
A record-breaking microscope - moh_maya
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05711-y
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kjeetgill
> Remarkably, Jiang et al. gave themselves a huge handicap with regard to
> beating the resolution record. For any given microscope lens, the best
> resolution is achieved by using the shortest possible wavelength of the
> radiation or electron beams concerned. However, the authors used relatively
> low-energy electrons, which have twice the wavelength of those used in the
> highest-resolution lens-based microscopes9,10. Using low-energy electrons
> for microscopy is good because it greatly reduces the damage inflicted on
> the specimen by the electrons. But in this case, it also meant that the
> resolution of the lens used by Jiang and colleagues was reduced by a factor
> of two. To beat the resolution record, the authors had to process a
> particular subset of the ptychographic diffraction data (the high-angle
> data), thereby obtaining an image with a resolution 2.5 times better than
> would otherwise have been possible.

Nice. It looks like this is a fresh gateway breakthrough with low hanging
fruit on the other side. It's always exciting when it's not just eeking out a
small increment gains blown up by University Press.

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perl4ever
What I want to know is, on the sample image of molybdenum disulfide (b), there
is one atom on the right near the vertical center, that is noticeably dimmer
than the rest. What could account for that?

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brian-armstrong
Maybe that one was less reflective than the others?

~~~
edejong
Pro tip: always polish the atoms when you make record breaking pictures of
them.

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1hackaday
When the tomography method is well developed, couldn’t this be use to scan the
neural structure of a live brain? (i.e., to upload a brain)

~~~
trentlott
It wouldn't work well at deep depths because it's interacting with the
electron shell. After a few nanometer or two of tissue you'd have no signal.
_If_ you'd figured out a way to put a brain in the microscope. They tend to
want samples in a vacuum, a few cm square and no more than a few mm thick
including the sample mount.

You'd have to use something like neutrons, which don't interact with electrons
and can be used to image internal structure. Those tend to have side-effects,
though, like inducing radioactive decay in nuclei.

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breadAndWater

      The basic principle of the technique was 
      proposed almost 50 years ago by the physicist 
      Walter Hoppe, who reasoned that there should 
      be enough information in the diffraction data 
      to work backwards to produce an image of the 
      diffracting object.
    

This kind of statement just absolutely cracks me up, because it's a clear
reveal that between this sort of awareness of diffraction principles, and
concepts like pilot wave theory, that double slit experiments and entanglement
haven't been mysterious for decades.

It's all just media manipulation. There are very firmly understood concepts
backing all the mechanics of quantum effects, and the journalists that push
the ambiguities are simply trolling would-be amateurs for to fan the flames of
confusion as a sort of outsider performance art.

~~~
lixtra
> It's all just media manipulation.

Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. [Hanlon]

~~~
colordrops
Thank you, for once Hanlon's razor is used properly.

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anonytrary
Does anyone else here get slightly annoyed when Nature articles are shared
here? It would be nice if there was a bot that tried to find a
mirror/alternative source to the same paper. There's something incredibly
disappointing and frustrating about paywalled scientific research.

~~~
olh
I will tell you what you can't do in those situations

do not copy the DOI
([https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0298-5](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0298-5))

do not go to sci-hub ([https://sci-hub.tw](https://sci-hub.tw))

and finally do not paste the DOI there to get the article

