When you read the header to this article, you probably thought I made a mistake. Doesn't he mean atomic force microscope, the familiar AFM? And isn't that microscope in our present, not in our future? Well, I'm not confused. The reference is to a beam of atoms that some day may be used in an atomic microscope, just like a beam of electrons is used in an electron microscope. It would be even more accurate to refer to an “atomic de Broglie microscope,” but that's a rather awkward label.

This article is the third of a series transcribed from the discussion taped during the Facility Management session at M&M 2000. it is printed with permission of the Microscopy Society of America, Bulleted paragraphs indicate comments by individuals attending the session.

D. Sherman: I am sure that there are many different schemes to try to recoup some costs in facilities we manage. Probably very few of us are really happy with the schemes we have at present. Hopefully this discussion will provide us with information that will be useful in refining the financial management of our different facilities.

This article is the final of a 4-part series transcribed from the discussion taped during the Facility Management session at M&M 2000. It is printed with permission of the Microscopy Society of America. Bulleted paragraphs indicate comments by individuals attending the session.

To get back to billing and cost recovery, one of the problems we continually face in our lab is that people can come through the door with any kind of problem under the face of the earth. We are wide open to any sort of EM research. This entails an awful lot of protocol development.

Project MICRO (Microscopy in Curriculum - Research Outreach) is an initiative by the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) to connect scientists with middle school teachers in an effort to introduce young students to the scientific method. Through a collaboration with the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley, a teacher's manual was produced as part of the LHS GEMS (Great Explorations in Math and Science) series. This manual, entitled “Microscopic Explorations”, can be used by scientists and middle school teachers alike to prepare a Project MICRO “Festival” to be presented in the classroom. Detailed information concerning Project MICRO in general, and the Microscopic Explorations manual can be obtained from the Project MICRO web page from MSA (http://www.msa.microscopy.com/ProjectMicro/PMHomePage.html).

The advent of the Internet has allowed the development of remote access capabilities to a growing variety of microscopy systems. The Materials MicroCharacterization Collaboratory, for example, has developed an impressive facility that provides remote access to a number of highly sophisticated microscopy and microanalysis instruments, While certain types of microscopes, such as scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopes, scanning probe microscopes, and others have already been established for telepresence microscopy, no one has yet reported on the development of similar capabilities for the confocal laser scanning microscope.

Bugscope is a second generation educational project in the World Wide Laboratory that provides web browser based control of scientific imaging instrumentation using the Internet. We had previously demonstrated web based remote access to sophisticated scientific imaging systems several years ago in the Chickscope project. The primary goal of the Bugscope project is to demonstrate that relatively low cost, sustainable access to an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) can be made available to K-12 classrooms.

On the Microscopy ListServer, a thread came up about problems with safety when loading cold traps from ladders. Working from a ladder is not a very safe proposition and being up there with a Dewar full of liquid nitrogen brings the safety officer to attention.

An alternative to trying to climb a ladder with a Dewar flask and pour the liquid nitrogen into the trap would be to have a pump for the liquid nitrogen in a Dewar flask on the ground that could be controlled from the top of a ladder.

We do this two different ways, using polyethylene (PE) molds or aluminum weigh boats, depending on the sample, You can either heat- or UV-cure these molds-just change the type of “lid” on the embedding mold.

The PE molds are used when the coverslip can be made to fit in the mold. We use JB-4-type molds, available from your favorite microscopy supplier. The key to using these molds is that they have to be pre-treated...fill the inner cup of the mold with LR White, cover with an aluminum JB-4 chuck (try to have enough resin in the mold to come up around the base of the chuck), and polymerize in a 60° C oven for a day or two, until the resin is hard.

I did serial sectioning for years on large single hole grids using a very simple technique that made the potential problems of film thickness, wrinkles and section loss very minor. I was not the original developer of the method and do not remember who originally gave it to me. It goes as follows:

• 1) Have your machine shop cut some thin pieces of Plexiglas into the size of glass slides. At one end, drill about a dozen holes, roughly 5 mm in diameter, in an area about the size of a formvar film cast on glass slides. These slides will serve as your template for holding your films.

Chasing sources of vibration seems to be a never-ending problem in microscopy. Here are the approaches we've taken to two different sources of vibration affecting our Hitachi S-800 FESEM. One of the first problems was with a window air conditioning unit in the room that was needed to augment our so called central system. The existing window unit vibrated the window, walls, and floor. One solution may have been to buy a split unit so that the compressor was outdoors, but there was a moratorium on buying new air conditioning units