Single atom imaging by TEM

From the cover of this week's issue of Nature, Meyer, et al show that TEM can be used to image individual atoms and molecules with high resolution if it is done against a graphene background. The video above is from the supplementary material, showing a single carbon chain suspended between two pieces of junk. It's a bit amusing that some of their most interesting data, showing carbon chains and polymers, is basically due to "vacuum contaimation", aka, crap in the chamber. But, it's interesting nonetheless. Admittedly, this has little to do with biology, and is unlikely to be very useful for biology because of the need to do it in vacuum. But it could be used to study fundamental polymer dynamics in interesting ways. Anyway, I just thought it was cool and worth mentioning.