This year marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of X-ray diffraction and the 85th anniversary of electron diffraction (see Microscopy Pioneers). For most of the time since their introduction, microscopists have known these two techniques as the primary phase identification methods used in conjunction with various microscopies. However, these two diffraction methods also have played enormous roles in understanding the structure of matter, as well as the nature of both X rays and electrons.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the organizational meeting that led to what is now the Microscopy Society of America. From its beginnings as a group of electron microscope builders and users, the Society has grown to embrace the science and application of all microscopy and microanalysis techniques used in the physical and life sciences. The Society's publishing activities evolved from the innovative annual meeting proceedings with two-page papers 45 years ago to today's popular journal, proceedings, and trade magazine published for MSA by Cambridge University Press. Below are a few important milestones* for the Society.

In February 1992 Don Grimes created Microscopy Today on his computer as a four-page, desktop-published newsletter. By November it had grown to 14 pages (see cover image below) and was delivered to 11,000 microscopists. In this latter issue there were articles on SEM and AFM, a detailed calendar of coming events, a column by Jean-Paul Revel, and an editorial encouraging readers to join MSA and MAS. Stephen Carmichael's review column made its first appearance in April 1994 (see page 8 for his 129th review!). Phil Oshel began Microscopy 101 in February 1997 and subsequently acquired most of the articles, especially those about microscopy methods. But the most unique aspects of those early MT issues were Don's humorous page fillers and his news about people and companies in the microscopy business. Don was able to make his news column work because he knew nearly everyone in the microscopy and microanalysis field: researchers, manufacturers, and salespeople.

This issue showcases the winners of the third annual Microscopy Today Innovation Awards competition. These awards were established to honor innovative microscopy-related products and methods that appeared in the previous year.

In his biography Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson describes how a single elementary school teacher could inspire a kid to study math and science. During those same formative years, Jobs's neighborhood was filled with engineers who could discuss nifty science topics with young Steve. While today's average school kid may not have such influences, the fact remains that Steve Jobs turned toward math and science before high school. Interest in science should be kindled during middle school so that students will take appropriate courses in high school in preparation to study science in college.

This issue highlights the large annual M&M meeting attracting over thousands of attendees and the Topical Conference attracting about 100 attendees. Both types of conferences are popular among microscopists and microanalysts.

In 1969 a meteorite exploded over Pueblito de Allende in northern Mexico. Many of the fragments were recovered and have provided a wealth of information about the chemical composition of our early universe. Most recently, Chi Ma, Oliver Tschauner, John Beckett, George Rossman, and Wenjun Liu have reported a new mineral in one of these meteorite fragments. Ma et al. named this new form of titanium oxide “panguite” for Pan Gu, the giant in Chinese mythology who, in the beginning, created the world by separating the heaven and earth from chaos. This is an allusion to this ultra-refractory mineral, stable at high temperatures and in extreme environments, being among the first solid materials in our solar system.

One of the largest freshwater fish (2 to 2.5 meters long, over 150 kg) lives in the Amazonian rivers and lakes. It is well known that these waters are populated with piranhas that swarm and devour almost anything that moves. The lungfish Arapaima gigas coexists with piranhas by virtue of an armor-like plating of scales. Y.S. Lin, C.T. Wei, E.A. Olevsky, and Marc Meyers examined the microscopic structure and mechanical properties of these scales to discover what provided this protection.

High-density magnetic memory is typically fabricated from ferromagnetic materials. As the density is increased and the memory elements are more densely packed, the magnetic fields of neighboring elements interfere with each other. If materials without magnetic fields, referred to as antiferromagnetic, could be manipulated to store data, such limitations theoretically could be overcome. In a breakthrough study, Sebastian Loth, Susanne Baumann, Christopher Lutz, Don Eigler, and Andreas Heinrich used a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to assemble a device with just 12 antiferromagnetic atoms that could be manipulated to one of two states, demonstrating the ability to store data. Until now, about one million atoms have been required to store a digital 0 or 1 in the most advanced magnetic storage systems.

About 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, modern humans out-competed Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals became extinct. Some recent theories have speculated that Neanderthals had an inferior diet (predominately meat) that put them at a disadvantage. Evidence for plant foods is rare at sites occupied by Neanderthals, but this could be due to vagaries of preservation and insufficient attention to plant remains. In an ingenious study, Amanda Henry, Alison Brooks, and Dolores Piperno used microscopy to demonstrate that plants and cooked foods are present in dental calculus (the stuff the dental hygienist scrapes off your teeth) on the teeth of Neanderthals.

An important challenge in microscopy is the development of high-resolution light microscopy methods to label and image cell populations in three dimensions. The ability to achieve this deep into intact specimens is limited by light scattering. Modern technologies, such as two-photon excitation fluorescence microscopy, allow examination of structures at distances of hundreds of micrometers below the surface but are insufficient to image and reconstruct large cell populations that are millimeters in scale and deeper below the surface. Whereas light scattering can be reduced by optical clearing, most of these reagents exhibit limitations such as the quenching of fluorescence. Recently, a clearing agent that spectacularly alleviates these major limitations was developed by Hiroshi Hama, Hiroshi Kurokawa, Hiroyuki Kawano, Ryoko Ando, Tomomi Shimogori, Hisayori Noda, Kiyoko Fukami, Asako Sakaue-Sawano, and Atsushi Miyawaki. They developed a clearing reagent called Scale that renders mouse brains and embryos transparent while completely preserving fluorescent signals from labeled cells!

Perhaps you've never wondered what sounds permeated the nighttime in a Jurassic forest, but there is now a partial answer. With the good fortune to obtain a well-preserved fossil specimen, Jun-Jie Gu, Fernando Montealegre-Z, Daniel Robert, Michael Engel, Ge-Xia Qiao, and Dong Ren were able to reconstruct the sounds that would have been made by a katydid of that geologic time.

