I have blown my trumpet against the gates of dullness

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I have blown my trumpet against the gates of dullness$ P.W. Hawkes* CEMES-CNRS, BP 4347, 29 rue Jeanne Marvig, F-31055 Toulouse Cedex 4, France Received 2 March 2002; accepted 2 March 2002

1. Books Literary criticism I think might be done in the form of paragraphs: that is to say, not from the standpoint of the scholar or the pedant, but from the standpoint of what is pleasant to read: if a book is dull, let us say nothing about it, if it is bright let us review it. Oscar Wilde, from a letter about the Lady’s World, which he edited.

1.1. Microscopy The two volumes of Progress in Transmission Electron Microscopy edited by X.-f. Zhang and Z. Zhang, which I have twice promised to deal with ‘next time’, have at long last been published [1]. During ‘‘the sixties and seventies, [when] transmission electron microscopy in materials science experienced a rapid and fruitful expansiony. China was trapped in political chaos’’, writes K.H. Kuo in his foreword. ‘‘When the nightmare was over, the scientists in China were confronted with the HREM at the atomic level and the AEM at the nanometer level. Amazed at these great achievements, electron microscopists in China took up the challenge heroically and worked $

Oscar Wilde, from a letter to Mrs George Lewis. *Tel.: +33-562-257884; fax: +33-562-257999. E-mail address: [email protected] (P.W. Hawkes).

feverishly to bridge the gap between China and the well developed countries in TEM’’. The ten chapters of the first volume, ‘Concepts and techniques’, are restricted to recent developments only and some are not suitable for the uninitiated—prior exposure to Reimer [2] or Williams and Carter [3] is indispensable. To begin, M.M. Kersker (JEOL, USA) describes ‘The modern microscope today’, a rather superficial account of the instrument, which concludes with four pages on ‘Microscopes in the future’: ‘‘From today the future addresses three areas where improvements, though considered and referenced in the past, are now possible for a variety of reasons [copy-editors are a fast-disappearing species]. These are: improvement in the energy spread of the primary electrons, the correction of lens aberrations to improve the resolution, and the improvement in mechanical automation and computer control of the microscope for more automated or even remote control’’. The chapter was presumably completed in 1997 or 1998, for the most recent reference to Cs correction is the paper ! Rose and Haider are by Krivanek et al. at Cancun. mentioned but no reference is given. Indeed, only seven references are given in all, in random order although the name-and-date system is used. Anyone unfamiliar with the history of the electron microscope would be well advised to skip Section 1.2, ‘Microscope development’, which gives a very odd picture of its theme. Thus, ‘‘The idea for an

0304-3991/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 0 4 - 3 9 9 1 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 1 4 7 - X

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electron microscope was first proposed by Rudenberg [sic] of Siemens Corporation in 1930. Patents were filed and were ultimately granted. In the United States, Farrand Optical Company, General Electric, North American Philips, and RCA took a license from him. Concurrently, Ruska in 1931, also at Siemens [sic], built and demonstrated an instrumenty’’. Later, he tells us that ‘‘A number of TEM companies were formed following the first commercialization by Siemens’’, among which AEI and Vickers [sic] are shown as separate companies; there is no sign of CSF, OPL Trub–T. . auber and Tesla though even Forge Flow [sic] gets a mention. UEMV is said to be a Russian firm and even so simple (and famous) a name as Carl Zeiss is misspelt. Mr. Kersker would do well to read ‘The story of European Commercial Microscopes’ by A.W. Agar [4] before next venturing into print. The standard of the next few chapters is, I am relieved to say, far higher: J.M. Cowley on ‘The quest for ultra-high resolution’, S.J. Pennycook and Y.Yan on ‘Z-contrast imaging in the scanning transmission electron microscope’, Z.L. Wang (Georgia Institute of Technology) on ‘Inelastic scattering in electron microscopy’ and S.Q. Yang et al. on ‘Quantitative analysis of high-resolution atomic images’. Incidentally, although K.H. Kuo tells us that ‘‘many chapter authors are young Chinese electron microscopists’’, this is one of the very rare chapters by Chinese microscopists living in China. All the others in this volume live in . Europe or the USA. Chapter 6, by the Hovmollers and T.E. Weirich, is on electron crystallography structure determination by combining HREM, crystallographic image processing and electron diffraction and this is followed by L.-c. Qin (IBM, San Jose) on ‘Electron amorphography’, a nice neologism, I thought. ‘Weak-beam electron microscopy’ is contributed by the fons et origo, D.J.H. Cockayne (whose address is still given as Sydney). The volume ends with chapters on ‘Pointgroup and space-group determination by CBED’ (Y. Liu, Lincoln NE) and on ‘Advanced techniques in TEM specimen preparation’ by S. Roberts et al. (Canada and USA). Volume 2, ‘Applications in Materials Science’, contains nine chapters, which I list more concisely:

