A new scanning electron microscope (SEM) design by physicist Derek Eastham could achieve a resolution around four times better than existing SEMs–as low as 0.01 nanometers (roughly the distance between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron).

It also produces a beam with about 100 times less energy than usual in an SEM, lowering the cost and possibly allowing it to study delicate structures normally destroyed by electron microscopes, such as untreated proteins and DNA.