Why NANO Vision Isn't Science Fiction 

Thanks for watching, Super Nerds! Special extra episode today, then PROJECT THOR tomorrow. See you in Footnotes - kH

Poor Tardigrade. Kyle becoming a villain is more obvious.

Light: "Hi. I'm a particle!" Physicist: "Ugh... Don't start _that_ again, I am _not_ in the mood!"

Despite the fact that electron microscopes can resolve images so finely that we can see individual atoms, nanoscopy has a number of massive advantages for the field of biology. The biggest is that a cell does not need to be dead for nanoscopy to be used, unlike electron microscopes. See an electron microscope concentrates a beam of electrons down to less than an Angstrom in diameter, but it must be performed in a vacuum, with a number of other preparations that kill the cell. However, these issues are not as prevalent with nanoscopy, allowing biologists to study a living cell. The other big one is that more resolution is not necessarily better for biology. Much of biology is based around the concept of form-function. In general, being able to see the individual atoms of a protein is not as useful as being able to see its general shape, with discovering the general mechanism of protein folding so we can predict its general shape being one of the most important open questions in all of biology.

“I never prefer magic” Says the one that religiously plays magic

Sad little water bear that got punched around by Kyle

I have an interesting topic, Thor How much force does it take to stop an earthquake with a punch?

In my microbiology class at college, we just had a discussion on the limits of regular microscopy and the same limit that you spoke of. I sent it to my professor so he can hopefully show it to other students. He also got his Ph.D in neuroscience, so the connection at the end of the video makes it even better! Thanks for another amazing video

Kyle: "Because that's what science heroes do" Me: I UNDERSTOOD THAT REFERENCE SCIENCE THOR!!!

But can it see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch? I'll see myself out.

My Great-Grandma is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Went to see her recently, and she could only mumble a few words. She was a husk, her brain too damaged by this horrendous disease. Glad to see Novartis working on finding a way to cure it. Nevertheless, a very well done video, keep them coming!

One of my favorite parts of science is that when research is done and something new is found we don't say "they discovered it" referring to the researchers we say " _we_ discovered it" referring to humans.

I have spent many a year searching for intelligent videos! I've been so thrilled to come across everything you've made!! As someone with a degree in computer science and math, I've always wondered if you will ever do a, "this is what we know vs here's what we need to figure out" video. Have a great one Kyle and keep up the great work! !

Trust me guys, even though the theory is fascinating, you really develop a brand new appreciation for the electron microscope when you use an actual light microscope and then look at pictures of electron micrographs, especially when the magnification is the same- it's like seeing everything with myopia and then suddenly putting on your glasses!

Love the channel. I came for the scifi thought experiments, but I'm growing attached to these 'real world' episodes. They're so enlightening.

This episode was amazing. I love the focus on the topic, not just the pop-culture value.

uploaded 24 seconds ago, i guess i refreshed at the right time

Hey Kyle, love the show! There's also another method of nanoscopy being researched which actually allows a person to see things on similar scales in real time without computer modeling. Basically, researchers are making what are known as microspheres and forming them into a large grid which then allows light to magnify and bend in a way that is visible to us! I got the chance to see this technology in person, and saw a little plus sign that was micrometers wide with a millimeter scale microsphere and a normal microscope that you can buy at the store. Since it was a demonstration this wasn't the bleeding edge of the technology, but it get's thousands of times smaller than what I saw, and it could even be a different future explanation for the superhero nano-vision power!

Ahh, Another refreshing drink for my knowledge thirsty brain.

Another great show, thanks! Would love you to do a show explaining the Double Slit experiment, especially with regards to how the results changes between acting like a wave to acting like a particle purely through being observed!

Did I just travel to the future? Did Earth just spin backward? What day is today? What just happened? Did Kyle mess with the Infinity Gauntlet again? WHAAAATTTTF " is this project Thor episode"??? #mindblow

And if they find a cure, most people probably wouldn't be able to afford it.

think you vids are great AND I feel obsessed with your highlights. the nanoscopy images are incredible!

Perfect timing!!! This cleared up so much for me. I was confused about how they "tagged atoms" in the bonnethead shark studies. This was so interesting and entertaining! 😊

Kyle: "I never prefer magic." Also Kyle: "I will destroy anyone who challenges me in Magic (the Gathering)" Hmmm.........

"There is no more doubt in my mind, Kyle is evil" -Einstein, I think.

