In today’s edition of Science is Cool, I learned that researchers at Cornell have improved imaging techniques used to view atoms in a crystalline structure. Here’s an example of the output of their experiment:
That’s a crystal of praseodymium orthoscandate, and the glowing balls are individual atoms. They’re “fuzzy” because the imaging is so precise you can actually see them vibrating with thermal energy (atoms are only still at absolute zero, and there’s some disagreement about whether they’re absolutely still even then).
Twelve years ago I noted that IBM researchers had been able to view a single molecule, which was astounding. This is just as amazing, and definitely fits into my “science is cool” category…