#electron-microscope — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #electron-microscope, aggregated by home.social.
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“Barbarians at the gate”*…
Times have changed. As the New York Times reports (in a piece apposite to Tuesday’s post)…
When Google prepared to go public in 2004, Larry Page, a co-founder of the company, wrote a letter to shareholders describing the internet firm’s responsibility to the world.
“We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr. Page said.
Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” — the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities and others — for more information. In the ensuing decades, Google became one of the planet’s richest and most powerful companies by directing people to the vastness of the open web.
Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.
Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot. Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. “agents” to run searches for them.
The effect of these moves is becoming clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever…
… and spending less time with the sites that supply the information Google’s AI returns. Stephen Follows unpacks one web site’s experience– a cautionary tale for the open web and a reminder that, if we kill the sites generating the answers on which we depend, they won’t be there for anyone (directly or via AI) to find…
If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.
Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.
And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year.
On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.
The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.
With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does – with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.
One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:
We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, ‘Where’s this page that you used to have and you don’t have anymore?’
Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet…
[Follows recounts the history of The Numbers: its launch on Geocities, its growth, the onslaught of robots, the attack of hackers, and the coming of the LLMs and their relentless scraping…
… How bad could [AI bot scraping] be? Pretty bad, tbh. Enough that site owners such as Bruce have to question the value of something that will take so much time and money to build and defend.
Cloudflare, which protects a huge share of the world’s websites, publishes data on how many pages each AI platform crawls for every one visitor it sends back to the websites it crawled.
Google crawls about five pages for every visitor it sends you. OpenAI crawls over 1,000. Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor it refers.
Note that the scale is logarithmic, i.e. each step along the bottom is ten times bigger than the last, because otherwise the differences are quite literally too large for me to include on one chart.For the history of the internet to date, the principle of the open web was that, in return for letting the search engine robots read your site, they would send you readers. But now, that trade no longer applies. The number of robots has exploded, and they no longer send anyone back.
When this firehose is aimed at a small site, it can inflate the bandwidth bill and possibly even take down an entire site…
[Follows looks at other sites, including Wikipedia, in similar straights, and at attempts to protect these sites…]
… Whether any of this works depends on whether the AI companies play along rather than route around it. But as Bruce put it to me, somebody has to try.
Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.
A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.
Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.
Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.
Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.
The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.
The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing…
AI is eating our seed corn: “What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all,” from @stephenfollows.com.
(Image at top: source)
* idiom
###
As we conserve our culture, we might spare a thought for Vladimir Zworykin; he died on this date in 1982. An engineer and inventor, he is considered “the father of television” (or at least one of them). At the dawn of radio broadcasting, Zworykin began developing a system for transmitting sound and pictures. Other inventors were using a motorized, mechanical scanning system with rotating disks capable of a picture about one inch square– bulky, heavy, and impractical for home use. Zworykin, at Westinghouse, instead developed an electronic scanning television system using cathode-ray tubes; his innovations– among them, the iconoscope (the forerunner of the television camera) and the kinescope (which allowed the transfer of video to film)– laid the technical foundation for television as we came to know it… and contributed to the development of the electron microscope.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #broadcasting #culture #electronMicroscope #history #Internet #openWeb #Science #society #StephenFollows #Technology #television #TheNumbers #VladimirZworykin -
“Barbarians at the gate”*…
Times have changed. As the New York Times reports (in a piece apposite to Tuesday’s post)…
When Google prepared to go public in 2004, Larry Page, a co-founder of the company, wrote a letter to shareholders describing the internet firm’s responsibility to the world.
“We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr. Page said.
Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” — the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities and others — for more information. In the ensuing decades, Google became one of the planet’s richest and most powerful companies by directing people to the vastness of the open web.
Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.
Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot. Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. “agents” to run searches for them.
The effect of these moves is becoming clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever…
… and spending less time with the sites that supply the information Google’s AI returns. Stephen Follows unpacks one web site’s experience– a cautionary tale for the open web and a reminder that, if we kill the sites generating the answers on which we depend, they won’t be there for anyone (directly or via AI) to find…
If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.
Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.
And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year.
On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.
The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.
With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does – with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.