Great show and really happy to see that microscopy is getting a whole episode dedicated to it. Single molecule localisation microscopy (SMLM- try saying that 5 times quickly) allows resolutions down to 10s of nanometers and allows us to go past the Abbe limit. However, this tends to be damaging to cells and there is another range of techniques that get down to around 100nm. This still gets past the Abbe limit and includes confocal microscopy techniques as well as structured illumination microscopy (worth a video by itself). The one of the main advantages of using optical techniques over electron is that as you mentioned it is possible to "tag" proteins with fluorescent markers. After tagging it is possible to watch these proteins and how they move around. Multiple colours can be used for different proteins all at the same time and so cellular dynamics can be observed. Electron microscopes have different contrast techniques as they dont have the advantage of using wavelength of electrons but they are able to go subnanometer. Interestingly, there is a technique called electron disperse xray spectroscopy that looks at the photons given off from the sample when electrons interact with it. This provides information on the elements that are present. Fyi- microscopes are cool... but I am a little bias

WOOOOOOOOO, extra episode and an excellent message! Awesome episode!

When Science Thor breaks out the Sins... *Super Villain Kyle Confirmed*

Hey Kyle. Don't you need two slits for the two-slit experiment diffraction pattern?

I had written a test on optics and waves earlier today and now I get an awesome video to boot, sweet stuff. Also Edna Mode would have a few choice words about the cape you're sporting there.

That was one of THE coolest vid that i have seen from you guys. Great job

Can someone tell me where Kyle went between 11:27 and 11:32? All I saw was some guy with glasses that I definitely don't recognise.

This was a fantastic video, I learned so much in a simple way. It helped learning how light works in waves. I never understood science too well but learning about the nanoscopic was amazing. Impressive how scientists have learned to zoom even closer to even see Alzheimer’s. Hopefully this brings us closer to finding cures. Great video!

I was thinking about various super powers yesterday and my brain came to the concept of gravity manipulation and it made me wonder what the full possibilities of a power like that could be. That's something I'd love to see Kyle tackle at some point while it's enlightening when he talks about the negative side effects of certain superpowers and why they wouldn't actually be good to have in real life I'd love know more about what the possible full potential of certain super powers could be if some could actually do them. In the case of gravity manipulation most fictional stories boil it down to just making things heavier or lighter but I can't help but feel the kind of things you could do by applying that kind of ability in the proper manner are potentially much more then that but then I'm not expert on the subject.

Kyle I love all your videos but these that deal with real science are my favorite. So incredibly fascinating to hear about scientific breakthroughs. Keep up the good work love the show! P.S. Where did Dr. Moo go? She was really finding her groove. Every episode was better than the last.

Evil Kyle super villain beats up a helpless tardigrade. Muahahahahaha!

Blowing up a water bear to be giant, only to beat it up, seems like a pretty villainous thing to do. You sure you aren't turning into one?

Hey Kyle, love your show. In astronomy we use light defraction patterns to help focus telescopes by using a Bahtinov Mask. The bahtinov mask creates diffraction spikes which are lined up to achieve an ideal focus. There are other similar masks like the Carey mask and perpendicular mask.

Hey Kyl;e, love the show (And thanks for the second Supernerd! Woot!). But yeah, I got nothin' to say here other than the fact that if you hadn't mentioned Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscopes I was gonna say something... lol. And my favourite recent "Small Thing seen for the First Time" was that just recently scientists from the University of Glasgow had managed to take an image of two quantuum-entangled photons. Totally insane right!?!?!

This is amazing! Kyle but, wouldn't the electron microscope that you stated at the end of your video would essentially kill the cells or tissues that one is looking at due to high levels of radiation bombardment? btw really love the show

That’s one light limit destroyed, how about that light speed limit too, eh? LET ME DREAM

What I like about the fact that Because Science is now its own channel, is that not every single video has to be about a certain superpower of a comic or movie character or something like that. The channel is still focused on that area but it's also possible to do something else.

Hi kyle, i had the good fortune to be able to take a nanotechnology course during my time at college and our campus let us tour the different labs on campus. But 2 of the ones we got to play around in were Scanning Electron Microscope lab and the Atomic Force Microscope lab. The AFM is even more precise than the SEM but is more susceptible to noise and background vibrations and is more limited in the readings it can take. But to oversimplify, it uses a nanoscale probe to move across a sample of whatever you wanted to look at and reading the fluctuations in the reactions at the tip of the probe it can discern individual atoms

Totally not a villain here is now working for a pharma Corp. Something like Umbrella I think.

Dude, you used a double-slit interference pattern on the wall with only one slit for the light to pass through.