mesoporous molecular sieves (W. Zhou, St Andrews), carbon nanoclusters (D. Zhou, Orlando FL), helicity of carbon nanotubes (L.-c. Qin, now at Tsukuba), low-dimensional materials (Z. Zhang et al., all Beijing), high-Tc superconducting Josephson junctions (J.-g. Wen, Tokyo), ion damage in superconductors (Y.Yan and M.A. Kirk, Argonne National Laboratory), misfit dislocations (J. Zou and D.J.H. Cockayne, Sydney), dislocation contrast analysis (Z.M. Wang and G.J. Shiflet, Valley Cottage NY and Charlottesville VA) and cryomicroscopy and 3-D reconstruction of macromolecular complexes (Z.-h. Zhou, Houston TX). The publishers have made the reviewer’s life particularly difficult by failing to include the authors’ names in the list of contents: for each chapter one must find the chapter, then turn to a third part of the book where the authors’ affiliations are listed. The books are well produced and contain much recent information. Many of you will have battered, dog-eared copies of Electron Microscopy and Analysis, by P.J. Goodhew, J. Humphreys and R. Beanland; now is the moment to replace them with the third edition [5], in which developments that have occurred in the 14 years that separate it from the second edition are well represented. The chapter headings remain simple and explicit: ‘Electrons and their interaction with the specimen’ or just ‘The transmission electron microscope’. Behind these headings, however, the explanations have been modified where necessary. The diagrams are clear and helpful and the language is easy to follow. Nevertheless there are topics that surely ought to be present but are not: I found no mention of contrast-transfer functions, for example; worse, despite all the progress in the last 3 years, the reader is not told that Cs has been vanquished. Electron holography rates only a few lines and the 1993 edition of Tonomura’s Electron Holography is cited in the bibliography, even though a second edition appeared in 1999. In conclusion, this new edition is a moderately good buy but it could have been much more up-to-date—could do better as school reports used to say! Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy by R. Brydson is likewise addressed to beginners but he has the advantage of a much narrower subject into

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which he can hence go deeper [6]. The language is again simple, with such chapter headings as ‘The EEL spectrum’, ‘EELS instrumentationy’ ‘Low loss spectroscopy’ ‘Elemental quantification’, ‘Fine structure on inner-shell ionization edges’, ‘EELS imaging’ and ‘Advanced EELS techniques in the TEM’. The explanations are easy to follow and I can confidently anticipate that copies of ‘‘Brydson’’ will soon be battered and dog-eared too. This will often be the first book on EELS to be put in the hands of newcomers to the subject and rightly so—the latter should not, nevertheless, assume that their elders are necessarily better: in Further Reading (p. 130), for example, the reference to Microscopy and Microanalysis is misleading, ICEM-1994 was not published by the San Francisco Press and I have doubts concerning the correctness of some of the URLs listed. In the same series of RMS Handbooks, published by Bios, is P.E. Champness’s Electron Diffraction in the Transmission Electron Microscope, another tremendously clear and useful little book [7] by an author whose scholarly life has been spent among electron micrographs of crystalline material. Her seven chapters cover ‘Diffraction and the EM’ ‘The reciprocal lattice and Bragg’s law’, ‘The reflecting sphere’, ‘Finding your way around reciprocal space: Kikuchi diffraction’, ‘The intensities of reflections’, ‘Determination of the Bravais lattice, point group and space group’ and ‘The fine structure in electron diffraction patterns’. The line diagrams and half-tones are well chosen and beautifully reproduced and both the author and the publisher can be proud of a volume in which the quality of the text and of the production are excellent. Every congress on electron microscopy in the physical sciences includes papers on grain boundaries but electron microscopy is not the only way of studying them. P.E.J. Flewitt and R.K. Wild have attempted to bring together most of what is known about these structures in their Grain Boundaries, Their Microstructure and Chemistry [8]. Of the five chapters, only one is of direct interest here: ‘Measurement of composition’ contains a survey of the different ways of looking at grain boundaries, which of course include TEM and EELS. The reader is assumed to be unfamiliar