One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:
We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, ‘Where’s this page that you used to have and you don’t have anymore?’
Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet…
[Follows recounts the history of The Numbers: its launch on Geocities, its growth, the onslaught of robots, the attack of hackers, and the coming of the LLMs and their relentless scraping…
… How bad could [AI bot scraping] be? Pretty bad, tbh. Enough that site owners such as Bruce have to question the value of something that will take so much time and money to build and defend.
Cloudflare, which protects a huge share of the world’s websites, publishes data on how many pages each AI platform crawls for every one visitor it sends back to the websites it crawled.
Google crawls about five pages for every visitor it sends you. OpenAI crawls over 1,000. Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor it refers.
Note that the scale is logarithmic, i.e. each step along the bottom is ten times bigger than the last, because otherwise the differences are quite literally too large for me to include on one chart.For the history of the internet to date, the principle of the open web was that, in return for letting the search engine robots read your site, they would send you readers. But now, that trade no longer applies. The number of robots has exploded, and they no longer send anyone back.
When this firehose is aimed at a small site, it can inflate the bandwidth bill and possibly even take down an entire site…
[Follows looks at other sites, including Wikipedia, in similar straights, and at attempts to protect these sites…]
… Whether any of this works depends on whether the AI companies play along rather than route around it. But as Bruce put it to me, somebody has to try.
Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.
A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.
Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.
Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.
Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.
The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.
The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing…
AI is eating our seed corn: “What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all,” from @stephenfollows.com.
(Image at top: source)
* idiom
###
As we conserve our culture, we might spare a thought for Vladimir Zworykin; he died on this date in 1982. An engineer and inventor, he is considered “the father of television” (or at least one of them). At the dawn of radio broadcasting, Zworykin began developing a system for transmitting sound and pictures. Other inventors were using a motorized, mechanical scanning system with rotating disks capable of a picture about one inch square– bulky, heavy, and impractical for home use. Zworykin, at Westinghouse, instead developed an electronic scanning television system using cathode-ray tubes; his innovations– among them, the iconoscope (the forerunner of the television camera) and the kinescope (which allowed the transfer of video to film)– laid the technical foundation for television as we came to know it… and contributed to the development of the electron microscope.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #broadcasting #culture #electronMicroscope #history #Internet #openWeb #Science #society #StephenFollows #Technology #television #TheNumbers #VladimirZworykin -
Converting a Scanning Electron Microscope Into a TEM is Surprisingly Easy
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Converting a Scanning Electron Microscope Into a TEM is Surprisingly Easy
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👀🔬 Oh, look! 🎉 Groundbreaking discovery: #semiconductors have 'mouse bites' 🐭 and we needed an electron microscope to tell us that. Next up: using a supercollider to confirm the existence of paper cuts. 🧠✨
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/electron-microscopy-shows-mouse-bite-defects-semiconductors #discovery #electronmicroscope #technology #sciencehumor #researchinnovation #HackerNews #ngated -
👀🔬 Oh, look! 🎉 Groundbreaking discovery: #semiconductors have 'mouse bites' 🐭 and we needed an electron microscope to tell us that. Next up: using a supercollider to confirm the existence of paper cuts. 🧠✨
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/electron-microscopy-shows-mouse-bite-defects-semiconductors #discovery #electronmicroscope #technology #sciencehumor #researchinnovation #HackerNews #ngated -
Tiny QR code achieved using electron microscope technology
https://newatlas.com/technology/smallest-qr-code-bacteria-tu-wien/
#HackerNews #TinyQRCode #ElectronMicroscope #TechInnovation #Bacteria #TUWien
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Tiny QR code achieved using electron microscope technology
https://newatlas.com/technology/smallest-qr-code-bacteria-tu-wien/
#HackerNews #TinyQRCode #ElectronMicroscope #TechInnovation #Bacteria #TUWien
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🔬 Explore types of microscopy 🧫—from simple to electron microscopes—unlocking cellular details for biology research and advanced diagnostics 🌱.
#Microscopy #TypesOfMicroscopy #BiologyLab #LifeScienceStudents #ElectronMicroscope #FluorescenceMicroscopy #CellBiology #Biotechnology #LaboratoryTechniques #BioResire -
🔬 Explore types of microscopy 🧫—from simple to electron microscopes—unlocking cellular details for biology research and advanced diagnostics 🌱.
