The website, www.microscopy.org, is the public face of the Microscopy Society of America. Any viewer can quickly learn about the history of the society, the current leadership, the committees, the member benefits, and the services that the society provides.

The upcoming Microscopy & Microanalysis 2011 meeting in Nashville will include the world's largest annual exhibition of microscope equipment, supplies, and services. For most attendees, the exhibition is one of the highlights of the M&M meeting.

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

Nashville, Tennessee, will be the venue for the next Microscopy & Microanalysis meeting, August 7–11, 2011. From the famous Grand Ole Opry to the interesting historical buildings, Nashville has something for everyone.

Last November's Microscopy Today was our first special issue to focus on a single microscopy topic (scanning probe microscopy). The present issue on surface analysis is the first to have a guest editor, Vincent Smentkowski. Vincent brought me the idea of a special issue on surface analysis, and I was pleased to help him bring this topic to our readers. Many journals publish highly technical special issues, but that is not the goal here. These articles on surface analysis techniques are aimed at the general microscopist. Each article provides a brief introduction to a technique, discusses the method's capabilities, and gives a few applications.

This special issue of Microscopy Today is devoted to light microscopy. Light microscopy is microscopy that employs light as a medium, or so I thought. Every week I see “optical microscopy” used as a synonym for light microscopy. I cannot understand the popularity of this confusing term. For people outside our field, the term “optical microscopy” must be perplexing: does it mean electron optical or light optical? My point is that we should present the techniques we use in clear unambiguous language: light microscopy, electron microscopy, scanned probe microscopy, etc. Regardless of logic, there are still strong adherents to the term “optical microscopy.”

Light optical imaging techniques that don't require labels are attractive for human studies because they are not toxic nor do they perturb the system being studied. Whereas there are several methods available to provide microscopic imaging below the surface of a tissue, they each suffer from limitations, such as low spatiotemporal resolution and a limited number of molecular signatures that can be imaged. Raman spectroscopy offers label-free contrast for major chemical species in tissue, such as water, lipids, DNA, and proteins based on vibrational spectra at light optical wavelengths. However, the Raman signal is very weak, which makes it difficult to image a sample with good temporal resolution. The recent development of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy can overcome these limitations as demonstrated by the elegant studies of Brian Saar, Christian Freudiger, Jay Reichman, Michael Stanley, Gary Holton, and Sunney Xie. Saar et al. improved the optics and electronics for the acquisition of the backscattered signal of SRS. In SRS microscopy, the sample is excited by two lasers at different frequencies. When the difference in frequency matches a molecular vibration in the sample, the intensities of the probes change in a predictable manner. These intensity changes are small, but Saar et al. developed a new method to detect them. They chopped one of the laser beams at high frequency (MHz) and detected the intensity change in the other beam, which offered superior sensitivity. The key component was a custom-made all-analog lock-in amplifier with a very short (about 100 ns) response time. The laser probe wavelengths were tuned to match a vibrational frequency of interest and raster-scanned across the sample. Frequencies were tuned to detect CH2 stretching (primarily for lipids), OH stretching (primarily water), and CH3 stretching (primarily proteins) vibrations. Imaging of water is of particular interest in studying the transport of water-soluble compounds such as drugs.

Localizing specific proteins within cells, tissues, and organisms has been a goal of microscopists for generations. In the early 1990s, a breakthrough was made when a molecule originally derived from a jellyfish was introduced as a probe for fluorescence microscopy. This molecule is green fluorescent protein (GFP), and it has become well known for its usefulness in localizing proteins at the level of the light microscope. It is also well known that electron microscopy (EM) offers far superior spatial resolution over light microscopy, but the application of probes to localize specific proteins has required antibodies conjugated with colloidal metals (such as gold). Delivery of antibodies into the cell commonly requires detergents to permeabilize the cell membrane, which compromises the ultrastructural detail. Another breakthrough was recently published on-line by Xiaokun Shu, Varda Lev-Ram, Thomas Deerinck, Yingchuan Qi, Ericka Ramko, Michael Davidson, Yishi Jin, Mark Ellisman, and Roger Tsien: they have developed a method similar to using GFP for light microscopy, but for specifically tagging proteins at the EM level.