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with such techniques and the treatment cannot, therefore, be very profound. The book will probably be used mainly for the very full accounts of composition and compositional changes and especially, of mechanical properties. A recent volume of the MRS Proceedings on Advances in Materials Problem Solving with the Electron Microscope [9] has not yet reached me, it will be described next time. Diamonds are almost as common as grain boundaries in the symposia at electron microscopy congresses these days, so I am including here the Diamond Films Handbook, edited by J. Asmussen and D.K. Reinhard [10]. ‘‘Over two decades of intensive science and engineering have gone into developing and understanding low-pressure diamond deposition. Diamond Films Handbook is a comprehensive source of information for readers interested in details of how low-pressure diamond synthesis is achieved as well as how the diamond may be used for practical applications’’. I pause only at Chapter 3, by L.J. Balk and R. Heiderhoff, in which ‘Film characterization methods: structure and composition’ are described. This contains a few pages about Raman spectroscopy, TEM and EELS, diffraction, luminescence, thermal conductivity and scanning probe techniques; although too brief to be very informative, they will point users of the other chapters towards fuller accounts. Good specimen preparation lies behind every sharp electron micrograph. ‘‘It took almost three years before publication of our [Giberson and Demaree’s] first paper on microwave fixation for electron microscopy’’, write these same authors in the Preface of their Microwave Techniques and Protocols [11], which collects 17 contributions on this theme by authors whose ‘‘methods and resultsy are the tangible evidence that microwaves can be used routinely as the basis for improved sample processing’’. There are chapters on animal tissues, plant tissues (persimmon endosperm, squash stem cells, red pepper fruit walls and Arabidopsis (the plant microscopists’ answer to Drosophila)) and veterinary diagnostics (herpes in koi gills—A ‘‘many prized koi were at risk’’—, duck plague, hepatomegaly and splenomegaly in lovebirds, kidney tubular EC in a turkey and Pacheco’s disease in a parrot, hepatitis in a

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bearded dragon lizard. The latter is absolutely fascinating through rendered hard to read by the excessive use of acronyms. I still do not know what EC is, though several columns of [34] are devoted to it). I must resist the temptation to examine all the remaining chapters in detail but be assured that if you study archived pathology sections, rat hippocampal slices, decalcification, sediments, Allium and Drosophila nuclei, motor endplates or skin, there is something for you here. Highly specialized therefore, but invaluable if you need this procedure. You will probably hesitate before warming up your takeaway lunch in the lab oven, however. In the life sciences at least, the electron microscopes now live cheek by jowl with several other types of microscope, and in particular with confocal and two-photon microscopes. Developments in the use of these instruments proceed apace and the collection edited by A. Diaspro, Confocal and Two-photon Microscopy, Foundations, Applications, and Advances, is therefore very welcome [12]. The 26 reasonably long contributions (occupying 553 pages) include many of the great names of the subject and cover instrumentation, techniques, image processing and numerous applications. I cannot list everything but the following selection gives the flavour of the contents. The first few chapters are by C.J.R. Sheppard, T. Wilson, A. Diaspro, C. Xu, J.E.N. . ook, . Jonkman, E.H.K. Stelzer, P. Tor C.J. de Grauw et al. and R. Wolleschensky et al. and cover the designs of the various kinds of instruments and their modes of operation. K.R. Castleman (author of a book on image processing) and P. Boccaci and M. Bertero explain how to process and restore images digitally. A long list of authors then describe applications to the study of live cells, the cell nucleus, Xenopus and transgenic mouse embryos, neuronal growth and morphology in brain slices, calcium imaging, and, in a very different domain, the characterization of integrated circuits and optoelectronics. I was relieved to see that no rabbits are ‘sacrificed’, since the editor includes ‘‘Pippi, a white and lovely rabbit’’ among his dedicatees. The book is well illustrated, with some colour, and the editor has clearly exerted a firm hand over his contributors to

