jtaillon

I think a lot of people would be into this. If you're willing to, you should totally do it! You might get some good contributions from the community, too.

Do you have/do you plan to open source this anywhere? I'd be really interested in checking it out!

What a strange take. It reads as "nothing is worth improving on if it cannot 100% completely replace the thing that we're trying to get rid of". If we can reduce our dependence (say 50%) on a power source that has huge negative externalities, isn't that a worthwhile effort?

Yes, in the same way a Cuisinart blender is a "monopoly" since I can only buy a Cuisinart blender from Cuisinart

No one's preventing anyone from building a better solution and making it available to consumers. Not a monopoly

Ok, then the government should be doing it and investing to meet current and future demand. A private company (in a non-regulated market) can't be forced to do so.

Should they? Why should one private company be forced to build infrastructure for other companies that are intentionally dragging their heels? GM doesn't run gas stations

It would be great if they could be altruistic to let anyone use them, but altruism isn't really a good path to profits in our society

Tesla has not "monopolized" charging stations in any reasonable understanding of the word. They spent somewhere south of $1B to built their own infrastructure. Any other company could have done that, but they chose to drag their heels instead. Even still, they could _still_ do that (and maybe EA will be that network). Electricity is pretty much everywhere, and there's definitely room for lots more long distance chargers. I don't understand how anyone could think what Tesla has done with it's supercharger network is a bad thing....

What do electron fumes smell like? :)

The thing is, they're not "ludicrously expensive". Sure, Teslas and Porsches and Jaguars are, but you can also get a late-model used Nissan Leaf for under 10k, or a brand new Kia Niro for ~30k after tax credit. That's well within the bell curve of what people spend on ICE cars, used or not. A Leaf might not meet your needs, but it's not like there aren't other options out there. If you factor in longer-term costs like fuel cost, maintenance, and wear-and-tear, the equation tilts even further towards EV.

Not to say they shouldn't be cheaper, but they'll definitely get there. We're pretty close to price-parity as is (just not tons of options).

In this case, "in and out of focus" is actually variations in the amplitude of the probability function for the electron density projected onto a single plane (to a first approximation). Sometimes the wave functions of all the electrons interfere constructively, so you see a bright spot, and sometimes deconstructively, so you see dark. Depending on the orientation of things, this results in the images of "atoms" that you see in the picture. As the crystal changes shape and size, the interference patterns change, which partially explains why it disappears and reappears a few times. There's a bit more going on than that, but the physics of what's happening in a TEM image is really neat.

Maybe, if you're unlucky. In all likelihood, you'll be asymptomatic and spreading it to a bunch of other people without realizing it (which is most of the reason we're in this mess). Then those people do the same, get sick, and/or die.

That's pretty much correct. Single-atom imaging is possible using aberration-corrected scanning TEM, but the beam doses used will typically obliterate anything organic through radiolysis or ionization damage (although there are emerging ways around that using some interesting compressive sensing techniques).

Most "atomic resolution" EM images you see are actually images of columns of atoms, since the imaging mode is transmission, so necessarily the image is summed through the plane of the sample (so atomic resolution is only in the perpendicular plane).

The techniques used in this paper get around the dose issue by taking many images of very many presumably identical proteins (called dose fractionation) at very low dose. Computer algorithms are then used to stitch together a 3D model based on the low-dose individual images. Making it really cold also helps things from breaking down under the beam.