting different queue values because we are using different wavelengths. And normally in one single shot without moving the detector this is the configuration that will give us the widest queue range. Whereas continuous source normally uses one continuous source normally uses one specific wavelength. So for example here at D11 you have to pick a wavelength between I don't know but it's probably something between 4 and 10 or 12 angstroms. And what happens here is that if you want to achieve a wide queue range you're going to probably have to pick one wavelength and then take different detector positions. Or normally you can also play with the wavelength but you measure different detector positions or different wavelengths to achieve the desired queue range. So another important aspect about the queue range is how big is the detector. So the bigger the bigger is the detector the wider is going to be the solid angle that we can reach with that single detector position. So it means that we are going to get more queue values from that specific shot. And then sample to the detector distance. This is something that we can play for example in substitute you can also vary the sample to the detector distance but it's not something I mean you can do that at the beginning of the experiment to set up the queue range that you want to measure but it's not normally something that you change during your experiment at a time of flight instrument. But basically what that's something that you have to do on continuous sources for example on D11 or D22 at ILL in which you basically take maybe two or three detector positions sample to the detector distances to collect a wide queue range. And some other some other aspects that can affect the queue range is the beam collimation. And then if you want to get to a specific queue regimes normally what you do is you use some advanced sans geometries for example USAPs if you want to go to really really low angle. And I think that Andrew will explain more about this type of instrument configurations that are not the common the standard sans setup. When it comes to flags basically what happens here is that the main contribution to the flags will come from the source. Normally reactors provide a higher flux on sample but then we also have to think that we are going to select one wavelength so we are chopping away lots of neutrons so we have to keep in mind which wavelength that we're going to use so that wavelength is the second factor that we have to take into consideration and then instrument geometry. So these three factors will determine how many neutrons we are going to get in our sample and this is important because as I said before the more neutrons the faster the measurements will be. Okay so when it comes to the resolution basically what happens is that the intensity that we measure at given Q value it has contributions from nearby Q vectors. Okay so there are two different types of contributions so this is the resolution of the Q vectors and we have one geometric contribution and one wavelength contribution. So what happens here is that these two different contributions come from different parts so the geometric contribution comes because our detector elements so we have normally these healing-free tubes and they have a finite size. Okay so it's kind of like five millimeter or eight millimeter it depends on the instrument that you are using but it means that you're going to have an array of different tubes and the detector can detect which tube is being hit by a neutron. Okay but basically that limits your resolution it's not that perfect resolution and that's not Q-dependent you can see that the geometric contribution is uh oh yeah sorry what I was saying yeah so the the the angle contribution the geometric contribution is not Q-dependent or it's wavelength dependent but not Q-dependent and then the other the other contribution comes from the wavelength that you are picking and the the the configuration of the instrument so what happens here is that we have different different types of let's say velocity selectors which basically will decide which wavelength we are going to use for our experiment and those will give a defined a defined wavelength for the neutrons and I will show you in the next slide how that works more or less so basically this will give us some wavelength resolution and as you can see here this is Q-dependent so we have at the end that this Q-dependent resolution if we add these two contributions we have a resolution that depends on the Q so normal on the Q-vector so normally when you go to do an experiment they calculate the resolution for you that then you can use to smear your theoretical models okay so just keep in mind that depending on which type of instrument configuration you use you're going to have two different types of contributions to your resolution one is the wavelength contribution that comes from how you select your wavelength for the experiment and the other one is your detector okay so for example helium free tubes have different spatial resolutions but a CCD camera will have a much better resolution but it has also some other disadvantages so so basically what happens is that when you have this like resolution effect in your data what is going to happen is that it's going to smear some of the features in your data and I will give you some examples later about it and I thought I had a picture here but apparently I don't maybe it comes later so basically what happens here is that we it's going to smear some of the features in your scattering signal and it's actually very difficult to let's say the convulate the resolution from your data so a common approach is actually to smear the theoretical models that we use for the analysis of the data I'm going to talk about this tomorrow more in detail how we smear these theoretical models but what happens here is that then we are going to have a function that accounts for this resolution the resolution that we get from the instrument configuration because