produce an extremely informative and readable volume. Even if it is too expensive for individual ownership, you will want to have a copy in the library if you use these techniques. The centenary of the electron in 1997 generated several books and articles, some of which have been noticed here, and the process continues with Histories of the Electron, the Birth of Microphysics, edited by J.Z. Buchwald and A. Warwick [13], which originated in meetings at the Royal Society and Science Museum in London and at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology in Cambridge MA. This fascinating volume is divided into four parts: Corpuscles and Electrons; What was the Newborn Electron Good for? Electrons Applied and Appropriated; and Philosophical Electrons. The great merit of this collection is to make us rethink and reconsider the ‘authorized version’ of the identification of the electron in the last few years of the 19th century. What did Thomson actually think he was doing when he established the particle nature of the cathode rays? George Smith has some thoughtprovoking observation on this. We have already met Isabel Falconer in these pages [14] and here, she examines the reactions of Oliver Lodge and Walter Kaufmann to Thomson’s findings: ‘‘Thomson’s work might well have become invisible had it not been preserved in the British context by the likes of Lodge’’. Kaufmann (who almost discovered the electron just before Thomson, as did Wiechert, [15]) ‘‘placed particular emphasis on the respective theoretical and experimental researches of the Dutch physicists H.A. Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman’’. Graeme Gooday and Beno#ıt Lelong continue the discussion. Of the four contribution to the second Part, I was particularly caught by Helge Kragh’s account of the four different kinds of electron that were circulating in the late 19th century: ‘‘the electrochemical (or Stoney–Helmholtz) electron, the electrodynamical (or Larmor–Lorentz) electron, the cathode rays (or Thomson–Wiechert) electron and the magnetooptical (or Zeeman–Lorentz) electron’’. The other chapters, also full of fascinating insights into the minds of physicists a century or more ago, are concerned with the Zeeman effect (T. Arabatzis), O.W. Richardson (O. Knudsen)

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and the electron gas theory of metals (W. Kaiser). In the third section we come closer to modern times with Laurie M. Brown on ‘The electron and the nucleus’, L. Hoddesdon and M. Riordan on ‘The electron, the hole and the transistor’, M.J. Nye on ‘The electron in organic chemistry, 1900– 1940’ and K. Gavroglu on ‘The physicists’ electron and its appropriation by the chemists’. ‘Philosophical electrons’ opens with a question by P. Achinstein: ‘Who really discovered the electron?’ ‘‘Heroes are falling in this age of revisionist history. Thomas Jefferson, according to one recent authority, was a fanatic who defended the excesses of the French Revolution. Einstein was not the saintly physicist we were led to believe but was mean as hell to his first wife. And, more to the present purpose, J.J. Thomson really didn’t discover the electron. So claim two recent authors, one a contributor to this volume, Theodore Arabatzis, in a 1996 article on the discovery of the electron, and the other my very talented colleague, Robert Rynasiewicz, at a February 1997 A.A.A.S. Symposium in honor of the 100th anniversary of the discovery. I would like my heroes to retain their heroic status, however, my aim in this chapter is not to defend Thomson’s reputation but to raise the more general question of what constitutes a discovery. My strategy will be this. First, I want to discuss why anyone would even begin to doubt that Thomson discovered the electron. Second, I want to suggest a general view about discovery. Third, I will contrast this with several opposing positions, some of which allow Thomson to retain his status, and others of which entail that Thomson did not discover the electron; I find all of these opposing views wanting. So who, if anyone, discovered the electron? In the final part of this chapter I will say how the view I develop applies to Thomson and also ask why we should care about who discovered the electron, or anything else’’. After much fascinating discussion and a certain amount of polemic, P. Achinstein asks another question: ‘‘Why should we care about who, if anyone, was the discoverer, that is, about who was the first to be in an appropriate epistemic state for discovery with respect to some entity? It depends on who the ‘‘we’’ is and on what is discovered. As noted, not

