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."

Comments

Wish they had this at my school

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wish they had this at my school

[deglr6328]

FYI Slashdot, one of this decade's genuine breakthroughs in science has been finally breaking the diffraction limit for visible light microscopy. The results in the past couple years alone have been nothing short of stunning. Specifically the techniques which are capable of doing this are confocal microscopy, near-field scanning microscopy, stimulated emission depletion microscopy, stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy and structured illumination microscopy. All of these techniques use visible light and can image at below the diffraction limit of ~250nm resolution, but most use complicated techniques using lasers etc. to do so. Except that last one, structured illumination. This technology is going to literally revolutionize microscopy and probably biology as a whole in the coming years. It is a very clever technique and produces unbefuckingleivably amazing images. With it, full 3D reconstructions of individual living cells with ~10 nanometer resolution, at frame rates in the several Hz range can be taken using a relatively simple LCD retrofit to a high quality transmission light microscope which is installed between the light source and the stage. Look at some of these movies taken of cell processes using the technique and try to keep your jaw off the floor. While the resolution may be higher, none of this is possible with SEM or TEMs due to the necessity of imaging in vacuo.

Re:Wish they had this at my school

[ccbailey]

Since I seem to oscillate between looking at TEM images and doing confocal microscopy these days, allow me to chime in here.

Apart from resolution, there are two factors that make EM useful in a way that light microscopy techniques never will be. Namely, that they allow you to look at an entire specimen at once and at the same time see things you weren't looking for. The pretty color images confocal images are made by tagging particular structures in the cell with fluorescent molecules. This is done either with fluorochrome labeled antibodies or by expressing proteins fused to fluorescent proteins. Therefore, you have to know what you're looking for in order to make a picture of it. Furthermore due to the overlap in the emission spectra of the fluorescent tracers, you can generally only look at about 3 things simultaneously. So if you want to see all the structures in a cell at once or you're looking for something, like a virus, but don't know which one or don't have an antibody for it, EM is still the tool of choice.

Not all that bad!

[nomso]

It could have been worse. It could have run Vista.

Otherwise, an interesting development.

Re:Not all that bad!

[sakdoctor]

Yo dawg, we heard you likes viruses, so we put a virus on your microscope, so you can get phished while you observe viruses though your microscope, dawg.

Re:Indeed amazing pictures

[aerthling]

No, I believe Vista's EULA limits magnification to 3000X.

Re:Indeed amazing pictures

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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).

Re:Using XP is not that bad...

[jimicus]

The PDF file linked shows that it generates images in BMP, JPEG and TIFF format.

Security implications

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hey, we have the TM-1000

[blind biker]

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.

Re:Hey, we have the TM-1000

[vlm]

Really, I'm thinking 60k is "payable" if you're really into the stuff.

I have some knowledge of the microscopy hobby. Also ham radio. Both are similar in that ultra high cost options are available, and similar in that prices don't drop, at least not like prices in the computer/electronics hobby.

It is considered "normal" to buy a $1000 radio or microscope, use it for a few years, sell for about $800, upgrade to the $2000 model, use it a few years, sell for maybe $1800, buy the $3000 model ... repeat for a few decades, next thing you know, "old" people of rather average income are operating $10000 of radio gear, $20000 telescopes, cameras, microscopes, etc.

This is very difficult for computer people to wrap their heads around, since last years video card is merely a paperweight today, etc. And vice versa, good luck convincing a ham radio guy that his five old PC will not sell for even 50% of its new price.

If computer prices were this stable, I'm sure I would easily have a $60K computer system by now.

Re:Hey, we have the TM-1000

[Anonymous Coward]

The computer sitting on my desk right now has 8GB of RAM, 4x2.4GHz cores, and 1TB of disk space -- build-out was about $1,600.

In 1995, I picked up a system with a Pentium @ 60MHz with 8MB of RAM for $2,000. Not that much can be added (I think the max RAM for this system was 16MB...maybe 32MB), but RAM was running about $200 for a 4MB stick at the time.

Based upon the RAM alone, I am running a $410,000 computer system in 1995 terms.

Let's look at the CPU...a P120 was about $400 at the time...strictly based upon clock speed...add another $16,000 to the value of my current system.

Hard drive? I have 1TB of storage in this system. In 1997, I paid $400 for an 8.4GB drive. Add another $49,000 on to my current system's value.

I have a half million dollar system on my desk right now...and I didn't have to sell my old system for $450,000 to get it.

Bashing for the sake of Bashing...

[geekmux]

"...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.

the summary is wrong

[myc]

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.

Re:There are a lot of other things to consider

[Jaime2]

I was a TEM operator about twenty years ago. We didn't have any special floor and the vacuum was drawn with an Edwards High Vacuum roughing pump that plugged into the wall and the final vacuum (10E-7 torr) was drawn with the internal diffusion pump. It was a Hitachi 600AB that could do about 100,000X magnification, but we only used it to about 4,000X or so for our purposes. This was a two ton, seven foot tall scope. We didn't use it for high magnification, but for x-ray diffraction crystallography and EDS identification of elemental composition. We also has a Phillips SEM. I'm sure we paid far less than $60,000 for it -- we bought it used. Even the TEM, which we bought brand new, was only about four times as expensive as the TM-1000. However, neither of these scopes could ever be used in most homes due to power requirements and their sheer size.

I think the big deal here is that this one (the TM-1000) fits on a table top, weighs 200 pounds, and doesn't require liquid nitrogen. BTW, the EDS detector available for this unit is pretty lame and is only able to detect elements from sodium up.

The electron microscope I used to use ran on OS/2

[doctor_no]

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!