as I said these values will be calculated for each q vector and then will be will appear in our data and we will use that to smear our theoretical models and then it's important to know that there is always a compromise between flux and resolution so the higher is the resolution normally the lower is the flux and sometimes to improve like our resolution by maybe I mean if we want to go from a 10 percent resolution to a 5 percent resolution maybe we have 12 orders of magnitude of our flux is too far 12 orders of magnitude lower so we have to actually really decide if resolution is that important for us okay another aspect about science experiments is the the background that we have in our in our measurements so it's kind of like the mean the the bare minimum signal that we can measure in our system so we have a scattering that is weaker than our background basically we're not going to be able to see it because it's going to be completely dominated by the background so we have to keep in mind that the lower is the background the better so the background normally comes from from different contributions so one is the stray radiation so neutrons coming from others from other instruments and from space and things like that and electronic noise from the detector and things like that so our things that actually we cannot control we can try to minimize it by for example placing some shielding and by playing with instrument geometry for example using like curve guides in in time of light instruments and improving the detector electronics but the thing is that we cannot just easily change the background in in in an instrument it's not that we can go there and just play some more shielding and I mean during an experiment and that will improve our background so actually what normally happens is that when they have internal time they just basically put all of the shoulders down and they just measure the signal that comes from the environment and that's the background and then they're gonna we're gonna subtract that to our to our to our to the to the experimental data we get okay so this is something that we cannot easily play with that is something that we can subtract and then there is also some background scattering that comes from the sample it's the incoherent scattering that we mentioned yesterday for example the presence of hydrogen will of protein will increase the the incoherent background and this is something that we also need to account for and subtract but this is a different type of background okay so just to give you a couple of minutes of of of fresh air I'm just gonna show you some pictures of different instruments so this is sound study at ices and this is the detector chamber and this is d22 at ilf and this is the detector chamber and the first thing that you can probably see is that the detector chambers of sound study is much shorter than that of d22 and that's because one is a time of flight instrument and as I explained before we can measure a wide-q range just by using one the texture position whereas at d22 we have to move the detector to reach like a wide-q range so you can go I think down to 20 meter and uh and then sample to the detector distance and I think that in d11 you can go down to 40 meter to get to the lowest q value okay but just keep in mind that the different time of flight and continuous source sounds instruments will will will be different in terms of of building and this is just the sample area of d22 there using some kind of like dialysis unit here and this is rob playing with the with the sample changer and larmor and and as you can see like this instrument it's a it's a bit more complex because they can also do like stuff with magnets and things that I can barely understand okay so what do you have to do when you do your experiment is you have to pick the q vector that you're going to measure that's very important and this will that's remind the wavelength that you're going to use and the detector type and position that you're going to use for this experiment and then there are some more complex configurations basically using the the the the collimation and the size of the apertures at the sample position and so on and uh also the sample environment will that's remind which configuration you can use but it's just something that Judith will mention later I guess but basically here what happens is that by playing with the different uh different uh characteristics of the instrument like wavelength detector position aperture and collimation you will get uh different q ranges so basically you will have to pick what you want to what you want to what you want to get in terms of q vector so another aspect that will be influenced by that will be the resolution of your measurement so this is the classic pinhole collimation and then we start to open the aperture and basically what happens is that we change the profile of our beam in terms of wavelength okay so this is something that will affect our resolution will increase the flags but it will affect the resolution as I mentioned before and and and basically by playing with this uh with these different aspects of the instrument this will determine the q range the flags and the instrument resolution and I said before that I was missing a picture and this is the one that I was missing just to show you how uh for example a velocity selector selects a given wavelength with a given resolution and how that will influence the flags okay so this is the neutron flags at n c n r and what happens here is that the total number of neutrons per unit area and time we are getting is the integration beneath this curve okay so if we want to select an area of the neutral I mean if we want to select uh a neutral wavelength we can let's say open or close uh I mean the let's say that the the velocity selector will select a wider or narrower uh waveband so what happens here is that if we for example want to have a better resolution this velocity selector will will select a narrower uh a narrower wavelength