I think it's super cool that the way you would overlay the pictures of the laser returns the same way that we look at radar returns using adjustable raster and sweep decay to create a solid picture over time.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up at the end. I was thinking, I know scanning electron microscopes have been around for quite some time now.

Kyle truly is EVIL! Why did he punch the poor water bear ;_;

Dang man, take it easy on that tardigrade. You punched it so much it is probably a retardigrade now. Sorry, I'll see myself out.

Hey, loved the video! I just thought it was worth noting that although the resolution of the microscopy techniques keep improving, they don't necessarily replace one another. They all have ups and downs, and they all work for a specific task. This is obviously obvious when you're talking about something like a light microscope versus an electron microscope, if you want to look at a bacterium you can't use the electron microscope. But when it comes to things like the STORM/PALM-like microscopy (that uses SIM microscopy on flourescent proteins), that you mentioned in the video, it's less apparent. Things like "Is the cell alive?" and "Can I genetically engineer my cell?" become increasingly important. For example using STORM on a live cell is practically impossible as you need to make use of antibodies carrying fluorophores that specifically attach to your target protein, this requires the permeation of the cell membrane (not something that cells particularly like or tend to survive). Conversely, doing PALM is equally impossible on a wild strain that you have no "genetic control" (sounds like a rock band) over, you simply cannot get the fluorophores attached to the proteins without creating a fusion protein of it with something like GFP (green fluorescent protein). Oh, and even more generally with these scanning microscopy techniques, you have to remember that they are also captured over a span of time, meaning you can't really get an image of the entire system at a point in time (not very useful you're trying to capture a snapshot). I really like this article if you guys want to know more about this field: Super-resolution microscopy at a glance (2011) by C.Galbraith.

thanks for clarifying electron microscope part

Kyle! did you just explained the Young's Double Slit Experiment with a single slit?

Hey Kyle how realistic is the eagle from Space 1999?

Your description of STORM techniques and the build up to super resolution techniques was absolutely fantastic. Your science communication techniques are wonderful, Kyle, and you should be on television with these abilities. On the topic, by far, the coolest super resolution techniques is Structured Illumination Microscopy, or SIM. By knowing how lenses work, we can essentially attribute size scales to a frequency of light, which, when dispersed by a lens, spans broader and broader in physical space, beyond the size of the lens eventually. This technique illuminates the structure with a known pattern, usually an array of lines, whose spatial separation is essentially the frequency limit of the lens because of the dispersion. The usually unresolvable emitters inside the material you're studying have their light rays experience a so-called beating effect, where their effective frequency mixes with the imposed pattern just like sound waves. These beats can help reconstruct an image consisting of sizes beyond the Abbe limit, I think by about 20%. Of course, nanostructures generated under EBL can be seen under an SEM with sizes up to the nanometer scale. I can't remember what the resolution of X_Ray telescopes are though.

Hi man. Great work, funny videos. Could you make some videos of the powers that scientificly we do want?

Did you really depict the"Double Slit Experiment" with a single slit? (Great video as always)

Wait what happened to the regular uploading schedule?

Hey Kyle, can you do a video on what would happen inside stopped time (like from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, when Dio constantly stops time using his stand) or how things would work when time is stopped Thanks!

Great video Kyle.

could you try to science Hamon? from Jojo's Bizarre adventure

How much energy would you need to throw a microscope into the sun?

Another amazing video!

I love to hear that this is a thing! I hope to see it improve.

Do you draw all the images or do you imploy an artist?

I see the Void has lost its place in the time continuum!

Good catch!

This concept seems quite simple... I feel the hardest part would be making the tools. Either way, great video! I enjoy learning about breakthroughs.

Microscope limits at .2µm, just try pinch to zoom 😂

Do you have something against water bears?!? Shame on you Thor!!

Amazing video and very well presented (I'll take it is as an ispiration for some presentation XD ), but I would like to give you some updates on this area. Indeed, recent works takle this problem changing "point of view" and (just to summarize tons of calculations) using quantum mechanincs tools, even if it's still in a early stage, there are clear evidences that is possible to beat Raylegih's curse. If you want would be amazing to start a discussion about it :)

Yo Kyle, I'm lovin the show, awesome! I correct you with your pronunciation, its olsimers, I thought it was old timers disease too. Maybe its because I'm in Australia. Anywho, keep up the good work!

Holy, Im early

Love your channel But I'll have to point out that I will dislike this video. I suggest you check who your sponsors are before accepting their sponsorship. Addition: Your sponsorship is also the most likely reason why you talked about finding a treatment and not a cure as this follows the policy of pharmaseutical corporations after the Goldman Sachs analysis that outright said that creating cures is unsustainable despite the benefit to individuals and society, even going as far as warning against the prospect of eradicating hepatitis C as a major loss of customers.

