7 ms·

A record-breaking microscope

85 points by moh_maya 8y ago

breadAndWater 8y ago
The basic principle of the technique was proposed almost 50 years ago by the physicist Walter Hoppe, who reasoned that there should be enough information in the diffraction data to work backwards to produce an image of the diffracting object. This kind of statement just absolutely cracks me up, because it's a clear reveal that between this sort of awareness of diffraction principles, and concepts like pilot wave theory, that double slit experiments and entanglement haven't been mysterious for decades. It's all just media manipulation. There are very firmly understood concepts backing all the mechanics of quantum effects, and the journalists that push the ambiguities are simply trolling would-be amateurs for to fan the flames of confusion as a sort of outsider performance art.
- lixtra 8y ago
  > It's all just media manipulation. Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. [Hanlon]
  - colordrops 8y ago
    Thank you, for once Hanlon's razor is used properly.
    - modells 8y ago
      I’d say 97%+ is either DGAF, forgetting, emergencies or needs a fire under their posterior. In that 3% though are outliers like sales clerk fabricating a story and SWATing/making-up an unspecified allegation against you because they didn’t like “losing” when it came to them inventing roadblocks to complete a routine retail return. Because they’re a chick, nothing happens to them for you being interrogated at gunpoint and possibly arrested or shot by a six-pack of the fearful blue mafia, it’s all good.
  - kurthr 8y ago
    Actually, I don't think it's stupidity... it's greed. Telling stories that sound good is unrelated to truth, but declaring them science or news (when you don't know) is deceptive.
  - amelius 8y ago
    The problem with this razor is that malicious people will happily incorporate it into their evil plans.
- jarfil 8y ago
  Nice try, but attempting to blame journalists won't make us forget about the Illuminati and lizard people.
  - breadAndWater 8y ago
    Wake up sheeple!
- ISL 8y ago
  There is enough information, should one be able to retain the phase; getting it from intensity is much more challenging. I'm familiar with the work of one of the authors; he is a world expert on diffraction inverse problems in physical context. From a quick skim of the paper, it would appear that they're simply being careful and clever.
- carapace 8y ago
  I'm just reading "What is Real?" by Adam Becker (a history of QM published this year) and boy do the Copenhagenists look foolish. Even Bohr comes off as a saintly buffoon. With experimental confirmation that the universe is non-local and "spooky action at a distance" is real, the pilot wave theory "wins" and there's no measurement problem. (It isn't journalists though, it's the physicists themselves that muddied the waters by permitting herd mentality to overwhelm science. Also, von Neumann got a proof wrong! Folks can be forgiven for not suspecting that. But once it was noticed then the "orthodoxy" should have paid attention.)
  - Luc 8y ago
    “What Is Real” is an opinionated book, to put it mildly.
    - carapace 8y ago
      No doubt. But the facts of which the opinions are held are pretty staggering. Von Neumann got a proof wrong in his textbook on QM. Grete Hermann found the error in 1935 and nobody noticed. De Broglie presented a "pilot wave" theory at the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. Einstein kept pointing out the problem with non-locality and everybody thought he was getting old and foggy. Physics is hella tribal. Physics. I took the Copenhagen metaphysics pretty seriously. It's so neat and elegant to confound the mystery of quantum wave-function collapse with the mystery of subjective experience. The "observer-created Universe" and all that. It's very disturbing to realize that it's basically metaphysical bunk. It's just staggering. But never mind all that! The Universe is non-local! *And yet-- Relativity!" Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but wave collapse does, so this is going to be some awesome physics!
- moh_maya 8y ago
  I'm not sure I completely understand your comment. Are you suggesting this is not a significant advance in the field? I am not an EM expert; but the fact that its been through peer review & gotten published in Nature seems to suggest scientists in the field think it is a significant advance. And from what I do know of microscopy, it is still not trivial to image (sub?) atomic size structures. Extending the quoted paragraph: "The basic principle of the technique was proposed almost 50 years ago by the physicist Walter Hoppe, who reasoned that there should be enough information in the diffraction data to work backwards to produce an image of the diffracting object. However, it was many years before computer algorithms were developed that could do this reverse calculation easily and reliably. The pictures produced by ptychographic methods are generated using a computer from a vast amount of indirect scattering data." The news & views article does not claim that this is a basic sciences advance; they are claiming its an engineering / methodology / procedural advance. And those are as important, IMO. Unless you are suggesting that, once the basic sciences are known, any engineering advance is trivial. If so, then you & I have very a different impression of how easy / difficult it is to build new "things" :)
  - breadAndWater 8y ago
    None of the things you've mentioned are anything close to what I'm bringing up. The point I'm making is that popular discussion of quantum effects are so wildly off-base, and have muddied the waters of even trying to understand what happens between photons and electrons, by casually reading about it. But you see something like this emerge, and it's really obvious that solutions to these problems were on the right track even as far back as the early 1900's, only to be derailed by academics emerging in the 1940's. Principles such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi... had it right very early. So, was there an ulterior motive to all the complex obfuscation of math, and inaccurate scientific reporting throughout the later 20th century? Or has it all been one big, innocent misunderstanding, among aloof egg heads distracted by their gigantic precious particle colliders? One wonders.
