Apple's Vision Pro has been used in what's described as the world's first cataract surgery performed with the headset. MacRumors reports: [New York opthalmologist] Dr. Eric Rosenberg of SightMD completed the initial procedure in October 2025 and has since performed hundreds of additional cases using ScopeXR, a surgical platform he co-developed for Apple's mixed reality device. ScopeXR streams live feeds from 3D digital surgical microscopes directly into the Vision Pro, which lets the surgeon view the operative field in stereoscopic 3D while overlaying preoperative diagnostic data. The platform also supports real-time remote collaboration, allowing surgeons to virtually join procedures and see exactly what the operating surgeon sees. "We are now able to bring the world's best surgeon into any operating room, at any hour, from anywhere on the planet," said Dr. Rosenberg in a company press release. "From residents performing their first cases to surgeons facing unexpected complications, this technology democratizes access to expertise and that will save vision."

"The April 1st timing should have been your first clue," writes Gadget Review. TechSpot's false story was just an April Fool's prank — although Gadget Review thinks it's still funny how "something about this particular piece of satire felt uncomfortably plausible." Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41, or perhaps it's the poetic justice of the underdog finally eating the giant. The semiconductor world has witnessed stranger reversals, but none quite this dramatic. Your gaming rig's CPU battle represents decades of corporate warfare, legal grudges, and technological leapfrogging that makes Game of Thrones look like a friendly board game.

Picture this: In 1975, AMD reverse-engineered Intel's 8080 processor, creating the Am9080 clone. The audacity was breathtaking — AMD spent 50 cents per chip to manufacture something they sold for $700. That's a 1,400% markup on borrowed technology, making today's GPU prices look reasonable. This relationship evolved from copying to partnership to bitter rivalry. The companies signed second-sourcing deals in the late 1970s, with AMD becoming Intel's official backup supplier. Then came the lawsuits. AMD sued Intel for antitrust violations in 2005, eventually settling for $1.25 billion in 2009. That settlement money helped fund the Ryzen revolution that's currently eating Intel's lunch. The historical irony runs deeper than your typical tech rivalry. AMD literally started as Intel's shadow, creating chips by studying Intel's designs under microscopes. Today, Intel engineers probably study AMD's Zen architecture the same way...

This April Fool's joke works because it captures something true about power shifts in technology.
The site TipRanks notes that both companies saw their stock price rise Wednesday, though that might not be related to the false article. "Positive analyst coverage from Wells Fargo could be acting as a catalyst for AMD stock today. Intel also announced plans to buy back its 49% equity interest in a joint venture with Apollo Global Management APO."

Scientists at Zhejiang University have created the world's smallest LED display, featuring pixels just 90 nanometers wide -- roughly the size of a typical virus and too tiny to be seen with optical microscopes. The breakthrough, described in Nature this week, uses perovskite semiconductors that maintain brightness even at microscopic scales, giving them an advantage over conventional LEDs.

The research team, led by Baodan Zhao, also demonstrated a larger display with pixels measuring about 100 micrometers (human hair width) that successfully rendered images including a spinning globe.

A team of researchers at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology has developed a prototype cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) microscope that, despite being significantly cheaper than high-end machines, has successfully solved protein structures with near-atomic resolution. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Science Magazine reports: [MB physicist Chris Russo] wants a manufacturer to commercialize his team's design, which he believes could be built and sold for $500,000. That's within reach of a new hire's startup package, or one of the regular equipment grants offered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or National Science Foundation, says Bridget Carragher, founding technical director of the Chan Zuckerberg Imaging Institute. "It would be a marvelous machine," she says. "Everyone who wants to do structural biology could do it." [...] One of the team's key insights was that the electron beam does not need the energies typically used in high-end cryo-EM microscopes. Levels of 100 kiloelectronvolts (KeV) -- one-third as high -- suffice to reveal molecular structure, and they reduce costs by eliminating the need for a regulated gas, sulfur hexafluoride, to snuff out sparks. The team also saw room for improvement in the system of lenses that focuses the electrons and the detector that captures them after they probe the sample.