Hey Kyle you did it again another fantastic video 😁 you should do a video on fusion in dbz try to science that topic

It’s so amazing what science can do, thanks for the KH

My name is Ashton and when you said thanks for watching at the end I got freaked the hell out since I'm home alone.. I thought I was going crazy for 2 seconds!

You can actually see the ABBA limit on a macro scale. For example when train headlights are seen from far away they appear as a singular triangular or even just circular shaped light. As they begin to approach you at a crossing or point where you are stamding you will see the light will become 3 distinct lights (in North America at least). Its not until the train is almost in the crossing or point where your at that you realize that there are actually 4 headlights on a train engine but the middle light is actually 2 lights right next to each other. This is best seen at night but trains always have their headlights on during the day too so it can be tested wherever trains are!

@5 minutes in, you described what is used in optical leak testing. Where you use a laser differential field to detect a hermetically sealed product to make sure that there is no gas leaking.

Going even further, I remember reading an article a while back about some scientists photographing an individual atom. They floated an individual atom between a laser and a camera. The laser was turned on and the camera was able to pick up the atom's silhouette. I can't recall for certain which element they used.

I thought the title said NACHO vision. Not disappointed though, keep up the great work Kyle.

Hey Kyle, great episode! However, isn’t there a point of magnification where it’s impossible to “see” anything. I mean smallest than the smallest wave length, I’m talking about the Planck length. Where what we are trying to view constantly changes because in our attempts to view something that small we change or alter the system by introducing energy.

Excellent video!

I used to use a Titan TEM in school and we would use it to measure in the Å range mainly dealing with atoms of gold

Kyle is the MAAAN!!!! Love the show! What size does a moon have to be in order to have its own moon?

Hi, Kyle- as both your pupil and fellow educator (high school English teacher) I am a big fan of the show! ^_^ I had a linguistics comment (can this count as science? the science of language?) about your pronunciation play with the word nanoscopy ( 6:30 ). In order to sound "way more fun," poets and other writers often play with the meter of words as you did here. Oftentimes, this is simply that: more fun. However, sometimes this syllable slander changes the meaning of words entirely, and in even more common cases, changes its part of speech. As an example, consider the word "construct." Depending on where the stress is, the part of speech changes: CONstruct - (noun) a building or structure conSTRUCT - (verb) to build something English often weirdly warps in ways we wonder about, but it seems to come natural to native speakers so we often don't even think about it. But many people studying English as their second language don't grasp the concept of meter (or stressing syllables) because such metrical systems don't exist in their native language. So imagine being taught something like this without ever having to stress syllables before: thermo = THERmo meter = MEter thermometer = therMOmeter Well, Kyle, there('s) mo' meter I could talk about here, but I think if this comment gets any hotter, your favorite element might burst out their mom eater. Thanks for having an awesome show! Can't wait to catch you on the next one!

Wow! Great video brought to us by our good friends at Novartis! I for one am now totally distracted from the fact that they manipulated research data and then hid it from the FDA! Flawless PR move!

