Costa Rica is amazing. You probably know that Costa Rica has no armed forces and that fully a quarter of its area is given over to national parks and other protected areas. You probably don't know that Costa Rica is also amazing for its electron microscopy. Almost anonymously Costa Rica has a center for electron microscopy on a par with centers in the United States or Europe.

El Centro de Investigation en Estructuras Microscopicas, CIEMIC (The Center for Microstructural Research) has its own purpose-built building with an infrastructure that would make most of us envious.