Speeding Up STM Imaging

Roland Piquepaille writes "Probably not many of you have used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the essential tool of nanoscience. And you might think that it's as easy to take a picture of an atom with an STM as it is to take a shot with your digital camera. In fact, the imaging of individual atoms with an STM is quite slow. Now researchers at Cornell University have shown how to accelerate this process — by adding a radio transmitter, they are able to speed up atomic-level microscopy by a factor of at least 100. A typical STM currently has a sampling rate of about one KHz. This new radio-frequency STM can operate a thousand times faster."

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Clarification of the above idiot troll

[timster]

New readers may not understand why such vitriol would be addressed to someone who submits interesting science stories to Slashdot. After all, while there is a link to his blog if you click on his name, this is standard practice with story submissions. So what's the big deal?

Well, there was a time back when Roland first started submitting stories where he would put a link to his blog in the summary content, blatantly suggesting that said blog might be a good place to discuss the story. Since there are ad links on his blog, that makes it horrible, evil and self-serving; readers were in an uproar.

Since then the blog link has been restricted to the submitter name at the beginning of the summary (again, standard practice). But some people really cannot ever let go, and we have to put up with silly tags and dumb trolls on every single one of his submissions. Kinda makes you long for the days when almost everyone on Slashdot was more interested in science than name-calling.