With the resulting prototype, the LMB group determined the structure of 11 diverse proteins. One was the iron-storing protein apoferritin, which has become a benchmark for cryo-EM resolution records. The LMB researchers mapped it at 2.6 angstroms -- 2.6 times the diameter of a hydrogen atom. That's not as high as the record cryo-EM resolution of 1.2 angstroms, but plenty good enough to make an atomic model, Russo says. And the process was fast. Because the microscope sat in the same lab as the freezing stage, the team could quickly check that its samples were good enough, rather than waiting weeks for results from a high-end machine. "Every single structure was done in less than a day," Russo says. Thermo Fisher Scientific, which makes a top-end machine, says it is already expanding the cryo-EM market. In 2020, it began to sell a lower cost option, called Tundra, that operates at 100 KeV. "I would say that there are universities that probably never believed they could own cryo-EM that now have the tools," says Trisha Rice, a vice president who heads the company's cryo-EM business. Indeed, Rajan's university just ordered one for $1.5 million.

Russo says Tundra is a step in the right direction, but his team's innovations could make cryo-EM even cheaper. For example, he says, Tundra dials back the energy on a simplified version of the costly electron source used in top-end microscopes, whereas the electron gun on the LMB prototype was designed for 100 KeV from scratch. But he understands that commercializing his team's design would require large investments by potential manufacturers. "We're talking to all of them," Russo says. "But at the end of the day, it's up to them."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Atomic-scale imaging emerged in the mid-1950s and has been advancing rapidly ever since -- so much so, that back in 2008, physicists successfully used an electron microscope to image a single hydrogen atom. Five years later, scientists were able to peer inside a hydrogen atom using a "quantum microscope," resulting in the first direct observation of electron orbitals. And now we have the first X-ray taken of a single atom, courtesy of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois-Chicago, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

"Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays one cannot tell what they are made of," said co-author Saw-Wai Hla, a physicist at Ohio University and Argonne National Laboratory. "We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom at a time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state. Once we are able to do that, we can trace the materials down to [the] ultimate limit of just one atom. This will have a great impact on environmental and medical sciences." [...] Hla has been working for the last 12 years to develop an X-ray version of STM: synchrotron X-ray-scanning tunneling microscopy, or SX-STM, which would enable scientists to identify the type of atom and its chemical state. X-ray imaging methods like synchrotron radiation are widely used across myriad disciplines, including art and archaeology. But the smallest amount to date that can be X-rayed is an attogram, or roughly 10,000 atoms. That's because the X-ray emission of a single atom is just too weak to be detected -- until now.

SX-STM combines conventional synchrotron radiation with quantum tunneling. It replaces the conventional X-ray detector used in most synchrotron radiation experiments with a different kind of detector: a sharp metal tip placed extremely close to the sample, the better to collect electrons pushed into an excited state by the X-rays. With Hla et al.'s method, X-rays hit the sample and excite the core electrons, which then tunnel to the detector tip. The photoabsorption of the core electrons serves as a kind of elemental fingerprint for identifying the type of atoms in a material. The team tested their method at the XTIP beam line at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source, using an iron atom and a terbium atom (inserted into supramolecules, which served as hosts). And that's not all. "We have detected the chemical states of individual atoms as well," said Hla. "By comparing the chemical states of an iron atom and a terbium atom inside respective molecular hosts, we find that the terbium atom, a rare-earth metal, is rather isolated and does not change its chemical state, while the iron atom strongly interacts with its surrounding." Also, Hla's team has developed another technique called X-ray-excited resonance tunneling (X-ERT), which will allow them to detect the orientation of the orbital of a single molecule on a material surface.

