China is set to fire up a powerful new x-ray light source that will reveal the atomic-scale structure of proteins and materials. By the end of December, operators expect light to begin to stream into experimental beamlines at the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) near Beijing, which will become one of just a handful of “fourth-generation” synchrotrons in the world.

HEPS revs electrons up to high energies and bends them around a circular track so the particles emit synchrotron radiation—mostly short-wavelength “hard” x-rays. The intense, laserlike x-rays are siphoned off into 14 beamlines that scientists will use to image materials and biological structures at atomic to nanometer scales and take snapshots of chemical reactions over nanosecond time frames.

“It’s like getting a major new telescope. You can see things that were not observable before,” ..... In structural biology, for example, HEPS will allow scientists to study cellular machines, such as the protein-assembling ribosome, in addition to imaging whole cells and viruses....