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An Electron Microscope For Your Home?
CuteSteveJobs writes "Could microscopy be in for a new golden age? Wired previewed the desktop-sized Hitachi TM-1000 Electron Microscope a while back. Light microscopes can magnify up to 400X (1,000X at lower quality) — just enough to see bacteria as shapes — but this one offers 20X to 10,000X, giving some amazing pictures. Unlike traditional electron microscopes, this one plugs into a domestic power socket and specimens don't need any special preparation; it's point-and-shoot, much like your typical digital camera. So easy a grade-schooler could use it, and earlier this year that's what happened: The kids at Iwanuma Elementary School in Miyagi, Japan got their own electron microscope. At $60,000, you'll have to give up on the BMW, but the hope is with economy of scale (so far 1,000 have sold) and miniaturization, the price will continue to drop. The only bad news? It runs XP."
I don't know about home users, but this is something a university could justify purchasing several of for an undergraduate lab. Biology could have been even more interesting.
They probably didn't want to discriminate against transgender slashdot users.
It could have been worse. It could have run Vista.
Otherwise, an interesting development.
there is no spoon
About it running on XP, cheer up it could have been Vista...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
... as long as you don't have to use some locked-down, proprietary software to read the images. I hope they don't use some closed image format for the output.
On the other hand, I'm sure some guys would like to take the effort putting $YOUR_FAVORITE_OS in it...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
At 60,000USD, thats not for your home, its just a worktop Electron microscope for labs.
What about wives? I thought that property is shared in marriage.
Ezekiel 23:20
It's not even gender-neutral -- it's a plural pronoun.
I am curious what this would imply as far as security involving micro-controllers goes. Some companies (particularly cable/sat providers would be hit the worst) use technologies like smart cards as a means of access controls. One of the biggest barriers to breaking these is how expensive it is to be able to reverse engineer one of these cards by means of a SEM. This would dramatically undermine that particular barrier.
Cool now you can kind of see a virus, and get a virus at the same time!
It's a lot of fun mostly because of its ease of use. I'm pretty sure a 7-year old would have no problems using it correctly after only an hour or two of training. Another plus is that it can be configured with an EDS device for (relatively speaking) peanuts. And it is just as easy to operate as the TM-1000.
But don't kid yourself: the quality of the images trails far behind the more serious equipment like, for instance, the Zeiss SUPRA series. I'm not saying this to be a dick; the difference is striking. With the TM-1000 you really do get what you pay for, and on bad days it seems only marginally better than an optical microscope.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
it would be twice as expensive for the same hardware.
> So easy a grade-schooler could use it
The real question is:
Is it easy enough that a caveman can do it?
You would think it would do colour.
In my day, we didn't have electron microscopes at school! We had to squint! And we were grateful!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"...The only bad news? It runs XP."
OK, don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good old fashioned bashing against the almighty iSteve with my Ballmer signature series chair thrower, but c'mon, seriously? Do we have to consider every damn application that runs XP a bad thing?
Seems the "damned" OS has managed to survive in the corporate world years past Vista (we're STILL ordering brand-new systems with XP), and Netbooks have seen their own resurgence of support for the aging yet stable and predictable OS.
I run a Macbook for school. What do I have loaded on Fusion? Yup, you guessed it. XP, for when I MUST run a Windows app. Every student comes marching in every year with a new Vista or OSX-loaded laptop, yet my entire computer lab is still running...yup, right again. Good ol' XP. Old, yet functional.
And rounding out this volley back to the subject at hand, some simple applications (like a microscope) I would rather NOT have to worry about the bullshit bloat of some other OS, especially when you consider your target audience is USED to seeing XP.
But could it run Linux?
I can just imagine it... "Sorry sir, there was fine print there, right inside that little dot; perhaps your eyesight is such that you'll need a Hitachi TM-1000 electron microscope. The price has really come down recently."
There's a lot of considerations that go into making and operating an electron microscope. For one thing, they usually require a pretty high vacuum which always has to be on causing some pretty how power costs.
