The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) encourages independent inventors who are not patent professionals to file and prosecute their own patent applications. Self-help books are useful guides for navigating through the PTO’s many laws and rules. When an inventor has an idea, he should document it, have the document witnessed, search all public records for novelty and unobviousness, and finally file an application with the PTO. The inventor defends his idea with an Examiner from the PTO and, if all requirements are met, receives a patent that grants the inventor a monopoly to make, use, and sell his invention for a period of time.

Preparing cross sections of particulates and wires for scanning electron microscopy study without inducing mechanical damage is difficult. Embedding materials in commercially available epoxy before polishing with a broad unfocused ion beam is a simple and inexpensive way to produce a cross section with minimal preparation artifacts. A stepwise procedure is provided for embedding and polishing powders, larger particles, and wires.

Linear image transfer down to a few tens of pm can be attained by a modern Cs-corrected transmission electron microscope. However, it is difficult to accurately evaluate such a high-performance microscope. We examine three-dimensional (3D) Fourier transform (FT) analysis in comparison with diffractogram (2D FT) analysis to evaluate aberration-corrected electron microscopes. The 3D FT can analyze information transfer on the Ewald sphere up to high-angles using a thick sample or a sample containing strong scattering elements. Therefore, the 3D FT analysis is necessary to evaluate Cs-corrected microscopes, especially those equipped with a Cc-corrector, or a monochromator, or microscopes operated at lower voltages.