#electron microscopy

Shell spiral. The Veliger. April 1, 1970.

Ptychodon microundulata, a New Zealand land snail, magnified 110 x.

AI turns electron microscopy into materials insights in minutes

An electron microscopy image can capture atoms arranged in a crystal lattice or defects threading through a semiconductor material, but turning that image into materials insight can take weeks of careful analysis. Now, an autonomous artificial intelligence platform developed at Cornell can do that work in minutes. The EMSeek platform, reported April 1 in Science Advances, streamlines materials research by identifying key features in a microscopy image, determining the crystal structure, predicting material properties, comparing results with existing scientific literature, and generating a report within a single, integrated workflow. "Electron microscopy produces incredibly rich information, but the bottleneck is often turning those images into usable scientific understanding," said corresponding author Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems at the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering. You is also co-director of the Cornell University AI for Science Institute.

Surgery in Miniature

A cell's energy-producing organelles, the mitochondria, are home to the stash of maternally-inherited DNA that encodes 13 proteins (distinct from the 20,000 protein-encoding genes in the nucleus). Mitochondrial faults underlie various diseases. Now researchers have managed to extract them from living cells using a nanoprobe (pictured here in a false-coloured scanning electron micrograph beside pollen grains for scale), allowing their vital role to be more directly studied and offering promise of sub-cellular organelle transplant 'surgery'

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Yanmei Ma and Weikang Huand, and colleagues

Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Biomimetic Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Science Advances, October 2025

Have you ever seen the incredible natural architecture of opals? This SEM image shows the unique microscopic structure that gives opals their amazing play of colours. The silica spheres inside the opal are arranged in a very regular, ordered pattern. Because of this structure, they interact with light specially, much like a photonic crystal (a material that can control light flow). This interaction causes opals to show those beautiful flashes of color, known as "play-of-color." This fascinating microstructure makes opals so special in nature and jewelry. Opal Structure – LVEM 5, SEM