waveband but this will also mean that the the the integral beneath the curve will be smaller which means that we're going to have a much lower flux whereas if we peak if we are less picky with the resolution and we have like a wider uh waveband we are going to have more neutrons okay so this is basically how we can just like in a simple way understand how the the the selection of the resolution will uh of the wavelength resolution in this case will determine how many neutrons we are getting okay because of the integral minus this uh this curves okay so how this affects the data that we are actually collecting so I have here some really simple and probably not the best examples but some really simple uh plots where I'm showing the scattering from the spheres and now I'm gonna uh just like get you to think about uh q range for spheres okay so basically let's say that we have these uh 20 ounce from the spheres we measure this entire q range for the green curve and basically we see uh the different parts of the curve so we see this guinea region around here and then we see the oscillations at high q and the pull-up region and this means that we are collecting the entire data set so we are collecting the q range that will require to resolve the structure of the system but then when if instead of picking the instrument configuration that gives us that q range we pick another one that doesn't go to high q what happens here is that we get information on the size of the particles because we get the q range but the interfacial scattering that comes from the high q expansion of the data has disappeared because we haven't actually proved it using that instrument configuration so we don't have this region here and there will be things like polydispersity or an isotropy and things like that that will that will be difficult to prove using this configuration so we have to be aware of what we are actually proving and then in the in the in the next example so we have some slightly bigger spheres so this is 80 ounce room I think I could have picked a better example that is more even more exaggerated but here what happens is that we are not uh the the q mean that we are proving with this instrument configuration is getting close to this guinea region so we are actually not getting this plot or that the data reaches a low q and what happens is that uh if we if we get this to the extreme there is going to be a point in which we are just going to see maybe just this part of the data because we are not going to a q values that are low enough to prove the entire size of the scattering so we are going to be missing that bit or information and this is a problem when we have something that is really big like probably hundreds of instruments and so on or even more um and I think that we'll have a few examples tomorrow about this uh another important aspect is the resolution as I said and I want to show you how the resolution affects the data so what happens here is that I have exactly the same uh model being simulated and what is happening here is that I'm applying I'm applying different resolution uh resolution values to this data so M1 has a perfect resolution so we have like one single wavelength uh we have like an infinitely good geometric resolution so basically we are doing like sax with a sound instrument because in sax we have super good resolution so as we can see at low q we have basically no effect in this configuration for the different resolutions but we can see how these sharp features are getting worse and worse when we are moving up in resolution so zero percent is the pink one and then we go to five percent so these these are less defined and then we go to 10 percent and we start to see that the peaks here high q start to disappear and when we are at 20 percent which is not that uncommon basically all of the features are gone okay so all of these features are gone so this is not if for example your system is it's polyvase burst it's not really important so it's not the end of the world but if you are looking at something that is crystalline or we are looking at something that you really want to have uh good information on for example is a small deviations from from isotropy then you really want to have like a good information here good resolution at high q and and and to achieve that you have to select wisely uh the instrument configuration okay i would say that a normal uh sounds configuration uses uh about a 10 percent resolution uh depending on the q value that you are using of course but uh normally the resolution at low q is low and at high q we have better resolution uh with the configurations that we normally use so we can get to to pretty good uh resolution at high q so basically what happens is that by playing with the different uh configurations that i mentioned before we will determine the cure rates the flux on the sample and the instrument resolution but i know that there are many things to keep in mind and it's not always easy to just they are not always straightforward so my recommendation uh when you are going to pick some instrument configuration and i think that this is more or less what people use is some things about it is that first uh you should simulate the data or try to kind of like just pick a sound software a small-angle scattering data analysis software and just say okay i think i'm going to have some spheres of this size because this is something that i've seen in dls or with nmr so do some characterization first and then basically just like try to get some information on the q-range that you need to prove that structure then basically you have to also think about the resolution that you will need for example do you have any peaks in the system is your system very one of these pairs is very isotropic uh because if it is probably you will need a good resolution to to look at those specific features so then that will basically if it is important resolution is very important for you you will have to tell the v-line scientists like yeah i need