Of the winged insects, adults have one or two pairs of wings. During the past 250 million years of insect evolution, there have been no exceptions to this. In a fascinating study, Benjamin Prud'homme, Caroline Minervino, Mélanie Hocine, Jessica Cande, Aïcha Aouane, Héloïse Dufour, Victoria Kassner, and Nicolas Gompel may have found something resembling an exception.

Since transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was developed about 80 years ago, numerous strategies have been attempted to visualize living cells at high resolution. The harsh environment within the TEM (mostly the vacuum and damage from a fixed beam of electrons) presents challenges. Some approaches have been to fabricate chambers within the TEM that provide a more “friendly” environment for living cells (that is, less stringent vacuum), but they have limitations. Impressive images have been generated with various cryogenic techniques, but frozen cells are not alive or in their native state in the traditional sense. Nihar Mohanty, Monica Fahrenholtz, Ashvin Nagaraja, Daniel Boyle, and Vikas Berry have developed an ingenious solution to the problem by “wrapping” cells with modified graphene.

Fluorescence microscopy can be used to study certain single molecules in solution or attached to a surface. Two conflicting challenges to overcome are: (1) to image freely moving molecules for long times and (2) to image immobilized single molecules when there is a highly fluorescent background. The fact that these two goals are inversely related is illustrated by epifluorescence, which is good for observing freely diffusing molecules but poor for detecting single molecules, whereas the reverse is true for zero-mode waveguides. Plus, these and other techniques require elaborate (read: expensive) equipment with computerized controls. Sabrina Leslie, Alexander Fields, and Adam Cohen have developed an ingenious (relatively) simple technique that can image freely moving single molecules.

Fluorescence microscopy is an essential and flexible tool for the study of biology, chemistry, and physics. It can provide information on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. However, since the inception of light microscopy, diffraction has limited the size of the smallest details that could be imaged in any sample using light. Because much of biology occurs on molecular length scales, interest in circumventing the diffraction limit has been high for many years. Recently, several techniques have been introduced that can bend or break the diffraction limit. Localization-based methods introduced in 2006 have reached this goal and are now rapidly growing in popularity.

A number of proposed technologies involve the controlled implementation of biologically induced carbonate mineral precipitation in the geologic subsurface. Examples include the enhancement of soil stability, immobilization of groundwater contaminants such as strontium and uranium, and the enhancement of oil recovery and geologic carbon sequestration via controlled permeability reduction. The most significant challenge in these technologies remains to identify and better understand an industrially, environmentally, and economically viable carbonate precipitation route.

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is one of the most powerful and dynamic methods for performing nanoscale imaging and materials characterization, enabling scientists and researchers to attain atomic resolution and measure nano-mechanical material properties in-situ, all while requiring minimal sample preparation. In spite of these clear advantages, user adoption of AFM has been limited by the technique's slow imaging speed as compared to light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). However, recent advances in AFM technology have increased AFM imaging speeds by over an order of magnitude, opening up a wide range of new applications while greatly improving the user experience.

In the animal kingdom, eyes come in a relatively small variety of functional forms. When a new optical system is found, it usually is a variation of a known form. It is very rare to discover a novel form of an eye. Such a sensational discovery has been made by Annette Stowasser, Alexandra Rapaport, John Layne, Randy Morgan, and Elke Buschbeck. Using two different experimental approaches, they demonstrated an eye with a truly bifocal lens, something that has only been suggested for certain long-extinct trilobites

In his now-famous 1959 speech on nanotechnology, Richard Feynman proposed that it should be possible to see the individual atoms in a material, if only the electron microscope could be made 100 times better. With the development of aberration correctors on transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) over the last decade, this dream of microscopists to directly image structures atom-by-atom has come close to an everyday reality. Figure 1 shows such a high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HR-TEM) image of a single-wall carbon nanotube obtained with an aberration-corrected TEM. Now that atomic-resolution images have become possible with aberration-corrector technology in both TEM and STEM, we can ask ourselves if we truly have achieved the goal of seeing individual atoms. Most aberration-corrected images exhibiting atomic resolution are not distinguishing individual atoms, but columns of a small number of atoms, so despite this remarkable achievement, there is still “plenty of room at the bottom” in order to move toward seeing, counting, and quantifying individual atoms. In fact, there never has been a more exciting time for electron microscopists.