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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.
It could have been worse. It could have run Vista.
Otherwise, an interesting development.
there is no spoon
... 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.
No, I believe Vista's EULA limits magnification to 3000X.
At 60,000USD, thats not for your home, its just a worktop Electron microscope for labs.
About it running on XP, cheer up it could have been Vista...
The drawback is that once MSFT folks drop their XP support, you will have to be extra careful when microscoping viruses (and very small wooden horses).
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
> So easy a grade-schooler could use it
The real question is:
Is it easy enough that a caveman can do it?
"...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.
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
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!
I know its asking a lot to bother reading the summary, let alone non-/. information on the device.. but no. You don't need nasty solvents and sputter coating with this particular model.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
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.
"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.