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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."
It could have been worse. It could have run Vista.
Otherwise, an interesting development.
there is no spoon
No, I believe Vista's EULA limits magnification to 3000X.
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
The PDF file linked shows that it generates images in BMP, JPEG and TIFF format.
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.
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
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.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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 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!
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.