YouTube's Doctor Volt repurposed a Blu-Ray drive, which are now easy to find on the cheap in the era of streaming content, to build a simple scanning laser microscope. Gizmodo reports: A couple of custom-designed and manufactured plastic parts were added to the mix to create a scanning bed for a sample that could move back in forth in one direction, while the laser itself shifted back and forth in the other. Unlike an optical microscope, where the entirely of an object is imaged at once, a scanning laser microscope takes light intensity measurements in increments, moving across an object in a grid and assembling a magnified image pixel by pixel. In this case, given the limitations of the Blu-Ray drive's spindle, which moves the sample being viewed back and forth, the image is assembled from 16,129 measurements (a 127x127 grid) and then scaled up to a 512x512 image.

A browser-based user interface written in Java allows focus adjustments and the scanning speed of the microscope to be modified, but at the slowest possible speed, the results are surprisingly good and recognizable. Certainly not comparable to what you'd get from lab equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars, but for a re-purposed Blu-Ray drive you could get for less than $20 on eBay, this is an impressive hack.

CNN reports that a professor and his students at Stanford's Autonomous Systems Lab have received "phase II" funding from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (which supports space robotics research) after proving the feasibility of their plan for robots to crawl through space caves. "The team will use the next two years to work on 3D simulations, a robot prototype, develop strategies that help the robot avoid risk, and test out [their cave robot] in a realistic mission environment — likely a cave site in New Mexico or California."

One of the students explains to CNN that "Caves are risky environments, but they're scientifically interesting. Our idea for this robot is to go far before people would get there to do interesting science and scope out the area."

CNN explains why space caves are so crucial: New research suggests that the best chance of finding past or present evidence of life on Mars requires going below its surface — at least 6.6 feet (2 meters) below. Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, which means that the surface of the red planet is bombarded by high energy radiation from space, and that could quickly degrade substances like amino acids that provide fragile evidence of life. Those harsh surface conditions also present a challenge for astronauts, which is one reason scientists have suggested that caves on other planets could be the key to future exploration. Vast cave systems on the moon and Mars could act as shelters for future space travelers.

Caves could also contain resources like water, reveal more about the history of a planet — and be havens for evidence of microbial life. On Earth, there are a varied range of cave systems, many of which remain unexplored, and they support diverse groups of microorganisms. But caves are dangerous — and since we've never peered inside a Martian cave, it's difficult to know what to expect.
The cave robot would presumably to be equipped with cameras, microscopes and LIDAR remote sensing, and the team envisions it will be tethered to a power-supplying rover on the surface.

One team member even told CNN the robots could be adapted to perform maintenance and upkeep on the planned "Gateway" lunar outpost between Earth and the moon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: From now on, Russian and Belarusian entities can only buy CPUs operating at below 25 MHz and offering performance of up to 5 GFLOPS from Taiwanese companies. This essentially excludes all modern technology, including microcontrollers for more or less sophisticated devices. Due to restrictions imposed on exports to Russia by the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union, leading Taiwanese companies were among the first to cease working with Russia after the country started full-scale war against Ukraine in late February. This week Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) formally published its list of high-tech products that are banned from exportation to Russia and Belarus, which prevents all kinds of Taiwan-produced high-tech devices as well as tools used to make chips (whether or not they use technologies originated from the U.S., U.K., or E.U., which were already covered by restrictions) to be exported to the aggressive nation. [...]

Starting today, Russian entities cannot buy chips that meet one of the following conditions from Taiwanese companies, reports DigiTimes:

- Has performance of 5 GFLOPS. To put it into context, Sony's PlayStation 2 released in 2000 had peak performance of around 6.2 FP32 GFLOPS.
- Operates at 25 MHz or higher.
- Has an ALU that is wider than 32 bits.
- Has an external interconnection with a data transfer rate of 2.5 MB/s or over.
- Has more than 144 pins.
- Has basic gate propagation delay time of less than 0.4 nanosecond.