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all discoveries and discoverers are of interest to all groups; some may be of interest to none. If what is discovered is important to some community, and if there was a discoverer, whether a person or a group, then simply giving credit where credit is due is what is appropriate and what may act as a spur to future investigations. In this regard discovery is no different from other achievements. If accomplishing something (whether flying an airplane, or climbing Mt. Everest, or discovering the electron) is valuable to a certain community, and some person or group was the first to do it, or if several persons independently were the first, then such persons deserve to be credited perhaps honored and rewarded by the community, especially to the extent that the accomplishment is important and difficult. Generally speaking, more credit should be given to such persons than to those who helped make the achievement possible but did not accomplish it themselves. Whether Thomson deserves the credit he received for being the (or a) discoverer of the electron is, of course of interest to him and to other contemporaries such as Lenard, Zeeman and Crookes, who thought they deserved more credit. It should also be of interest to subsequent physicists, historians of physics, and authors of textbooks who write about the discovery. The answer to the question of who discovered the electron, and hence who deserves the credit, is, I have been suggesting, not so simple. Part of that answer depends upon establishing who knew what, when, and how, which in the electron case is fairly complex. The other part depends on establishing some reasonably clear concept of discovery. In this chapter I have attempted to contribute to each task, particularly the latter’’. And finally, I liked the concluding sentence of the last note: ‘‘I am indebtedyto the editors of this volume fory convincing me to tone down my anti-socialconstructivist sentiments’’ though I wish he had not listened to them. Next, M. Morrison discusses the reality of spin and J. Bain and J.D. Norton ask ‘What should philosophers of science learn from the history of the electron?’ The answer is that ‘‘Physicists are fallible and their evidential base never complete, so that we cannot expect any theory to be error-free

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or final’’, a conclusion that may not sound very profound but is preceded by interesting commentary. Finally, we come to a chapter by N. Rasmussen (see [16]) and A. Chalmers, who discuss ‘The role of theory in the use of instruments; or how much do we need to know about electrons to do science with an electron microscope?’ As much as possible, we instinctively reply, but it is not as simple as that, as Rasmussen and Chalmers’ ‘‘casual browsing through the history of electron microscopy’’ brings out vividly. I leave you to read their most enjoyable browse for yourselves and conclude with a few lines from their conclusions: ‘‘All of this is to suggest that there is much more to the experimenter’s craft than dreamt about in many philosophies of science, particularly those that suppose that the link between experimental data and objects or systems in the world is forged by way of deductive connections between complete, mathematically formulated theories, making possible the tracing of the causal path from object via experimental apparatus to detecting or measuring device. Some experiments might be captured at least approximately by this characterization. But much more work needs to be done on how experimenters reason even in such experiments, especially in the various kinds of experiments beyond the classic type designed to test a theory. Making lists of the sorts of things experimenters have in their bags of tricks, as Franklin and Hacking especially have done to good effect, is only a start. The conceptual tools experimenters bring to bear should be related systematically to the subjects and purposes of their inquiry, as well as to their technical and cultural resources. And we must also not assume that an adequate taxonomy of experimental logic will be a static structure. Keeping the historical dimension of the experimenter’s craft in mind is essential, to help avoid overhasty universal claims about the essence of experimentation, and to help find patterns of change that may characterize different sciences in different contexts. The new enthusiasm among philosophers of science to study epistemology as scientists do it is unquestionably laudable. For this enthusiasm to bring philosophy of science substantially closer to its own subject matter, however, it must be tempered with the realization

that science might be much more heterogeneous and complex than philosophers have long been imagining.’’ When you read this, Professor Fang-hua Li will have reached her 70th birthday. Six of her colleagues (one of whom contributes to [1]) have anticipated this by presenting her with a handsomely bound collection of 37 of her key papers and abstracts [17]. The earliest is an abstract (in Chinese and Russian) in Acta Physica Sinica (1963), and Prof. Li did indeed begin her research career in Leningrad. There is nothing from the early 1970s for ‘‘During the Culture Revolution in China, the research was interrupted. I spent two years to do the physical labor in a country field and in a factory, so-called re-education’’. In 1977, she re-appears in Acta Phys. Sin. (now in Chinese and English) and from then on contributes extensively to the electron microscopy literature, frequently publishing in Ultramicroscopy, as we hope she will continue to do unless she decides to enjoy retirement in some other way. By Looking through a Scientist’s Microscope, D. Kunkel has observed and photographed Hidden Worlds, described by S. Kramer [18]. This is a colourful book for children, who are invited to ‘‘Imagine what it would be like toy look into the eyes of a carpet beetle, examine grains of pollen on a sunflower petal or take a peek at red blood cells the size of jelly doughnuts’’. Large colour micrographs accompany the corresponding captions. The next section covers ‘Becoming a scientist’, with a picture of ‘‘Dennis [Kunkel] working at one of his microscopesy.Dennis grew up in the Iowa countryside, where cornfields stretched for miles in all directions. Dennis helped tend the flowers and vegetablesy[he] loved nature and being outdoors but he did not know that someday he would become a scientist’’. Then comes ‘Working as a scientist’, where we are shown a helicopter in which Dennis travelled to a volcanic blast zone, where he found a Hydra and other life in the lakes. The remaining pages show him in a variety of predicaments and some of his micrographs. This is clearly aimed at a very young audience, it is of no intrinsic interest. Also, ‘‘Much of [D. Kunkel’s] research has been published in scientific journals’’, we are told, but a search in Biosis and Medline