this resolution five percent resolution 10 percent resolution and he will basically tell you what is the best instrument configuration that will give us will give you the highest flux which is what you want but there will always be a compromise so if you want a higher resolution it's going to mean it means that you are going to have a lower flux if you want to go to really low q it means that your uh your your uh spot your time will be longer okay so this is something that you have to keep in mind so moving to the next part i'm going to talk a bit now about uh the different uh calibrations that perform uh in the small-angle nature and scattering instruments so this is something that the v-line scientists will normally do for you but it's something that you can keep in mind so you know what is actually happening so in a perfectly small-angle neutron scattering you have a constant flux that you know you have a normal neutron spectrum and it's perfectly defined and you have no background but actually this doesn't exist so this means that to to to get the data that you want to get you will have to apply some corrections to the raw data that you obtain in a small-angle neutron scattering experiment and then you have to do some calibration measurements for this so you have to measure the wavelength and the wavelength spectrum the incident flux the efficiency of your detector and the dead time so i'm just going to go very briefly through this because as i said this is something that is performed by the by the by the v-line scientists and it's not that unique to know all of this for your experiment but it's good to actually be aware of what is actually happening so one of the first things that perform is that you have to calibrate your wavelength so you have to determine the neutron wavelength that is getting to your instrument so to do so you have two options one is to use an standard that has normally a peak and it has a so it has like a known scattering so we know how this is going to scatter so this is for example silver v and a and it has a peak around it has a d spacing of 58.38 angstrom so if we use bragg law we can see that there is going to be a peak appearing at 0.01 inverse angstrom so basically we measure the scattering from that and we know that this peak will have to be at that given q value okay and if there is deviations from that it means that our wavelength is not correct okay so we have to correct the the wavelength that we are so this will be used to kind of like know the wavelength that we are using for that experiment and then another way to do this is to use the time of flight time of flight configuration let's say so what happens here is that we have two small detectors that are called pencil detectors before the sample position so what happens is that the instrument hits this pencil detector so we know so there is like a chopper stopping neutrons so the chopper lets some neutrons in they hit this first detector and then the neutrons travel and they hit the sans detector so basically there is a time that the neutrons take to go from here to here and we can actually use that to calculate the velocity of the neutrons and by using the boggle relationship we can calculate the wavelength of the neutrons so those are two typical ways to calculate to calibrate the wavelength in some instruments but this is something that is normally performed before you go to do the experiment okay so the incident flux is measured in I only mentioned one but there is another way to measure it so the incident flux is measured using the direct beam so basically you have a direct beam hitting your detector normally is attenuated so you don't burn your detector but you have your beam hitting your detector and it's going to tell you how many neutrons that detector is to is how many neutrons are reaching the detector and basically that's going to give you your flux another way of doing this is by using a standard sample so for example a polymer and then we know that that should show an eye of zero so so the intensity at angle zero should be I don't know a given value it's an standard and then we can use that value to calibrate the the incident flux and that's normally that is and that's something that is normally performed at a time of flight instruments instead of this direct beam so the other calibration that you had that it's performed is the detector efficiency so you have to think that these detectors have an array of tubes and not all of them are perfectly equal so there's going to be uh uh let's say there's going to be an efficiency associated to each of these pixels so what you have to do to measure these uh to correct for these is that you have to pick something that is an coherent miscatering because as Andrew said yesterday in coherent miscatering it's a four has a four pi dependence which means that it's just going to go everywhere it's not it doesn't have any uh angle dependence so what happens here is that there is going to be some uniform signal hitting the detector uh if we use for example h2 or plexiglass and then we use that to calculate the the efficiency of each of the pixels and correct for that so uh the time is basically uh the the time required for the detection of new of a neutron uh uh to to detect a uh a neutron hitting the the detector and this uh relates to when the detector is saturated so if we are sending too many neutrons and too fast to our detector we just might get to the situation where we saturate the detector and you know it's not capable of measuring them uh there is not capable of measuring them so basically what happens here is that they have to do some uh some some calculations to measure what is this uh depth time which means that if we go above this depth time the detector will not be able to cope with the neutrons and we're going to have to use a lower flux or a weaker scatter in this case and basically yeah this is something that it's also performed at uh before you go to the to the facility so uh once you've done some of