Clathrin-coated vesicles are the shuttle containers within cells. The vesicles carry lipids and proteins between membrane-bound compartments. Clathrin forms a cage-like structure around the membrane-bound vesicle that is pinched off from the plasma membrane (in endocytosis) or a membranous component of the cytoplasm. Clathrin recruits cargo that is within a vesicle through intermediary proteins known as adaptors that help select membrane-anchored protein and form an interface between the clathrin cage and the membrane bilayer.

The beginning of metallurgy in the Old World is characterized by hammering native metals such as gold, copper and meteoric iron. Owing to the need of annealing the metal, for softening it after cold working, pyrometallurgy, the use of fire for producing metals from ores, could have been found by trial and error. Parallel to the rise of metallurgy is the use of a campfire (low temperature: max. 800°C) for baking clay-objects, which also seems to be an additional origin of metallurgy. The very first piece of molten copper-ore, dating back to the 7th millennium BC, was found in Catal Hoyiik, Turkey, together with hammered native copper and beads made of galena (PbS), initially mistakenly thought to be metallic lead.

Plum Island Animal Disease Center, located on a small island off the coast of Long Island's North Fork, has been clouded in mystery and misinformation for years. Often the topic of conspiracy theorists, this secret place has generated many myths—from aliens to anthrax and pink eels to secret submarines. But the truth of the center's mission is far less colorful yet far more crucial to the state of the nation's agriculture.

In June 2003, operational responsibility for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) transferred from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and PIADC became the core of the DHS effort to protect US livestock from foreign animal disease agents.

Color has historically seen limited use in metallography, mainly due to the cost of film and prints and the difficulty and cost of reproducing images in publications. However, with the growth of digital imaging, capturing color images is much simpler and cheaper. Also, printing images in color is inexpensive for in-house reports, and can be distributed cheaply on CDs, although reproduction in journals is still expensive. Color does have many advantages over black and white. First, the human eye is sensitive to only about forty shades of gray from white to black, but is sensitive to a vast number of colors. Tint etchants reveal features in the microstructure that often cannot be revealed using standard black and white etchants.

Production of crude oil is generally accompanied by several other product phases, namely water, gas and solids. Pressure drops across chokes, concomitant gas evolution (due to pressure drops) and turbulence caused by various pipeline configurations can create difficult-to-resolve emulsions. Natural crude oil surfactants and solids exacerbate the problem further by migrating to the newly created oil-water interface and stabilizing the unwanted emulsions. Once the fluids arrive at the production facilities, a variety of vessels are employed to separate the oil, gas and water. Depending on the wettability of the solids, they will exit via one or both of the liquid phases. In a worse case scenario, the solids will accumulate at the oil-water interface.

Fundamental research within the scope of cell and structural biology as well as nano-technology is increasingly focusing on unraveling interactive biological and biochemical processes and pathways at the macromolecular level. For this, high resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is indispensable. Of paramount importance is the three-dimensional visualization of macromolecular structures and molecular machines in their native hydrated state. Their physical fixation within ultra-thin vitrified ice layers is the crucial starting point.

"The most advantageous feature of the ex-situ lift out method is throughput."

A great deal of emphasis is placed on "throughput" in the microprocessor industry. Wafer sizes are getting larger and the costs of building them have increased astronomically. The transmission electron microscope (TEM) has become the essential tool for examining current microprocessor products. The TEM can only be effective if it has properly prepared specimens to put into it. In order to achieve the highest specimen preparation spatial resolution, the microprocessor industry has turned to focused ion beam (FIB) tools, either single or dual column, for TEM specimen preparation in applications ranging from process control to failure analysis, and on to semiconductor device metrology.

Electron-beam lithography offers very high resolution patterns without the need for masks. Systems based on electron microscopes offer entry into electron-beam lithography at reasonable cost. Such systems are becoming popular in research environments due to their versatility and reasonable cost.

While these systems work well they do have problems writing on insulating substrates. The insulating substrate causes charge to build up from the incident electron-beam. As the charge builds up on the surface of the insulator, the incident beam is distorted and moved in x and y. The result is a lack of positioning accuracy on the patterns as well as pattern distortion.

At the Microscopy and Microanalysis conference in Honolulu this last August a small meeting was convened to share information and knowledge about implementing LIMS (Laboratory Information Management Systems). The meeting took place at the end of the session on Core Facility Management, through the efforts of Debby Sherman, who is coordinator of the Core Facility Managers Focused Interest Group (http://microscopy.org/MSAUnits/Committees/ Facilities.html). In addition to the meeting, I spoke with several vendors (focusing on those vendors we use here at PathBioResource), as well as others who have made some progress in developing and/or installing LIMS.

October 2005 marks 50 years since the first images achieving atomic resolution were obtained by Erwin Miiller and Kanwar Bahadur at the Pennsylvania State University using field ion microscopy. An image from that seminal work is shown in Figure 1. Two separate meetings were held this year to commemorate this important event in the history of microscopy; the 50th Anniversary of Atomic Resolution Microscopy, held June 15-17, 2005 at Penn State and the Golden Anniversary of Atomic Resolution Imaging, a symposium at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2005 in Honolulu held July 31 to August 4, 2005. These celebrations were timed to coincide also with the World Year of Physics 2005 http://www. wyp2005.org/.