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produced only a single publication, on ‘Envenomations and toxinology’, unless he is the same D. Kunkel who publishes (in French) on medical themes. Another D. Kunkel has tested ‘legal assumptions regarding the effects of dancer nudity and proximity to patron on erotic expression’ (Law & Human Behaviour 24 (2000) 507) but this probably is not our D. Kunkel either. My request to his website for a list of publications remains unanswered. 1.2. Image processing As I am mortal, so have I my faults and failings in common with other mortals. I believe, by a too eager thirst after knowledge, I have oftentimes, to gratify that insatiable humour, been at too great expense in buying books, and spending rather too much time in reading; for it seems to be the only diversion that I have any appetite for. Reading and study (might I be allowed the phrase) would in a manner be both meat and drink to me, was my circumstances independent. Thomas Turner, Diary of a Georgian Shopkeeper Image processing and image analysis ‘‘have a long history that can be traced back at least to the early 1960s. For more than two decades, the field was occupied mostly by computer scientists and electrical engineers and did not attract much interest from mathematicians. Its rather low level of mathematical sophistication reflected the kind of mathematical training that computer scientists and electrical engineers were exposed to and, unfortunately, still are: It is roughly limited to a subset of nineteenth-century mathematics. This is one reason. Another reason stems from the fact that simple heuristic methods, e.g., histogram equalization, can produce apparently startling results; but these ad hoc approaches suffer from significant limitations, the main one being that there is no precise characterization of why and when they work or don’t work. The idea of the proof of correctness of an algorithm under a welldefined set of hypotheses has long been almost unheard of in image processing and analysis despite the strong connection with computer science’’. It is with these strictures that O. Faugeras introduces Mathematical Problems in

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Image Processing—Partial differential equations and the calculus of variations by G. Aubert and P. Kornprobst, authors of this ‘‘wonderful contribution’’ [19]. Readers who share my distaste for hagiographic forewords, panegyrics on what is to follow, should not be put off: this moderately abstract text is full of interesting material, in which the authors show how the very shaky foundations of many image-processing procedures can be consolidated. The three chapters that follow the introduction and mathematical preliminaries are concerned with aspects of restoration, segmentation and ‘Other challenging applications’, notably sequence analysis and classification. As indicated by the title, the tools that most interest the authors are variational calculus and partial differential equations. The book is not an ;easy read but the authors have done as much as they could to help the reader and their text should act as a catalyst to authors of more accessible texts. ‘‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’’, I had murmured as I tried not to be irritated by the patronizing tone of the Foreword, but my reaction was unfair: the lesson that image processing has much to gain from the applied mathematicians is persuasive. But of course we knew that already—G. Aubert and P. Kornprobst are not the first in the field but they are certainly among the leaders. The next few books are the kind that O. Faugeras disapproves of but with which most of us have to manage, at least, until new texts midway between them and the austerities of Aubert and Kornprobst appear. The first, Digital Image Processing Algorithms and Applications, by I. Pitas [20], presents a host of ‘‘algorithms and lab experiments in a rather systematic wayyThe book is accompanied by lab exercises that are based on eikona, a digital image processing software developed by the author’’. This software can be downloaded from the Web, as can related transparencies in pdf format. The subjects covered are those traditionally included in such texts: the various transforms, filters and enhancement, compression, edge detection, segmentation and shape description; the closing chapter consists of exercises using eikona. These are a lot of topics to squeeze into a comparatively short book and in some places, the treatment is so short that the

