Seeing is believing. So goes the old adage. Seen evidence is undoubtedly satisfying because it can be interpreted easily, though not always correctly. For centuries, to improve their ability to see things, humans have developed such instruments as telescopes that observe the heavens and microscopes that reveal bacteria and viruses. The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner for their foundational work on superresolution fluorescence microscopy in which they overcame the Abbe diffraction limit for the resolving power of conventional light microscopes. (See Physics Today, December 2014, page 18.) That breakthrough enabled discoveries in biological research and testifies to the importance of modern microscopy.
In February 2014 the US Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences held a two-day workshop that brought together experts from various fields to identify advances in electron microscopy that would facilitate new science.1...
