Cool New Technology

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This is awesome! They've recently developed a new microscope that can view atoms in motion! I'm blown away just thinking about it. Here's the article from newscientist:

"...Now Ahmed Zewail, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has developed a way to produce faster, shorter electron pulses.

These can be used like a strobe light to reveal atoms in motion, letting electron microscopes capture more frequent snapshots, and producing high-resolution footage of atoms in motion.

Zewail is a past master at speeding things up. He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry – studying chemical reactions just a few femtoseconds (billionths of a millionth of a second) long using pulses of laser light.

His latest work has now created another new field – ultrafast electron microscopy. Zewail's team use an oscillating laser to illuminate the cathode in their microscope with pulses of UV light about 100 femtoseconds long.

The cathode's surface has a high quantum efficiency, meaning it readily releases electrons when bombarded with photons. It converts the femtosecond light pulses into femtosecond electron pulses, of just a few tens of electrons.

Pioneering movies

Those short pulses act like a camera flash, creating a crisp image of the target specimen at a very precise moment in time. Zewail's research team can generate movies showing the picosecond (millionths of a millionth of a second) motion of atoms..."


Summary: They're breaking new ground, people. These scientists are effectively changing our most powerful microscopes from individual pictures to black & white movies. This is an epic upgrade to the way we view the minuscule.