Plus they also have to be isolated from vibrations in the ground, so even if it's not that sensitive, it still probably would only work if installed in the basement of a suburban house; operating that thing near the top of a multi-story apartment complex probably would cause some sort of calibration errors. The TEMs that I've seen were built on top of some huge concrete blocks (at least 10 feet deep) that were isolated from the surrounding so trucks could pass by without disturbing them.
Don't see why it's worth $60,000 when you can give an entire class of about 100 a regular compound light microscope for everyone to use, as long as it's purely for educational purposes. Nevertheless, it's a pretty cool engineering feat, and I guess someone somewhere could find it practical.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
On a research grade light microscope, the maximum magnification one can get without loss of resolution is roughly 1500x - 1600x, not 400x as the summary suggests. Also, resolution of the image has nothing to do with magnification; the numerical aperture (N.A.) of the objective lens determines the resolution.
NO CARRIER
It probably will, but is anyone willing to buy one, try it out, and get back to us? :-)
Yeah, I could really have used those $15 that running Linux would save me..
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
Am I the only one that noticed this "news" is year and a half old?
it has a USB 2.0 connector to attach to PC which is recommended to run XP. Probably not a big deal to get it to work with Linux or BSD or Mac OSX
The above microscope would be a great addition to any microbiology lab, anywhere. Now we need a foolproof home DNA sequencer.
---
Microbiology Feed @ Feed Distiller
If you poke around the web, you'll see that this thing has been selling since April 2005. That's 4 1/2 years. They were celebrating their 1000th unit sold. This is not exactly a revolution.
Wake me up when I can own a Rife microscope.
Bidding is open for a Hitachi S-6180 from the University of Wisconsin... mds.bussvc.wisc.edu
Five grand (and a the winning bid) and it can be yours.
EM is all fine and good, but you cant just stick things into it like you can a light microscope. Sample prep is very complex. Unless these kids have several rather nasty solvents to fix the sample, and a high-pressure liquid CO2 bomb to remove excess liquids, not to mention a sputter-coater, there is nothing you can do with it. Sounds like a waste of money for schools to buy this. Better to buy 200 decent light-scopes and let kids play with it individually than watch the teacher put a prepared sample into a tube and look at a computer screen.
Win XP is used because this is the cheapest way to develop software:
1. Notebook they used already comes with XP preinstalled
2. XP programmers are 30-40% cheaper than Linux Qt or Cocoa developers
3. XP development can be easily outsourced into low-cost destination
The submitter hoped that it ran on Unix to find his balls as well.
The electron microscope I used to use ran on OS/2 Warp. Acquired images had to be transferred off the computer using Zip drives. Its still in service. I have a fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS) machines that runs on OS9 exclusively.
The thing is, being that some scientific equipment can easily be six-figures, the computers that are connected to those machines are dedicated to it and run one piece of software exclusively. Many scientist aren't in-depth computer people, most labs with won't allow those computers to have any other software that isn't necessary to be installed, or be used to surf the net, or be upgraded if its working. Any downtime associated with such an expensive machine can be costly, and the software that runs it is usually finicky and filled with bugs (being that the userbase is miniscule).
The fact that its on XP isn't much of an issue, in fact, it seems a lot more progressive then other equipment out there. I know equipment that will on run on Windows 95/98/Me, and let me tell you it's a NIGHTMARE!
and any other website that requires javascript just to see images and navigate their website. javascript is a godDamn abomination!!!
It probably runs Windows Embedded 2009. Which is the componentized version of Windows XP. Microsoft was forced to keep XP around for their embedded sector because Vista can't be broken up like XP can be, then customized for embedded systems as required.
For example, an XP Embedded (aka Windows Embedded 2k9) install can go as small as ~175MB for a full graphical UI (Explorer) w/IE8, Direct X, etc- all the goodies you'd need on a typical non-localized desktop or workstation (for games, work, whatever). You can lop that down to under 64MB if you cut the UI and make it command-line only (which is sort of deceiving, because the command-line mode just launches into cmd.exe as the shell).