    - moh_maya 8y ago
      Ah; thank you for the reply; I understand what you were trying to say. I'll leave my original comment in place for context for other readers. :)
kjeetgill 8y ago
> Remarkably, Jiang et al. gave themselves a huge handicap with regard to beating the resolution record. For any given microscope lens, the best resolution is achieved by using the shortest possible wavelength of the radiation or electron beams concerned. However, the authors used relatively low-energy electrons, which have twice the wavelength of those used in the highest-resolution lens-based microscopes9,10. Using low-energy electrons for microscopy is good because it greatly reduces the damage inflicted on the specimen by the electrons. But in this case, it also meant that the resolution of the lens used by Jiang and colleagues was reduced by a factor of two. To beat the resolution record, the authors had to process a particular subset of the ptychographic diffraction data (the high-angle data), thereby obtaining an image with a resolution 2.5 times better than would otherwise have been possible. Nice. It looks like this is a fresh gateway breakthrough with low hanging fruit on the other side. It's always exciting when it's not just eeking out a small increment gains blown up by University Press.
perl4ever 8y ago
What I want to know is, on the sample image of molybdenum disulfide (b), there is one atom on the right near the vertical center, that is noticeably dimmer than the rest. What could account for that?
- brian-armstrong 8y ago
  Maybe that one was less reflective than the others?
  - edejong 8y ago
    Pro tip: always polish the atoms when you make record breaking pictures of them.
- albutr 8y ago
  It's a chalcogen vacancy, a very common type of defect in these materials. These materials are called transition metal dichacogenides, so they have the form MX2, where M is a metal (most commonly Mo or W) and X is a chalcogen (typically S or Se). In this case, there is an S missing, but you still see a spot because there is another S below it (if you look at the crystal structure, it resembles graphene but has more complex structure in the third dimension, its 3 atoms thick rather than being flat, with the two chalcogens in the unit cell right on top of each other).
anonytrary 8y ago
Does anyone else here get slightly annoyed when Nature articles are shared here? It would be nice if there was a bot that tried to find a mirror/alternative source to the same paper. There's something incredibly disappointing and frustrating about paywalled scientific research.
- albutr 8y ago
  Here you go: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04630 https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04630 they revised the title slightly between this and the real publication, but it's the same pub
- olh 8y ago
  I will tell you what you can't do in those situations do not copy the DOI (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0298-5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0298-5) do not go to sci-hub (https://sci-hub.tw https://sci-hub.tw) and finally do not paste the DOI there to get the article
- JadeNB 8y ago
  > There's something incredibly disappointing and frustrating about paywalled scientific research. Yes, there's a lot that's incredibly disappointing and frustrating—but is the solution to that not even to point to it? If you're interested enough, you can do whatever searches a bot would do (or build the bot yourself to do the searches).
1hackaday 8y ago
When the tomography method is well developed, couldn’t this be use to scan the neural structure of a live brain? (i.e., to upload a brain)
- trentlott 8y ago
  It wouldn't work well at deep depths because it's interacting with the electron shell. After a few nanometer or two of tissue you'd have no signal. If you'd figured out a way to put a brain in the microscope. They tend to want samples in a vacuum, a few cm square and no more than a few mm thick including the sample mount. You'd have to use something like neutrons, which don't interact with electrons and can be used to image internal structure. Those tend to have side-effects, though, like inducing radioactive decay in nuclei.
  - throwawaysrs3 8y ago
    You seem to know about this stuff. All day every day literally at least 40 identifiable wifi signals pass straight through my brain (I'm in an apartment building) just at the moment there are at least 5. If we assume the same amount of radiation can pass through a subject without damage, then how much information is recoverable if you had lots of very expensive scanning equipment around the head? (I mean from specifically gigahertz, i.e. Wifi, range signals). I mean surely it's not 0, but is it the sort of thing that if the same subject were sitting in a chair for 1,000 hours, then a quite lossy picture of neural interconnects could be had? (Over a period of months.) Most people wake up every day more or less the same, with the same reasoning capabilities (barring a few things they learned the previous day, or dreamt about in their sleep), lots of neurons die, it's a pretty lossy little neural net, so I don't think it needs that much fidelity and I think it's no problem if the same subject sits in for months and months. though you talk about the method mentioned by the article, the article mentions that the resolution this gets down to is 0.39 ångströms. The cell body of a neuron is across 1,000,000 ångströms across. far less fidelity is needed. so I'm curious about whether any information is recoverable from wifi-range scanning, and what would happen if you scanned the same subject for thousands of hours over the course of months.
- deleted 8y ago
modells 8y ago
In the not too near future, a crotchety, graying Louis Rossmann will be repairing MEMS at the atom level on HoloTube while under lawsuit from Mom Corp. regarding right-to-repair and complaining alternately about his prostate and colon.

