I don’t know if there’s any way to make our kids understand how cool this is. Take a look at this picture. All those little dots are gold atoms. Atoms, man!
TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope — capable of producing images with half-angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom also known as really freaking small — has been installed at the Department of Energy’s
National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory.
I am simply agog at the possibilities. Consider how, for the last however long, we’ve been learning about the structure of atoms and molecules with tinker toys and conceptual illustrations in science books. Now, we’re going to have actual pictures of the darn things. Amazing! Link to the Sietch blog.