XP Embedded is a very nice, stable system, if you can afford the licensing. The tools are pretty good for building the system. Out of all the Microsoft systems, XP Embedded is by far the cleanest- because you can build the OS with precisely what you need in it (Don't need IE? Don't build an image with it.).
You can take a 400X image and blow it up photographically to 4000X; but who cares? What matters is resolution. Any cheapie science catalog will sell you a microscope that magnifies 200X, but all you see is hugely magnified blur. Can you resolve one micron, or one nanometer? That's what matters.
FEI has a much better one that can do 24000X max. At 70000 it's a bit more expensive than the Hitachi but then you have soemthing you can really work with. Trust me, 10000X is not nearly enough to see anything interesting :). I saw a demonstration of one of those at a conference once. I wish I had the money to get one of those things for myself.
-- Cheers!
"They" was used here as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. It's weird but, yes, "they" can be singular.
Does anyone know of a relatively cheap microscope that is basically just a camera which can dump an image into a computer in real time?
My eyes are getting a little worse and it seems to me that using my monitors makes more sense than looking into our standard microscopes. Also it seems to me this would be a cheaper way to go. I'm just an ammature. If something like this can be had for a reasonable amount I'd probably buy it.
I know, I know, silly me for reading the actual summary.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Much of jewlry is custom-engraved by laser. It would be neet to know how to read the engravings, maybe even direct a micro-tool to sand the etching off the jewel.
Of'course, I think jews have been steeling jewelry for years and this technology makes them lightyears ahead of whatever we were buying at the time.
Want one ?
The very serious " The Amateur Scientist " column in Scientific American in the
early 70's had detailed plans on how to make an electron microscope.
A do it yourself project. With a teacher , we had built one of them and it turned out
very interresting images. Just a thought.
Here's one of the elementary school's blog entries about the subject, in case any of you were curious.
It sounds like these kids are really getting a kick out of this piece of equipment. Iwanuma isn't exactly a poor elementary school, but it's neat that the microscope is small and inexpensive enough that the school can afford it. I worked at a smaller elementary school in northern Miyagi that had a computer lab with videoconferencing equipment, and my guess is that the schools that don't buy an electron microscope will use those cameras to share with other nearby schools that do.
Now, for just US$60000, the busy Blade Runner about town can look for manufacturer's reference codes on synthetic snake scales from the comfort of his own home! No more standing out in the rain!
"their" is not gender-neutral singular. It's plural. "an average slashdotter" is presumably one person.
Where is this free beer everyone on Slashdot keeps talking about?
"It runs XP."
No it doesn't. Perhaps submitters should start looking at what they're submitting. I know it's a lot to ask.
... it's tough to complain about the Microsoft tax. It's so small as to be unnoticable. Still, once enough of these get out into the hands of ordinary folk, how long do you think it'll be before someone has Linux-based replacement software?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
How about a SEM for $5k? Assume similar to Hitachi resolution, ease of use; 1/2 the size and 1/4 the weight. What uses can you think of for this? How big is the market--how many per year would people buy? Yea, it's possible. -Dr.E
This is very much like the FEI Phenom microscope, which my company wrote the software for. The Phenom has been on the market for several years already. It's cheaper too, if I'm not mistaken.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
No, actually, "they" cannot be singular. "He" is the proper singular, gender-neutral pronoun in English. Of course, that doesn't stop people from using "they" in a singular sense -- and it's been done for hundreds of years -- but it's still not correct.
Three decades ago, when I was at high school, and even in early university years, I was fascinated with biology and specially botany. I acquired a good conventional optical microscope and got custom fixtures made for SLR cameras to take pictures. I managed to scan some of those I could find on my page on photomicroscopy. I was endlessly fascinated by seeing the patterns on pollen grains and chloroplasts inside plant cells.
I always hit the limit on what optical microscopes can see, even with an oil immersion lens. The depth of focus was always very shallow and I had to prepare stuff before seeing much. I kept reading on electronic microscopes, both scanning and tunneling, and only dreaming of ever operating one.
Perhaps in my lifetime it can be more affordable as an item for the hobbyist.
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