#Microscopy #TypesOfMicroscopy #BiologyLab #LifeScienceStudents #ElectronMicroscope #FluorescenceMicroscopy #CellBiology #Biotechnology #LaboratoryTechniques #BioResire -
🎉 Behold the tale of the electron microscope! A century of progress boiled down to "now you can see really tiny stuff." 📏🔬 Meanwhile, your browser still can't play audio—it's like pioneering 1920s technology on a 2025 device. 🚀🦖
https://www.asimov.press/p/electron-microscope #electronmicroscope #technologyprogress #tinyworld #browserissues #2025innovation #HackerNews #ngated -
🎉 Behold the tale of the electron microscope! A century of progress boiled down to "now you can see really tiny stuff." 📏🔬 Meanwhile, your browser still can't play audio—it's like pioneering 1920s technology on a 2025 device. 🚀🦖
https://www.asimov.press/p/electron-microscope #electronmicroscope #technologyprogress #tinyworld #browserissues #2025innovation #HackerNews #ngated -
DIY Calibration Target for Electron Microscopes - It’s a problem that few of us will ever face, but if you ever have to calibrate y... - https://hackaday.com/2025/06/12/diy-calibration-target-for-electron-microscopes/ #scanningelectronmicroscope #electronmicroscope #nanoparticles #repairhacks #science #gold
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DIY Calibration Target for Electron Microscopes - It’s a problem that few of us will ever face, but if you ever have to calibrate y... - https://hackaday.com/2025/06/12/diy-calibration-target-for-electron-microscopes/ #scanningelectronmicroscope #electronmicroscope #nanoparticles #repairhacks #science #gold
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💌 Our first Valentine comes from the #EMGlossary 💌
Thanks to our amazing community 👨🔬 👩🔬 v2.0.0 of our OWL artefact is now published 😍
Love knows no boundaries and neither should data. The electron microscopy glossary ensures that data crosses labs and disciplines effortlessly. #Interoperability
🌐 https://emglossary.helmholtz-metadaten.de
#electronmicroscopy #electronmicroscope
#LoveData25
#LoveDataWeek
#DataMatters Hashtag
#HMC @helmholtz_hmc -
💌 Our first Valentine comes from the #EMGlossary 💌
Thanks to our amazing community 👨🔬 👩🔬 v2.0.0 of our OWL artefact is now published 😍
Love knows no boundaries and neither should data. The electron microscopy glossary ensures that data crosses labs and disciplines effortlessly. #Interoperability
🌐 https://emglossary.helmholtz-metadaten.de
#electronmicroscopy #electronmicroscope
#LoveData25
#LoveDataWeek
#DataMatters Hashtag
#HMC @helmholtz_hmc -
Groundbreaking Images Reveal the Human Brain at Nanoscale Resolution https://petapixel.com/2024/05/13/groundbreaking-images-reveal-the-human-brain-at-nanoscale-resolution/ #electronmicroscope #neuroscience #microscope #microscopy #Spotlight #science #brain #News
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Groundbreaking Images Reveal the Human Brain at Nanoscale Resolution https://petapixel.com/2024/05/13/groundbreaking-images-reveal-the-human-brain-at-nanoscale-resolution/ #electronmicroscope #neuroscience #microscope #microscopy #Spotlight #science #brain #News
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Eva Weig, Professor for Nano and #QuantumSensors, and her team are producing vibrating nanostrings large enough to be seen under an #electronmicroscope. They could become fundamental components of a new #quantumtechnology: http://go.tum.de/091531
@MCQST
📷M.Jooss -
Eva Weig, Professor for Nano and #QuantumSensors, and her team are producing vibrating nanostrings large enough to be seen under an #electronmicroscope. They could become fundamental components of a new #quantumtechnology: http://go.tum.de/091531
@MCQST
📷M.Jooss -
Getting a Close-Up View of Chip Formation with an SEM - When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you’ve got... - https://hackaday.com/2023/06/01/getting-a-close-up-view-of-chip-formation-with-an-sem/ #electronmicroscope #chipformation #metalwork #shearzone #science #carbide #chips #sem
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Getting a Close-Up View of Chip Formation with an SEM - When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you’ve got... - https://hackaday.com/2023/06/01/getting-a-close-up-view-of-chip-formation-with-an-sem/ #electronmicroscope #chipformation #metalwork #shearzone #science #carbide #chips #sem
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Building an Electron Microscope For Research - There are a lot of situations where a research group may turn to an electron micro... - https://hackaday.com/2023/04/14/building-an-electron-microscope-for-research/ #electronmicroscope #creativecommons #microscope #opensource #research #scanning #science #license #sem