Electron diffraction in both SEM and TEM provides a contrast mechanism for imaging defects as well as a means for quantifying elastic strain. Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is the commercially established method for SEM-based diffraction analysis. In EBSD, Kikuchi patterns are acquired by a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and indexed using commercial software. Phase and crystallographic orientation information can be extracted from these Kikuchi patterns, and researchers have developed cross-correlation methods to measure strain as well.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been producing reference materials since the 1950s. Over 50 materials have been developed to cover bulk rock, sediment, and soils for the geological community. These materials are used globally in geochemistry, environmental, and analytical laboratories that perform bulk chemistry and/or microanalysis for instrument calibration and quality assurance testing. To answer the growing demand for higher spatial resolution and sensitivity, there is a need to create a new generation of microanalytical reference materials suitable for a variety of techniques, such as scanning electron microscopy/X-ray spectrometry (SEM/EDS), electron probe microanalysis (EPMA), laser ablation inductively coupled mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). As such, the microanalytical reference material (MRM) needs to be stable under the beam, be homogeneous at scales of better than 10–25 micrometers for the major to ultra-trace element level, and contain all of the analytes (elements or isotopes) of interest. Previous development of basaltic glasses intended for LA-ICP-MS has resulted in a synthetic basaltic matrix series of glasses (USGS GS-series) and a natural basalt series of glasses (BCR-1G, BHVO-2G, and NKT-1G). These materials have been useful for the LA-ICP-MS community but were not originally intended for use by the electron or ion beam community. A material developed from start to finish with intended use in multiple microanalytical instruments would be useful for inter-laboratory and inter-instrument platform comparisons.

This article summarizes the experiments undertaken to produce a basalt glass reference material suitable for distribution as a multiple-technique round robin material. The goal of the analytical work presented here is to demonstrate that the elemental homogeneity of the new glass is acceptable for its use as a reference material. Because the round robin exercise is still underway, only nominal compositional ranges for each element are given in the article.

Electrochemical and electrocatalytic phenomena underpin a broad spectrum of energy, chemical, and information technologies. Examples range from electrocatalytic activation of oxygen reduction reactions in fuel cells, gas-solid reactions, and ionic transport in gas sensors and oxygen pumps, to a wide gamut of electrochemical and transport phenomena in primary and secondary batteries. Equally important is the role of ionic phenomena in information technologies, as exemplified by a recent wave of interest in memristive and electroresisitive information storage and logic devices. This article examines a new type of scanning probe microscopy (SPM), referred to as electrochemical strain microscopy (ESM), that can provide a better understanding of these complex phenomena.

Two-photon microscopy (2PM) provides three-dimensional (3D) and four-dimensional (4D) (x, y, z, t) imaging in living specimens or under experimental physiological conditions very close to live. In conjunction with fluorescent labels, 2PM provides a powerful means of investigating the relationships between structure and function at the microscopic level that are key to understanding biological systems. This technique is able to provide time-resolved, 3D images of dynamic systems with near-diffraction-limited resolution and highly specific structural contrast.

A microscope, by definition, provides structural and analytical information about objects that are too small to see with the unaided eye. From the very first microscope, efforts to improve its capabilities and push them to ever-finer length scales have been pursued. In this context, it would seem that the concept of an ultimate microscope would have received much attention by now; but has it really ever been defined? Human knowledge extends to structures on a scale much finer than atoms, so it might seem that a proton-scale microscope or a quark-scale microscope would be the ultimate. However, we argue that an atomic-scale microscope is the ultimate for the following reason: the smallest building block for either synthetic structures or natural structures is the atom. Indeed, humans and nature both engineer structures with atoms, not quarks. So far as we know, all building blocks (atoms) of a given type are identical; it is the assembly of the building blocks that makes a useful structure (see Figure 1). Thus, would a microscope that determines the position and identity of every atom in a structure with high precision and for large volumes be the ultimate microscope? We argue, yes. In this article, we consider how it could be built, and we ponder the answer to the equally important follow-on questions: who would care if it is built, and what could be achieved with it?

Over the past fifty years the scanning electron microscope (SEM) has established itself as the most versatile and productive tool for imaging and microanalysis in many areas of science and technology, and some seventy-thousand instruments generate millions of micrographs every day. Scanning electron microscopes do, however, have one fundamental limitation in that the only experimental variable available to the operator is the choice of the accelerating voltage. Although the ability to vary beam energy is both necessary and important, it is an unfortunate fact that changing the beam energy also alters many aspects of performance: imaging resolution, relative strength of different signal components, depth of beam penetration, capabilities of the various analytical systems, and the severity of charging and beam-induced damage. This makes it difficult or impossible to optimize the interaction of interest.

Over the last decade, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) has advanced remarkably. With the development of aberration-corrected optics, improved recording systems, high brightness guns, and so on, imaging with single-atom sensitivity across the periodic table has become a reality. Atomic resolution imaging with rapid acquisition and with greater signal collection efficiency opens many opportunities in the study of dynamic processes of materials.

The ability to visualize the distributions of specific proteins with a light microscope and fluorescent probes is largely responsible for our current understanding of cellular structure. A major limitation of this approach arises from the blurring effects of diffraction, which decreases resolution and limits the ability to obtain information at the nanoscale. There has been a tremendous drive to develop optical and computational methods that improve the resolution of the light microscope, and structured illumination microscopy (SIM) is one solution. This method uses patterned illumination to double both lateral and axial resolution. Nikon's N-SIM is a commercial system that integrates the most desirable features of light microscopy, specific labeling of molecules, and live cell imaging, with structured illumination. This provides the ability to achieve super resolution suitable for a range of biological applications.