these measurements what you have to do is that you will have to correct the data that you get because basically the scattering intensity you have will have different contributions so we'll have some contribution from the instrument configuration because it has optics has different things on the beam path and that's going to affect your scattering as you can see in this schematic representation so it gets to this aperture and suddenly it just hits this corner of the aperture so there's going to be some scattering coming from that so there is some contribution from the from the instrument there is going to be some contribution from the sample which is what we actually want to measure these orange lines here then we have some contribution from the cell because basically the cell is also in the beam path and even if we normally use sample environments that have very very very little interaction with the neutrons there is always some interaction so what happens here is that when it hits the cell it just like gets scattered and goes somewhere and then we have some background that it's basically coming from somewhere else outside the instrument some electronic noise and straight neutrons from other instruments or outer space so what happens here is that we have to correct for these different things I just like put here some of the you know what each of these symbols and letters means so we I'm not going to go into detail but so you know for example we have neutron flags detector efficiency the soil angle of the of the detector and so on so there are some things that as I said before we have to determine before getting what we want to get which is the microscopic cross section of the sample okay so we have here our sample we have this microscopic cross section which is the data that we actually want to analyze but this is what we are actually measuring so we have to correct for all of this okay so there is some like let's say standardized protocols to do this and and as I said the beam light scientist is aware of this it's not that you know you need to know all of this by heart but I think it's good that you have an idea of what is actually happening there so basically to get this scattering the microscopic cross section of your sample what you have to do is that you have to measure the scattering from the sample the scattering so the sample in yourself and you put it there in your sample environment then you measure the scattering from the from an empty sample holder you measure the block position so basically you you cut all of the incoming neutrons and this means that you can for example better mine the background signal you measure the direct beam intensity to get the total flux you measure the transition the transmission which is the transmission is the neutrons that pass through the sample without being scattered you measure the transmission you measure the an empty the transmission of the of the empty beam and then you measure the detector response and efficiency and finally you can also measure the solvent scattering to subtract that so basically with this first seven you're going to perform the corrections that will allow you to go from the intensity that you actually measure to the microscopic cross section of your sample okay and then there is one step more which is a step number eight which is the the scattering signal that comes from the solvent or from your matrix so what happens here is that once you apply all of those corrections that I mentioned before you get what it's called the reduced file so you go from your raw data to your reduced file so your reduced file is basically going to have the scattering from the sample plus the solvent okay so basically it's sorry is that it's the scattering from your particles plus the solvent it's like here represented as the as this black curve so what happens is that to actually get the microscopic cross section from your particles you have to subtract the solvent contribution or this matrix contribution so what you have to do is that you perform a measurement where you measure these signal from the solvent and then you subtract that contribution to get your scattering signal which in this case is the blue okay so this is actually quite important to do it right because normally this is actually log of the data of intensity you overestruct these values what will happen is that you will have some negative incentive negative intensity values which means that if you are if you present them in a log longer scale they are just going to disappear because you cannot calculate logarithm of a negative value so what happens here is that you have to be aware that you are not over subtracting or under subtracting the this solvent signal and the way to do that is to you go to the high q expansion of your data you see what is the intensity of your sample and the intensity of your solvent and because of this high q data mainly coming from the contribution of the solvent because it's what it's most important there basically you can just like scale yourself and up and down until you get the desired scattering signal so I think that this is my last bit and I'm going to talk about how you can access this type of instruments and I think and I think probably some of you are already aware of this but I think it's important to know that at different scattering facilities they have different access routes so this is for example from ISIS and they have this nice diagram that will tell you what is the best way for you to access this to access the instrument to get some beam time okay so for example if you need some quick measurement and if it is something relatively straightforward that doesn't require complicated sample environments then you can apply for a spread access access basically it's just some mail-in system that you send your samples a few of them and they will measure them for you to actually just maybe know if Sans is a good technique for the characterization of your sample or something else or like complete a data set or