A story of groundbreaking technologies and their uses today? YES PLEASE MORE

Hi Kyle, What you are talking about today also goes by the name Super resolution microscopy (SRM) (by the way, since it is super, don't you want to destroy it or turn it into something evil?). It has even greater potential in science than many of us realize both for biological science and non-biological. During my PhD. studies I looked into the possibility of visualizing vacancy defects in crystalline materials (it was a crazy idea to my advisor that she wanted me to verify and see if we could get thrown in to my phd), something that is either impossible or pretty difficult to do with any other microscopy technique unless the defect concentration is very high. Even transmission electron microscopy with systems like the Titan TEM, you cannot be expected to find vacancy defects very easily in complex structures unless the defect concentration is very high because you are examining an extremely small portion of the sample. Not to mention that it often takes a good amount of modeling to actually verify diffraction contrasts and what they mean in any High Resolution TEM image (the type of images that people will also sometimes claim you are seeing individual atoms, though you are only seeing diffraction gradients / atomic columns) and you have to assume that the sample preparation did not actually distort what you are examining. In those systems you have to make a focused ion mill within an SEM first and thin the sample down before it gets into a TEM. The assumption is that you did not place the defect there / it already existed. With SRM, these type of issues go away. Now for biological samples, nanoscopy / SRM techniques are great because the risk of damaging the samples is drastically reduced. Ultimately, the resolution limit is based on the photobleaching of the dyes that are used. However, for non-biological samples, there is the potential to actually go even smaller. The researchers that made STED SRM had already proven that this can be done in diamonds where they found Nitrogen-vacancy defect color centers and that the resolution of limit is only limited by the STED beam power limits. For STED SRM, they could image Nitrogen-vacancy centers and clusters in 3D space over the distance of microns with a resolutions at much finer scales (to around 100 nm from the 2009 paper and could potentially be further improved because no fundamental has been determined). If you limit the imaging to 2D space, the spacial resolution drops to less than 3 nm if you look at some of other papers. Here are two papers from Stefen Hell's research group which discuss these aspects: 1) Three-dimensional stimulated emission depletion microscopy of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond using continuous-wave light. 2) Stimulated Emission Depletion Microscopy Resolves Individual Nitrogen Vacancy Centers in Diamond Nanocrystals. For the studying of wideband gap materials (i.e. visible light transparent materials), this is an unprecedented potential. No other technique allows you to potentially locate and visualize point defects in 3D space to this degree. As you know, playing with defect chemistry allows for great control of a material's properties. Si is the easiest example. Our computer chips are all made essentially through controlling the doping of Si with N or P dopants to increase the concentration of electrons and holes in different regions of Si. There are a couple more parts, but those are the starting points. TEM is mostly out of the question even with tomography techniques as you cannot possibly analyze that volume of material. Atom probe tomography techniques such as LEAP (local electrode atom probe tomography) cannot come close to replicating this. They still do not capture enough of the atoms (less than 95 to 90% if I recall). In order to capture point defects you must capture 100% and specially map them perfectly because you are looking for where material is missing effectively and causing structural disorder. Often times, scientists have to utilize secondary techniques to model out and guess what is causing various phenomena such as charge conduction in these types of materials. Eventually competing theories have come up and now with SRM, we may be able to come to better understandings of what is causing these defects if the defects being sought are luminescent sources. My old advisor had this crazy theory for solving a big question in the ferroelectric material's community and while I did not get a chance to actually test it, my initial look into it found that it appears to be a viable means as long as you have the right laser source and cameras. I do hope someone gets to test it out one day. We have only begun to scratch the surface of what can be studied with this technique and a lot of scientific questions will either be answered or strongly hinted at through this technique.

I really prefer when Kyle says only “Because Science” in the conclusion, then the theme arrives next. It really looks like a fucking cool bad-ass moment...

Well focused video. :)

Right at the end Kyle talks about Electron Microscopes, they are fantastic and can resolve images to very high magnifications. The trouble with them, and why they're not used for the sort of research Kyle was talking about, is that all the subject matter has to be dead. The chamber that the electrons pass through in order to get an image is kept under vacuum and at very low temperatures. The samples are also typically fixed in chemicals and covered in an atom thick layer of gold, for scanning electron microscopes. Transmission electron microscopy uses other electron dense dyes, depending on what you're looking for in your samples.

I had no idea Nerdist had a actual channel on PlutoTv. I've been having Because Science playing all morning

Love this version of Because Science that explains current science. Can see how this could change future and past episodes.

Kyle is a 4th wall breaking comic book (video?) Character and I love it

Awesome video, could you sometime go into how scientists are now viewing single atoms.

Hey Kyle love the show but I work late so I can never catch a live and wanted to ask a question or more suggest a topic. Futurama science. Like how the planet express ship moves or how nippler eats and poops dark mater. Also how do they keep heads alive in jars?

Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy or STEM, uses a similar technique but with electron microscopes. It can produce a visual output where you can view molecules and the "shadows" of atoms. While the Optical Microscopy can get to the 10's of nano-meters (nm), the Electron variant can get to 0.05 nm. DNA is about 2 nm across and a water molecule is about 0.27 of a nm across.

10:04 I wish I had Gravity Defying hair like this. He might not have superhero powers, but his hair does lol. Love the show Kyle. One question I do have though, is in the Flash Series as of 2014, there is Firestorm and whenever he lights up (or Flame-on like the Human Torch does) there's this sound effect that sounds similar to a Cheetah roar. Is this the case in real life when that much power hits the ground at that force and speed? Sorry I don't know how to phrase this question lol.

You spoke about Light and at the end, you mention Electrons but another possibility is scanning tunnelling microscope a process of using a single atom point of Platinum wire (or potentially Carbon nanotubes) and a current that using a quantum mechanical effect to ‘tunnel’. I think if a hero had their fingers with these as touch-sensitive hairs then they could pass their hands over and receive a complex picture at a 0.1nm to 0.01nm scale.