Costa Rica is amazing. You probably know that Costa Rica has no armed forces and that fully a quarter of its area is given over to national parks and other protected areas. You probably don't know that Costa Rica is also amazing for its electron microscopy. Almost anonymously Costa Rica has a center for electron microscopy on a par with centers in the United States or Europe.

El Centro de Investigation en Estructuras Microscopicas, CIEMIC (The Center for Microstructural Research) has its own purpose-built building with an infrastructure that would make most of us envious.

October 2005 marks 50 years since the first images achieving atomic resolution were obtained by Erwin Miiller and Kanwar Bahadur at the Pennsylvania State University using field ion microscopy. An image from that seminal work is shown in Figure 1. Two separate meetings were held this year to commemorate this important event in the history of microscopy; the 50th Anniversary of Atomic Resolution Microscopy, held June 15-17, 2005 at Penn State and the Golden Anniversary of Atomic Resolution Imaging, a symposium at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2005 in Honolulu held July 31 to August 4, 2005. These celebrations were timed to coincide also with the World Year of Physics 2005 http://www. wyp2005.org/.

Since we do a lot of small-sample critical-point drying (CPD) for SEM, we assemble our own drying capsules which can be manufactured easily in quantity. Materials' cost at current prices is about $10 for 50 capsules. About 25 capsules can be manufactured in an hour. The completed capsule consists of a small polypropylene chamber with fine-mesh, stainless-steel screen caps at each end that allow easy exchange of solvents. shows the steps ofthe assembly process. The base of one capsule is cut off with a razor blade, the cap of a second capsule, for a bottom (Figure 1a). Chamber length can be 5 to 14mm. One-quarter-inch holes are punched through the center of each cap using a paper punch whose spring/detente has been removed to pass the caps' rim (Figure 1b). A sheet-metal shim punch is used to create 3/8" disks of 60-mesh stainless steel wire cloth.

Raman spectroscopy, much like the more familiar infrared spectroscopy, reveals chemical information of materials under investigation as a result of molecular vibrations. The result of these techniques, the spectrum, is a chemical "fingerprint" allowing for material identification. While infrared microscopy is well known and well established in the industrial laboratory setting, Raman microscopy has only recently begun a resurgence as a result of technological advances. These include advances in lasers, optical filters (notch filters), and CCD detector technologies.

As you ease the bell jar back down onto its seat, past the evaporation fixture, it is quite easy to chip a $600 jar. Chipped bell jars are a perennial problem in EM labs. They degrade vacuum in evaporators resulting in lower quality films and ultimately shorten the life of the vacuum system. This note describes a new resin that I have used for repairing bell jar chips.

A common chip can be seen in Fig. 1. It was caused by crashing the bell jar into the evaporation fixture. The chip is less than 0.5mm deep. Beside it you can see another chip that will not be treated as it does not extend to the jar edge.

How do you give 1150 undergraduates in an introductory cell biology course (Biology 200) access to electron microscopes? Students often ask if they can see the electron microscopes. They often ask if they will have an opportunity to learn EM. As part of the course material, students are expected to recognize the images produced by different EM techniques, know the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques and interpret 2-dimensional micrographs in 3 dimensions. This is akin to teaching the theory of baking bread without ever smelling it in the oven. A pilot project was designed to address getting round the impossibility of bringing 1150+ students into the BioImaging Facility. This initiative gave selected undergraduates a hands-on experience of SEM in the BioImaging Facility and allowed the rest of their classmates to share that experience.

For people in a small EM lab, keeping stable stain solutions that don't accumulate precipitates over time can be a problem. Over the last 26 years, I have adapted the method originally described by Venable and Coggeshall (1) to address this need

Because of the high cost of Polaroid film, many years ago we fitted our Hitachi S-450 scanning electron microscope with a 35 mm camera. At that time, we used a Pentax ME Super, which was totally manual and had to have the film advanced by a hand lever. This was an annoyance, but when we set up the system, Polaroid Type 55 film was about $2.00 per photo, and the cost of 35 mm spooled in our lab ran about $.10 per photo.

When we traded the Hitachi S-450 for the later Hitachi S-570, we moved the 35 mm system to this microscope. About 1999, when the Pentax ZX-50 with motorized film advance became available, we adapted it to the S-570, using the Pentax electric shutter release. The lens used with both of these cameras was an elderly 50 mm screw-mount Pentax Macro lens that focused well on the CRT of the SEM.