something like that if you want to do use a more complex if you want to have a more complex experiment for example having an advanced sample environment or you want to measure loss of sample you will have to apply for a full proposal and there are two different ways of doing this one is the normal access so we have the diet access which basically it's let's say the standard access for these facilities and then we have that I'm going to explain a minute and then we have rapid access so rapid access is when you have something that is very urgent so it's something that is either a very hot topic and you want to get it out as soon as possible or for example you are a PhD student that you are about to finish and you need to do some measurements okay so so you can try to bribe the the beam line scientists and by saying like oh yeah I need to do this and so I need some beam line some beam some access to the beam line really really fast and and this is a some of the routes so basically these are very fast they will allow you to perform either a few measurements or an entire experiment and this normally takes a bit longer okay so basically what happens here is that for the standard access route which is what I what I see is called the direct route basically you get a full experiment and your proposal will be reviewed by by some external scientific panel there is normally two calls per year and you have to wait for a bit before you go to do your experiment so you have to plan this ahead so discretionary access is the direct access so what happens here is that you get a full experiment and it has to be either a hot topic or that you're you're a PhD student you're about to finish and so on and you want to convince them that it's very important for you to get your experiment as soon as possible so this is a rolling proposal mode that basically means that you can submit this proposal at any time and you can typically get your beam time in one month because they always save some experimental time for this type of proposals but it's also very very scarce so it's difficult to actually get this type of access but if you are in a in an urgent need you can always do that so express time or test access or easy it has different names at different facilities what happens here is that you want to just just check some samples for example I'm sending some samples today to ILO for for some easy experiment it's called like that the type of access so what happens here is that they are going to measure some of the samples for me to get some data and to submit like a full proposal for the next round so you can use it for collecting some preliminary data it's also a rolling proposal that you can submit at any time and normally in a few weeks you can you get your experiment on if it is something relatively straightforward and then something that is not included in the in the previous in the previous slide but it's something that and it's not that common but basically you can also pay for having access to these instruments you can get like full experiments and it's very expensive I can tell you that and it's normally used by industry because they want to either keep all of the preparatory knowledge for them or because they won't just have the BIM time available for when they want to do the experiment and basically yeah they just pay for the BIM time and they just get access to those instruments so yeah so what happens here is that depending on what the type of proposal that you're going to submit is going to go through a different process so the first thing that you have to consider is how to write your proposal okay so I'm going here to one proposal that I submitted to NCNR a few years ago and basically it had more or less this structure so basically I have a standardized way of writing proposals and that works for me not I guess that not everyone does it in the same way but basically what I do is I use some like scientific background to explain why why why the science that I'm performing is relevant it's important to put some references because it looks like you know what you're doing then it's also very important to include some preliminary data because you have to show them that SANS or any other technique but now we are talking about SANS will be useful for the characterization that you want to perform on that sample so you have to put some structural characterization normally or some data that relates to a structural feature so you can present some NMR or the spentroscopy too but normally some structural characterization it's always good DLS or SANS for example so you present that data and then the important thing and this is very crucial for almost any SANS characterization is that you have to explain them why SANS is needed because otherwise they will tell you oh your sex rates they are available in labs you can access easily you can access them easily at a synchrotron facility so they will tell you do sex but you have to explain them why you need to do a small-angle neutron scattering for resolving the questions that you are trying to to to answer so basically it's important to tell them why SANS and also why you selected that instrument in particular then basically you have to present your experiment plan so what you're going to measure how many samples how many contrasts the configuration that you want the sample environment and for how long are you going to be measuring so for example here I think that we requested three days and then you can also put like a brief statement on what are you going to do with the results so are you going to how you're going to analyze the data if there is going to be if you're going to involve some other techniques for example SANS or NMR if this is planned to be like published in some journals or whatever if it is part of a PhD project so this is something important to actually because they want the community to keep growing and the way to do that is by by educating and forming new scientists on the technique so it's important that they know if this is