In addition to being unable to buy chips from Taiwanese companies, Russian entities will not be able to get any chip production equipment from Taiwan, which includes scanners, scanning electron microscopes, and all other types of semiconductor tools that can be used to make chips locally or perform reverse engineering (something that the country pins a lot of hopes on).

Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that improves the resolution of an ordinary light microscope so that it can be used to directly observe finer structures and details in living cells. Phys.Org reports: "This material converts low resolution light to high resolution light," said Zhaowei Liu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego. "It's very simple and easy to use. Just place a sample on the material, then put the whole thing under a normal microscope -- no fancy modification needed." The work, which was published in Nature Communications, overcomes a big limitation of conventional light microscopes: low resolution. Light microscopes are useful for imaging live cells, but they cannot be used to see anything smaller. Conventional light microscopes have a resolution limit of 200 nanometers, meaning that any objects closer than this distance will not be observed as separate objects. And while there are more powerful tools out there such as electron microscopes, which have the resolution to see subcellular structures, they cannot be used to image living cells because the samples need to be placed inside a vacuum chamber.

The technology consists of a microscope slide that's coated with a type of light-shrinking material called a hyperbolic metamaterial. It is made up of nanometers-thin alternating layers of silver and silica glass. As light passes through, its wavelengths shorten and scatter to generate a series of random high-resolution speckled patterns. When a sample is mounted on the slide, it gets illuminated in different ways by this series of speckled light patterns. This creates a series of low resolution images, which are all captured and then pieced together by a reconstruction algorithm to produce a high resolution image. The researchers tested their technology with a commercial inverted microscope. They were able to image fine features, such as actin filaments, in fluorescently labeled Cos-7 cells -- features that are not clearly discernible using just the microscope itself. The technology also enabled the researchers to clearly distinguish tiny fluorescent beads and quantum dots that were spaced 40 to 80 nanometers apart. The findings appear in the journal Nature Communications.

Liu's team previously published a paper showing that his technology is also capable of imaging with ultra-high axial resolution (about 2 nanometers). They are now working on combining the two together.

An anonymous reader shares a summary from Howard Hughes Medical Institute: In a darkened room in Ashburn, Virginia, rows of scientists sit at computer screens displaying vivid 3-D shapes. With a click of a mouse, they spin each shape to examine it from all sides. The scientists are working inside a concrete building at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, just off a street called Helix Drive. But their minds are somewhere else entirely -- inside the brain of a fly. Each shape on the scientists' screens represents part of a fruit fly neuron. These researchers and others at Janelia are tackling a goal that once seemed out of reach: outlining each of the fly brain's roughly 100,000 neurons and pinpointing the millions of places they connect. Such a wiring diagram, or connectome, reveals the complete circuitry of different brain areas and how they're linked. The work could help unlock networks involved in memory formation, for example, or neural pathways that underlie movements.

Gerry Rubin, vice president of HHMI and executive director of Janelia, has championed this project for more than a decade. It's a necessary step in understanding how the brain works, he says. When the project began, Rubin estimated that with available methods, tracing the connections between every fly neuron by hand would take 250 people working for two decades -- what he refers to as "a 5,000 person-year problem." Now, a stream of advances in imaging technology and deep-learning algorithms have yanked the dream of a fly connectome out of the clouds and into the realm of probability. High-powered customized microscopes, a team of dedicated neural proofreaders and data analysts, and a partnership with Google have sped up the process by orders of magnitude. Today, a team of Janelia researchers reports hitting a critical milestone: they've traced the path of every neuron in a portion of the female fruit fly brain they've dubbed the "hemibrain." The map encompasses 25,000 neurons -- roughly a third of the fly brain, by volume -- but its impact is outsized. It includes regions of keen interest to scientists -- those that control functions like learning, memory, smell, and navigation. With more than 20 million neural connections pinpointed so far, it's the biggest and most detailed map of the fly brain ever completed. The scientists have published a pre-print paper describing their work, and have made the data they collected available to view and download.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Tea drinkers have been urged to avoid plastic tea bags after tests found that a single bag sheds billions of particles of microplastic into each cup. A Canadian team found that steeping a plastic tea bag at a brewing temperature of 95C releases around 11.6 billion microplastics -- tiny pieces of plastic between 100 nanometers and 5 millimeters in size – into a single cup. That is several orders of magnitude higher than other foods and drinks.

