Tag Archives: STM

New technology: An optical microscope without lenses

News: Scientific Instruments    April 26, 2011
Say ‘microscope’ and most people think of the models they had in school. Those microscopes had lenses and used visible light (either natural light or a bulb of some kind). Generically they’re called optical microscopes. So what’s a microscope called if it doesn’t have any lenses? Try lens-free optical tomographic microscope. And this means what? [...]
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Paleogenetics: Unlocking the secrets from DNA of long ago

Impact: Decoding DNA    March 6, 2011
Eighth in a series of posts inspired by ten topics in ‘Insights of the Decade’ from the December 17, 2010 special issue of Science Magazine The topics are: Inflammation, climatology, tricks of light, alien planets, the microbiome, cell reprogramming, Martian water, the DNA time machine, cosmology and epigenetics. The original articles are now behind a [...]
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Pulsed scanning tunneling microscope: New tool, new insights

Impact: Scientific Instruments    October 3, 2010
An STM image of atoms forming a “quantum corral”….image developed for IBM. Before the week goes flipping by on the calendar, I wanted to mark one of those achievements that get scant attention but will probably have large impact. I say “probably” because even the people who developed IBM’s new pulsed scanning tunneling microscope don’t [...]
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A first: Spintronics made visible

News: Quantum Physics    April 27, 2010
It’s an important emerging field, spintronics; though it’s not too well known. It’s based on a quantum property of electrons – they spin. Some electrons spin ‘up,’ some spin ‘down’ and if you can get a device to read that state of up or down, that’s the basis for many kinds of electronics. This includes [...]
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