85 points by moh_maya 8y ago

The basic principle of the technique was proposed almost 50 years ago by the physicist Walter Hoppe, who reasoned that there should be enough information in the diffraction data to work backwards to produce an image of the diffracting object. This kind of statement just absolutely cracks me up, because it's a clear reveal that between this sort of awareness of diffraction principles, and concepts like pilot wave theory, that double slit experiments and entanglement haven't been mysterious for decades. It's all just media manipulation. There are very firmly understood concepts backing all the mechanics of quantum effects, and the journalists that push the ambiguities are simply trolling would-be amateurs for to fan the flames of confusion as a sort of outsider performance art.

lixtra 8y ago
> It's all just media manipulation. Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. [Hanlon]
- colordrops 8y ago
  Thank you, for once Hanlon's razor is used properly.
  - modells 8y ago
    I’d say 97%+ is either DGAF, forgetting, emergencies or needs a fire under their posterior. In that 3% though are outliers like sales clerk fabricating a story and SWATing/making-up an unspecified allegation against you because they didn’t like “losing” when it came to them inventing roadblocks to complete a routine retail return. Because they’re a chick, nothing happens to them for you being interrogated at gunpoint and possibly arrested or shot by a six-pack of the fearful blue mafia, it’s all good.
- kurthr 8y ago
  Actually, I don't think it's stupidity... it's greed. Telling stories that sound good is unrelated to truth, but declaring them science or news (when you don't know) is deceptive.
- amelius 8y ago
  The problem with this razor is that malicious people will happily incorporate it into their evil plans.
jarfil 8y ago
Nice try, but attempting to blame journalists won't make us forget about the Illuminati and lizard people.
- breadAndWater 8y ago
  Wake up sheeple!
ISL 8y ago
There is enough information, should one be able to retain the phase; getting it from intensity is much more challenging. I'm familiar with the work of one of the authors; he is a world expert on diffraction inverse problems in physical context. From a quick skim of the paper, it would appear that they're simply being careful and clever.
carapace 8y ago
I'm just reading "What is Real?" by Adam Becker (a history of QM published this year) and boy do the Copenhagenists look foolish. Even Bohr comes off as a saintly buffoon. With experimental confirmation that the universe is non-local and "spooky action at a distance" is real, the pilot wave theory "wins" and there's no measurement problem. (It isn't journalists though, it's the physicists themselves that muddied the waters by permitting herd mentality to overwhelm science. Also, von Neumann got a proof wrong! Folks can be forgiven for not suspecting that. But once it was noticed then the "orthodoxy" should have paid attention.)
- Luc 8y ago
  “What Is Real” is an opinionated book, to put it mildly.
  - carapace 8y ago
    No doubt. But the facts of which the opinions are held are pretty staggering. Von Neumann got a proof wrong in his textbook on QM. Grete Hermann found the error in 1935 and nobody noticed. De Broglie presented a "pilot wave" theory at the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. Einstein kept pointing out the problem with non-locality and everybody thought he was getting old and foggy. Physics is hella tribal. Physics. I took the Copenhagen metaphysics pretty seriously. It's so neat and elegant to confound the mystery of quantum wave-function collapse with the mystery of subjective experience. The "observer-created Universe" and all that. It's very disturbing to realize that it's basically metaphysical bunk. It's just staggering. But never mind all that! The Universe is non-local! *And yet-- Relativity!" Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but wave collapse does, so this is going to be some awesome physics!