part of a PhD project or or a master project or something like that so what happens when you submit your proposal is that you have your research problem so you have to ask your question can a small-angle nutrient scattering help me with this so you write your proposal if you think that the answer is yes you have to say what is the relevance of the science that you are performing what you want to achieve with the experiment and what is your plan so you have to submit it if it is the standard proposal round you have to submit it before the deadline because otherwise you will have to wait half a year for the next call and then they're going to gather some scientific panels that will evaluate the quality of your proposal and then they will accept it or deny it we have to keep in mind that this is a competitive scheme you're going to be competing they have a limited amount of resources that they can allocate so you're going to be competing against other scientists so for example next year that these two facilities are going into a shutdown iolite analysis there is going to be uh there is not going to be much uh being time available for small-angle neutrons scattering in europe which means that it's going to the competition will be brutal and and the likelihood of getting your proposal accepted will be lower which doesn't mean that your experiment is not interesting or the science that you are performing is not interesting it's just that it was not the time okay so you have to keep that in mind and and and they will in case that it gets rejected they will give you some feedback on how to improve it and what how they think that the the proposal could be a bit better for for the next round and so on so it's always good to to to also listen to that feedback and if you get your proposal accepted what is going to happen is that a few months later the beam life scientist is going to send you emails saying okay i have to put your experiment we have to schedule your experiment at some point uh what do you think about this when you're available so you give them some dates for this experiment and they are going to tell you okay come come come here whenever you i mean for these dates and we will do the experiment so you will have to plan the experiment for those dates and you will have to keep things in mind like for example if you have to travel because now in covid times is a bit more complicated and many experiments are being performed remotely uh you're gonna have to get the chemicals for the experiment especially if they are deteriorated this is something that you have to keep in mind and you might need to plan ahead for example do i need to contact a declaration facility to to to get all of these chemicals or do i need to buy them but just what i said yesterday just think that not everyone has deteriorated cotton candy in the lab uh then you have to come out with an experiment plan and what you're going to do at the experiment and you have to have this very clear because you're going to have to work a lot you're going to have to do night shifts so it's very to have a plan and not just go cowboy style and hope to get there and decide everything last minute and then just like sort out the logistics for example if you have to travel you have to book your flights and so on so these are some important aspects that we have to keep in mind okay so in summary uh what it's important when it comes to performing an experiment is that you have to come out with a plan and you have to really decide if you need neutrons for uh for answering the question and you need to actually figure out how you're going to access those neutrons uh to perform that experiment so basically then you will have to pick an instrument and you will have to decide what configuration of the instrument uh you're going to use and how that will enable you to access the information that you want to get then you will have to to go to the facility or if it is a remote experiment you will have to send your samples to perform the experiment you will have to reduce the data and then that basically means that you have your macroscopic scattering cross section which is the signal that you will have to analyze and then probably spend at the very least a few weeks analyzing the data and having fun with that and tomorrow we are going to talk a bit more about data analysis which is the next part of my series of lectures and this is all I had to say about experimental small-angle neutrons scattering so if you have any questions you can either ask them now or we can leave them for the future I think I put my question yes is there any protocol concerning the handling of measured samples because many of these materials can potentially become radioactive on cities it has been exposed to neutron beams yes uh so it depends of what materials you are working and when you submit your experimental risk assessment before the experiment you basically have to state the compounds that you are going to measure so for example if you have like you have some neutron absorbers and things like that they will be they will get hot and they will be radioactive so what you have to do is that after the experiment they're gonna so they're gonna give you a protocol on how to deal with those samples so the standard protocol is that all of the samples that have been in the beam will be tested for different types of radiation but then if you have something that is marked with like yeah with like especially radioactive or activated material then they will have also established protocol and sometimes you have to leave your samples there for like weeks or months until they get deactivated or if they don't get deactivated they will dispose them for you as radioactive material but that means that you cannot take your sample back so it's sample dependent and that's something that they have like an established protocol for that when they receive their the experimental risk assessment thank you you're welcome I'm sure there is another question here in the chat