miscellany

This just strikes me as so amazing! There's not much more that I can say about this beyond, "WOW!!!" From the American Institute of Physics:

A field ion microscope (FIM) image of a very sharp tungsten needle. The small round features are individual atoms. The lighter colored elongated features are traces captured as atoms moved during the imaging process (approximately 1 second).

(hat tip: Boing Boing)