moh_maya 8y ago
I'm not sure I completely understand your comment. Are you suggesting this is not a significant advance in the field? I am not an EM expert; but the fact that its been through peer review & gotten published in Nature seems to suggest scientists in the field think it is a significant advance. And from what I do know of microscopy, it is still not trivial to image (sub?) atomic size structures. Extending the quoted paragraph: "The basic principle of the technique was proposed almost 50 years ago by the physicist Walter Hoppe, who reasoned that there should be enough information in the diffraction data to work backwards to produce an image of the diffracting object. However, it was many years before computer algorithms were developed that could do this reverse calculation easily and reliably. The pictures produced by ptychographic methods are generated using a computer from a vast amount of indirect scattering data." The news & views article does not claim that this is a basic sciences advance; they are claiming its an engineering / methodology / procedural advance. And those are as important, IMO. Unless you are suggesting that, once the basic sciences are known, any engineering advance is trivial. If so, then you & I have very a different impression of how easy / difficult it is to build new "things" :)
- breadAndWater 8y ago
  None of the things you've mentioned are anything close to what I'm bringing up. The point I'm making is that popular discussion of quantum effects are so wildly off-base, and have muddied the waters of even trying to understand what happens between photons and electrons, by casually reading about it. But you see something like this emerge, and it's really obvious that solutions to these problems were on the right track even as far back as the early 1900's, only to be derailed by academics emerging in the 1940's. Principles such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi... had it right very early. So, was there an ulterior motive to all the complex obfuscation of math, and inaccurate scientific reporting throughout the later 20th century? Or has it all been one big, innocent misunderstanding, among aloof egg heads distracted by their gigantic precious particle colliders? One wonders.
  - moh_maya 8y ago
    Ah; thank you for the reply; I understand what you were trying to say. I'll leave my original comment in place for context for other readers. :)

kjeetgill 8y ago

> Remarkably, Jiang et al. gave themselves a huge handicap with regard to beating the resolution record. For any given microscope lens, the best resolution is achieved by using the shortest possible wavelength of the radiation or electron beams concerned. However, the authors used relatively low-energy electrons, which have twice the wavelength of those used in the highest-resolution lens-based microscopes9,10. Using low-energy electrons for microscopy is good because it greatly reduces the damage inflicted on the specimen by the electrons. But in this case, it also meant that the resolution of the lens used by Jiang and colleagues was reduced by a factor of two. To beat the resolution record, the authors had to process a particular subset of the ptychographic diffraction data (the high-angle data), thereby obtaining an image with a resolution 2.5 times better than would otherwise have been possible. Nice. It looks like this is a fresh gateway breakthrough with low hanging fruit on the other side. It's always exciting when it's not just eeking out a small increment gains blown up by University Press.

