Can you break down polymers like nylon with enzymes? That’s what researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are trying to find out. To do this, you need as large a surface area as possible to give the enzymes as much chance as possible to do their job. Ideally, they would like to work with a powder, but it is rather impractical to grind nylon waste into a reproducible powder. An alternative is to spin it by conventional means into a thin fibre – which is reproducible – that can be observed using Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS). Wim Bras, a distinguished scientist in polymer and soft matter science at ORNL, was curious how good the new SAXS setup was and tried to make a diffraction pattern from a single fibre, resulting in this fibre diffraction pattern. The fibre is a 20 µm thick nylon fishing line. The colours indicate how many photons landed at a particular location.