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Building an Electron Microscope For Research - There are a lot of situations where a research group may turn to an electron micro... - https://hackaday.com/2023/04/14/building-an-electron-microscope-for-research/ #electronmicroscope #creativecommons #microscope #opensource #research #scanning #science #license #sem
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Machine Learning Helps Electron Microscopy - Machine learning is supposed to help us do everything these days, so why not elect... - https://hackaday.com/2023/04/03/machine-learning-helps-electron-microscopy/ #electronmicroscope #machinelearning #science #stem
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Machine Learning Helps Electron Microscopy - Machine learning is supposed to help us do everything these days, so why not elect... - https://hackaday.com/2023/04/03/machine-learning-helps-electron-microscopy/ #electronmicroscope #machinelearning #science #stem
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Electron Microscope Conversion Hack - Some of you probably know this already, but there’s actually more than one kind of... - https://hackaday.com/2023/02/01/electron-microscope-conversion-hack/ #electronmicroscope #science
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Electron Microscope Conversion Hack - Some of you probably know this already, but there’s actually more than one kind of... - https://hackaday.com/2023/02/01/electron-microscope-conversion-hack/ #electronmicroscope #science
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Electron Microscope Conversion Hack
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/01/electron-microscope-conversion-hack/
#electronmicroscope #Science -
More old #electronics equipment from my Ebay-enabled home lab. #NixieTubes! This 1969 #Keithley 615 #electrometer has a discrete MOSFET front-end and a dual-slope A/D made of gate-level RTL chips. The rear-panel parallel output is labeled PRINTER, because that is all you were likely to do with it in 1969. I once used it to measure the beam current of a Philips #electronMicroscope. Here it is getting the right answer for a #Victoreen 1 GΩ resistor.
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More old #electronics equipment from my Ebay-enabled home lab. #NixiTubes! This 1969 #Keithley 615 #electrometer has a discrete MOSFET front-end and a dual-slope A/D made of gate-level RTL chips. The rear-panel parallel output is labeled PRINTER, because that is all you were likely to do with it in 1969. I once used it to measure the beam current of a Philips #electronMicroscope. Here it is getting the right answer for a #Victoreen 1 GΩ resistor.
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Butterfly eye, x1800
Focus drifted right before I hit start scan but I didn't notice until part way through. So it goes with scanning microscopy.
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A few of our SEMs have these external scan generators/frame grabbers that ~worked. All of the scans from the 35C before this year were captured on one (including this scan of an ICE40 FPGA).
Problem is they use a proprietary fiber-optic PCI card. The software is windows XP only and infuriating to use.
I traced out the PCB for the X/Y sweep DACs + buffer/offset circuits, then captured that in KiCad.
Seems like a great place to drop in an ICE40.
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Viewing Atoms with Electrons - When we were in school, they always told us we can’t see atoms. If you have an ele... - https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/viewing-atoms-with-electrons/ #scanningelectronmicroscope #electronmicroscope #science
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Microscopy Hack Chat with Zachary Tong - Join us on Wednesday, June 23 at noon Pacific for the Microscopy Hack Chat with Za... - https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/microscopy-hack-chat-with-zachary-tong/ #electronmicroscope #hackadaycolumns #atomicforce #microscope #microscopy #confocal #hackchat #micron
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Ptychography Shows Atoms at Amazing Revolution - Cornell University enhanced electron microscopy using a technique known as ptychog... - https://hackaday.com/2021/05/25/ptychography-shows-atoms-at-amazing-revolution/ #electronmicroscope #electronmicroscopy #ptychography #science #atoms #news