"We think that it is a lot when compared to other foods that contain microplastics," says Nathalie Tufenkji at McGill University. "Table salt, which has a relatively high microplastic content, has been reported to contain approximately 0.005 micrograms plastic per gram salt. A cup of tea contains thousands of times greater mass of plastic, at 16 micrograms per cup." Tufenkji's team bought four different tea bags from shops and cafes in Montreal, cut them open and washed them, steeped them in 95C water and analyzed the water with electron microscopes and spectroscopy. A control of uncut tea bags was used to check it wasn't the cutting that was causing the leaching of microplastics. The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Controlled Environments Magazine: Two high-speed electron microscopes. 7,062 brain slices. 21 million images. For a team of scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, these numbers add up to a technical first: a high-resolution digital snapshot of the adult fruit fly brain. Researchers can now trace the path of any one neuron to any other neuron throughout the whole brain, says neuroscientist Davi Bock, a group leader at Janelia who reported the work along with his colleagues on July 19 in the journal Cell.

The fruit fly brain, roughly the size of a poppy seed, contains about 100,000 neurons (humans have 100 billion). Each neuron branches into a starburst of fine wires that touch the wires of other neurons. Neurons talk to one another through these touchpoints, or synapses, forming a dense mesh of communication circuits. Scientists can view these wires and synapses with an imaging technique called serial section transmission electron microscopy. First, they infuse the fly's brain with a cocktail of heavy metals. These metals pack into cell membranes and synapses, ultimately marking the outlines of each neuron and its connections. Then the researchers hit slices of the brain with a beam of electrons, which passes through everything except the metal-loaded parts. "It's the same way that x-rays go through your body except where they hit bone," Bock explains. The resulting images expose the brain's once-hidden nooks and crannies.

You asked questions, we've got the answers!

Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998.

Christine took some time to answer questions from Slashdot readers.

Dave Knott writes: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to researchers who developed cryo-electron microscopy, which is described as a way to create detailed images of the molecules that drive life -- a technology that allows scientists to visualize molecular processes they had never previously seen. This is decisive for both the basic understanding of life's chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals. From the Nobel committee's press release: "Electron microscopes were long believed to only be suitable for imaging dead matter, because the powerful electron beam destroys biological material. But in 1990, Richard Henderson succeeded in using an electron microscope to generate a three-dimensional image of a protein at atomic resolution. This breakthrough proved the technology's potential. Joachim Frank made the technology generally applicable. Between 1975 and 1986 he developed an image processing method in which the electron microscope's fuzzy two-dimensional images are analyzed and merged to reveal a sharp three-dimensional structure. Jacques Dubochet added water to electron microscopy. Liquid water evaporates in the electron microscope's vacuum, which makes the biomolecules collapse. In the early 1980s, Dubochet succeeded in vitrifying water -- he cooled water so rapidly that it solidified in its liquid form around a biological sample, allowing the biomolecules to retain their natural shape even in a vacuum. Following these discoveries, the electron microscope's every nut and bolt have been optimized. The desired atomic resolution was reached in 2013, and researchers can now routinely produce three-dimensional structures of biomolecules."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: Imagine spending your whole life seeing the world in black and white, and then seeing a vase of roses in full color for the first time. That's kind of what it was like for the scientists who have taken the first multicolor images of cells using an electron microscope. Electron microscopes can magnify an object up to 10 million times, allowing researchers to peer into the inner workings of, say, a cell or a fly's eye, but until now they've only been able to see in black and white. The new advance -- 15 years in the making -- uses three different kinds of rare earth metals called lanthanides...layered one-by-one over cells on a microscope slide. The microscope detects when each metal loses electrons and records each unique loss as an artificial color.