perl4ever 8y ago

What I want to know is, on the sample image of molybdenum disulfide (b), there is one atom on the right near the vertical center, that is noticeably dimmer than the rest. What could account for that?

brian-armstrong 8y ago
Maybe that one was less reflective than the others?
- edejong 8y ago
  Pro tip: always polish the atoms when you make record breaking pictures of them.
albutr 8y ago
It's a chalcogen vacancy, a very common type of defect in these materials. These materials are called transition metal dichacogenides, so they have the form MX2, where M is a metal (most commonly Mo or W) and X is a chalcogen (typically S or Se). In this case, there is an S missing, but you still see a spot because there is another S below it (if you look at the crystal structure, it resembles graphene but has more complex structure in the third dimension, its 3 atoms thick rather than being flat, with the two chalcogens in the unit cell right on top of each other).

anonytrary 8y ago

Does anyone else here get slightly annoyed when Nature articles are shared here? It would be nice if there was a bot that tried to find a mirror/alternative source to the same paper. There's something incredibly disappointing and frustrating about paywalled scientific research.

albutr 8y ago
Here you go: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04630 https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04630 they revised the title slightly between this and the real publication, but it's the same pub
olh 8y ago
I will tell you what you can't do in those situations do not copy the DOI (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0298-5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0298-5) do not go to sci-hub (https://sci-hub.tw https://sci-hub.tw) and finally do not paste the DOI there to get the article
JadeNB 8y ago
> There's something incredibly disappointing and frustrating about paywalled scientific research. Yes, there's a lot that's incredibly disappointing and frustrating—but is the solution to that not even to point to it? If you're interested enough, you can do whatever searches a bot would do (or build the bot yourself to do the searches).

1hackaday 8y ago

When the tomography method is well developed, couldn’t this be use to scan the neural structure of a live brain? (i.e., to upload a brain)

trentlott 8y ago
It wouldn't work well at deep depths because it's interacting with the electron shell. After a few nanometer or two of tissue you'd have no signal. If you'd figured out a way to put a brain in the microscope. They tend to want samples in a vacuum, a few cm square and no more than a few mm thick including the sample mount. You'd have to use something like neutrons, which don't interact with electrons and can be used to image internal structure. Those tend to have side-effects, though, like inducing radioactive decay in nuclei.
- throwawaysrs3 8y ago
  You seem to know about this stuff. All day every day literally at least 40 identifiable wifi signals pass straight through my brain (I'm in an apartment building) just at the moment there are at least 5. If we assume the same amount of radiation can pass through a subject without damage, then how much information is recoverable if you had lots of very expensive scanning equipment around the head? (I mean from specifically gigahertz, i.e. Wifi, range signals). I mean surely it's not 0, but is it the sort of thing that if the same subject were sitting in a chair for 1,000 hours, then a quite lossy picture of neural interconnects could be had? (Over a period of months.) Most people wake up every day more or less the same, with the same reasoning capabilities (barring a few things they learned the previous day, or dreamt about in their sleep), lots of neurons die, it's a pretty lossy little neural net, so I don't think it needs that much fidelity and I think it's no problem if the same subject sits in for months and months. though you talk about the method mentioned by the article, the article mentions that the resolution this gets down to is 0.39 ångströms. The cell body of a neuron is across 1,000,000 ångströms across. far less fidelity is needed. so I'm curious about whether any information is recoverable from wifi-range scanning, and what would happen if you scanned the same subject for thousands of hours over the course of months.
deleted 8y ago

modells 8y ago

In the not too near future, a crotchety, graying Louis Rossmann will be repairing MEMS at the atom level on HoloTube while under lawsuit from Mom Corp. regarding right-to-repair and complaining alternately about his prostate and colon.