Ok that might be a bit of an exaggeration, Cosmo Alto may not be the electron microscopist in the world, or North America, or Manhattan, but he is definitely the best electron microscopist I know. In this episode, Cosmo sits down with us and tells us about the wonderful world of electron microscopy.

If you're not familiar, for the majority of scientific history, we were using light microscopes to look at small things, which essentially just utilizes lenses to magnify things to the size where you can see them, like the microscope you probably used in science class. An ELECTRON microscope is used to look at things which are smaller than the wavelength of light! So the things you can look at in an electron microscope are on the picometer scale, which means you can look at the structure of proteins from the brain, for example. The microscope shoots a laser at the proteins and an electron detector receives the electrons that bounce off the protein, forming an image that scientists can then look at and synthesize into their research.

Lastly, I always like to ask guests who talk about technology how hard it would be to turn the technology they work on into a weapon: listen on to hear about whether you could turn an electron microscope into a space laser!

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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