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: A decade ago, a fossil hunter was combing the beach in southeastern England when he found a strange, brown pebble. The surface of it caught his eye: It was smooth and strangely undulating, and also slightly crinkly in some places. That oddly textured pebble, scientists report today, is actually an endocast -- an impression preserved in the rock -- that represents the first known evidence of fossilized brain tissue of a dinosaur (likely a close relative of Iguanodon, a large, herbivorous type of dinosaur that lived about 133 million years ago). Human brains and bird brains are packed tightly into the brain case, so that their convolutions leave an impression of the inside of the case. But dinosaur (and reptile) brains are more loosely fitted; they are surrounded within the brain case by membranes called meninges, tough sheaths that protect and support the brain. So an endocast of a dinosaur brain might be expected to show those structures -- and it did. But beneath them, remineralized in calcium phosphate, the researchers also spied a pattern of tiny capillaries and other cortical tissues -- the sort of fabric you'd expect for the cortex of a brain. That those textures were pressed up against the brain case doesn't necessarily mean that dinosaurs were bigger-brained and smarter than we thought, however: Instead, the dinosaur had likely simply toppled over and been preserved upside down, its brain tissue preserved by surrounding acidic, low-oxygen waters that pickled and hardened the membranes and tissues, providing a template for mineralization. The structure of the brain, studied with scanning electron microscopes, reveal similarities to both birds and crocodiles. The researchers reported their findings in a Special Publication of the Geological Society of London.

You asked, he answered!

Raspberry Pi founder and CEO Eben Upton has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers.

New submitter Alien7 sends an article about a group of bio-hackers who are out to bring DIY gynecological medicine to women who don't have easy access to it. Under the name GynePunks, they're assembling an arsenal of open-source tools for DIY diagnosis and first-aid care—centrifuges made from old hard drive motors; microscopes from deconstructed webcams; homemade incubators; and 3D printable speculums. ... So far the work is largely focused on diagnosis, and members of the collective are quick to note that what they’re creating is far from a comprehensive solution. It’s limited by some obvious factors—access to materials, a place to put them together, and the time to do it. But where the infrastructure does exist, and people are motivated to do so, it is very possible to establish some useful alternatives for self-care. As an example, Klau pointed to a pilot vinegar test program that’s lowered cervical cancer deaths by some 31 percent among poor women in Mumbai’s slums.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Science: Today's digital photos are far more vivid than just a few years ago, thanks to a steady stream of advances in optics, detectors, and software. Similar advances have also improved the ability of machines called cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EMs) to see the Lilliputian world of atoms and molecules. Now, researchers report that they've created the highest ever resolution cryo-EM image, revealing a druglike molecule bound to its protein target at near atomic resolution. The resolution is so sharp that it rivals images produced by x-ray crystallography, long the gold standard for mapping the atomic contours of proteins. This newfound success is likely to dramatically help drugmakers design novel medicines for a wide variety of conditions.

An anonymous reader writes: Eric Betzig recently shared in the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on high-resolution microscopy. Just yesterday, Betzig and a team of researchers published a new microscopy technique (abstract) that "allows them to observe living cellular processes at groundbreaking resolution and speed." According to the article, "Until now, the best microscope for viewing living systems as they moved were confocal microscopes. They beam light down onto a sample of cells. The light penetrates the whole sample and bounces back. ... The light is toxic, and degrades the living system over time. Betzig's new microscope solves this by generating a sheet of light that comes in from the side of the sample, made up of a series of beams that harm the sample less than one solid cone of light. Scientists can now snap a high-res image of the entire section they're illuminating, without exposing the rest of the sample to any light at all."