In a movie I saw recently, a young Will Shakespeare was seen to repeatedly dip the nib of a quill into a reservoir of ink and scrawl on pieces of paper until, finally, what we know as "Romeo and Juliet" was penned. As pointed out by Richard Piner, Jin Zhu, Feng Xu, Seunghun Hong, and Chad Mirkin, this technology is much older than Shakespeare, dating back about 4000 years. But even technology this old can change.

As you are well aware, making devices on a smaller and smaller scale (nanofabrication) is certain to change our future way of life, Nanofabrication frequently relies on lithographic methods where a pattern is superimposed on a resistive film and the film is chemically etched to create a structure that conforms to the pattern.

Modern microscopy allows the life scientist to produce seductively beautiful images with powerful techniques developed by brilliant physical optical scientists, and yet be nearly completely confused with regard to the importance of the results. This is because modern microscopes are something like Lotus race cars: they have all the performance to fly in the hands of an experienced user, or crash and burn spectacularly in the hands of a novice. There is therefore great need for a comprehensive and accurate but accessible "drivers manual" for modern microscopical techniques.

Applications of scanning force microscopy (SFM) in polymer studies have flourished in this decade, reflecting (a) sensitivity to both structure and properties on the nanometer scale, and (b) ease of operation in ambient environments without sample pretreatment. One drawback in SFM of soft materials has been damage incurred during the imaging process. The problem was alleviated by the development of dynamic force microscopy (DFM) in which the probe spends little or no time in contact with the polymer surface and shear forces are minimized. This mode of operation has been dubbed "tapping", "intermittent contact", "non-contact", "near-contact", etc. As studies proliferated, it became apparent that different researchers were using different terms to refer to the same apparent imaging mechanism, or the same term to refer to different imaging mechanisms.

First, it matters not a bit what others are doing, even if they are doing it with the full knowledge and permission of their wastewater treatment officials. This is because every treatment plant is different, and must set its own limits on chemical waste. Approval must be obtained from local officials.

Getting permission from one's own group of officials may be a pleasant or difficult experience, but the way can be eased a bit by being prepared. Realize that most of them do not know what our histological chemicals are, so provide them with the OSHA mandated hazard codes {e.g., flammable, corrosive, carcinogenic, etc.). They also want to know flash point, pH, miscibility with water and odor (if strong).

As humans, we are very sight oriented. As microscopists, we usually acquire data that is in the form of images. Since micrographs, or pictures, are what we deal with, we tend to become involved with the presentation of the data and its visual impact. When making a figure plate for publication, do you often find yourself moving images around, adjusting sizes, tonal gradations, and positions to achieve a more visually pleasing arrangement? Microscopy must be the most artistic of the sciences. We might like to have fun with our images, as well.

Images formed by electrons are collected on media that sees only if the electrons were there or not. Traditional electron micrographs are black and white images; photons are needed for the colors that we can detect.

While using casts in place of original bones and teeth for study with the SEM is a rather common practice, periodic updates and introductions of unique casting methods help to keep the process of improving cast quality cumulative, limiting unnecessary repetition of ineffectual procedures. The following is a summary of casting methods that I have synthesized from several published reports as well as some that I have developed independently (e.g., Waters and Savage 1971; Scott 1982; Rose 1983; Gordon 1984; Teaford 1991; Buikstra and Ubelaker 1994; Schmidt, 1998). The study for which I first employed these methods consisted of hundreds of archeologically- derived human teeth dating from about 1,000 to around 10,000 years ago. The study required detailed views of dental surfaces magnified 500X (Figure 1). The casts that I produced routinely had features that were distinct at magnifications of 2.000X and higher.

Having installed Photoshop 5 after using version 4 for some time, I think that all scientists who believe that the integrity of their imagery is important, understand what Photoshop 5 brings with it: the issue of "color space" or color profiles". Whereas users could rely on the integrity of their image being retained with Photoshop 4, this changes with version 5, and in some cases rather severely. For example, a image bitmap which might represent elemental spatial distribution data should be considered to have a gamma of unity. Photoshop 4 would represent this data for editing via the display monitor's gamma compensation only. That is, the integrity of the pixel values would remain and visual compensation happens between data and display. Photoshop 5, on the other hand, will modify pixel values in accordance with either a desired "working" color space or an anticipated "target" color space.

We are using negative stain or a combination of osmium tetroxide fixation and negative stain to monitor the size homogeneity of lipid vesicle/liposome populations prepared by such techniques as sonication, extrusion, and gel filtration chromatography. Small sonicated vesicles up to about 50 nm in diameter seem sufficiently well preserved in negative stain for adequate size determination, although some flattening upon adherence probably does occur. Larger vesicles such as 100 nm extruded liposomes which contain a large aqueous core are likely to be flattened significantly in negative stain and may be partially stabilized with an osmium tetroxide fixation. The effectiveness of this fixation will in large part depend upon the degree of saturation of the lecithin species.

One conventional method for picking up ultrathin sections for transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is to prepare the mesh or slot grids with a formvar support film and then pick up your sections as they are floating in the knife boat. An alternative method is to first pick up sections on a naked grid and then lay them down on formvar film suspended over holes drilled in an aluminum bridge. I use this method when picking up serial sections on slot grids. A description of the method follows. The bridges I have were manufactured at the University of Georgia instrumentation Shop. They can also be purchased pre-made (for example, from SPI, Inc. They list them as Domino Racks), or one can make them from aluminum with a vise and drill. The sample bridge in the figure is similar to what I use. It is 5 cm long, 2.5 cm wide.