The SwissFEL X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) facility started construction at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Villigen, Switzerland) in 2013 and will be ready to accept its first users in 2018 on the Aramis hard X-ray branch. In the following sections we will summarize the various aspects of the project, including the design of the soft and hard X-ray branches of the accelerator, the results of SwissFEL performance simulations, details of the photon beamlines and experimental stations, and our first commissioning results.

The J-UNIO (JCSG protocol using the software UNIO) procedure for automated protein structure determination by NMR in solution is introduced. In the present implementation, J-UNIO makes use of APSY-NMR spectroscopy, 3D heteronuclear-resolved [1H,1H]-NOESY experiments, and the software UNIO. Applications with proteins from the JCSG target list with sizes up to 150 residues showed that the procedure is highly robust and efficient. In all instances the correct polypeptide fold was obtained in the first round of automated data analysis and structure calculation. After interactive validation of the data obtained from the automated routine, the quality of the final structures was comparable to results from interactive structure determination. Special advantages are that the NMR data have been recorded with 6 to 10 days of instrument time per protein, that there is only a single step of chemical shift adjustments to relate the backbone signals in the APSY-NMR spectra with the corresponding backbone signals in the NOESY spectra, and that the NOE-based amino acid side chain chemical shift assignments are automatically focused on those residues that are heavily weighted in the structure calculation. The individual working steps of J-UNIO are illustrated with the structure determination of the protein YP_926445.1 from Shewanella amazonensis, and the results obtained with 17 JCSG targets are critically evaluated.

We describe consequences of the chiral anomaly in the theory of quantum wires, the (quantum) Hall effect, and of a four-dimensional cousin of the Hall effect. We explain which aspects of conductance quantization are related to the chiral anomaly. The fourdimensional analogue of the Hall effect involves the axion field, whose time derivative can be interpreted as a (space-time dependent) difference of chemical potentials of lefthanded and right-handed charged fermions. Our four-dimensional analogue of the Hall effect may play a significant rôle in explaining the origin of large magnetic fields in the (early) universe. What is the chiral anomaly?The chiral abelian anomaly has been discovered, in the past century, by Adler, Bell and Jackiw, after earlier work on π 0 -decay starting with Steinberger and Schwinger; see e.g.[1] and references given there. It has been rederived in many different ways of varying degree of mathematical 1 This review is dedicated to the memory of Louis Michel, the theoretician and the friend.