Here's Today's Feel-Good Story:
Most people don't realize that science has never been able to x-ray a single atom, but that has changed.
Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois used a technique known as SX-STM (synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy) in order to do this, and they say that it paves the way for finding cures for some major life-threatening diseases, development of super-fast quantum computers and other advancements.
“Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes—but without X-rays one cannot tell what they are made of,” explained Professor Saw Wai Hla of Ohio State University, the lead author on the paper explaining the discovery. “We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom-at-a-time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state. This discovery will transform the world.”