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reader will need to look elsewhere in order to grasp the subject—greyscale mathematical morphology, for example. Nevertheless, the book will be welcomed for its extensive advice on ways of programming the various algorithms. S.K. Mitra and G.L. Sicuranza have brought together an impressive collection of experts on the many facets of nonlinear image processing in their book of the same name [21]. They have accepted, which editors are all too often unwilling to do, that readers of the book will almost certainly be reasonably familiar with the subjects treated and they have therefore wasted few pages on introductory matter, unwanted by the expert and inadequate for the beginner. S. Peltonen et al. open the book, with an account of ‘Analysis and optimization of weighted order statistic and stack filters’, and related topics are then discussed by G. Arce and J. Paredes (‘Image enhancement and analysis with weighted medians’), K. Barner and A. Hardie (‘Spatial–rank order selection filters’) and E. Abreu (‘Signal-dependent rank-orderedmean filter’). C. Kotropoulos et al. then describe ‘Nonlinear mean filtersy’ and S. Thurnhofer explains what Teager filters are; if they are new to you, as they were to me, you may like to know that they are defined by yðnÞ ¼ x2 ðnÞ  xðn  1Þxðn þ 1Þ in the 1-D case. He is followed by G. Ramponi on ‘Polynomial and rational operatorsy’ and G. Sapiro on ‘Nonlinear partial differential equations in image processing’. Then come chapters on mathematical morphology by P. Salembier and P. Maragos and an account of coordinate logic filters by B. Mertzios and K. Tsirikolias. The three concluding chapters deal with fuzzy filters (F. Russo), ‘Digital halftoning’ (D. Lau and G. Arce) and ‘Nonlinear image operators and higher-order statistics’ (C. Zetzsche and G. Krieger). A very useful and modern collection, highly recommended. S.-t. Bow has revised his Pattern Recognition and Image Preprocessing, first published in 1992 [22]. It is divided into five large parts: Pattern recognition, Neural networks for pattern recognition, Data preprocessing for pictorial pattern recognition, Applications and Practical concerns

for image processing and pattern recognition, with a few mathematical appendices at the end. Each theme is dealt with in detail, the writing and explanations are clear and lavishly illustrated with worked examples and I am sure that this massive compilation will be found to be a very useful tool. The only oddity that struck me concerns the appendices, one of which explains the elements of matrix algebra. It is inconceivable that anyone who did not already know how to manipulate matrices should so much as take this book down from the shelf. Geometric Data Analysis by M. Kirby is ‘‘Intended for students and researchers whose work involves analyzing patterns in large, highdimensional data sets’’. His book [23] is ‘An empirical approach to dimensionality reduction and the study of patterns’ and covers an unusually wide range of ways of finding good bases for the representation of data. The object is not just to compress voluminous information; the act of transformation can itself be revealing: ‘‘However, because they are intimately related to the data, these transforms often provide special insight into the structure of the data. Indeed, it is not unusual for an empirical transform to reveal basic facts concerning the data that are not at all apparent from a standard analytical approach’’. The Introduction begins with a chapter on pattern analysis as data reduction followed by a recapitulation of the essentials of vector spaces and linear transformations. The next section discusses optimal orthogonal pattern representations and is mostly concerned with the Karhunen–Loe" ve expansion. Then comes a section on time, frequency and scale analysis, with chapters on Fourier analysis and wavelet expansions. The final part is concerned with adaptive nonlinear mappings, and examines radial basis functions, neural networks and nonlinear reduction architectures. Very nicely written and presented, I think that O. Faugeras would not object to housing a copy on his shelves. I particularly enjoyed the choice of examples, among which lip motion and machine lip-reading have generated a new word, eigenlips: ‘‘In this setting, a word o is viewed as a short sequence (P ¼ 16) of high-dimensional (120  1000) images yIn the coordinate system of the ambient space, a

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Fig. 1. The first 16 eigenlips ordered from left to right and top to bottom. Courtesy of M. Kirby and John Wiley and Sons.

word is represented by N ¼ 12000 spatially and temporally correlated time series. To reduce the dimensionality of this representation, we digitally record a set of words, to be used for training, that characterize the lip motion, i.e., we assume that the data set is large enough to span the space of all relevant lip motions. From this training set, we compute the eigenpictures or eigenlips [Fig. 1]yA sample word (not from the training set) is represented by the sequence of 16 images shown in [Fig. 2]. These images were projected onto the first 20 eigenpictures. The result of the reconstruction is excellent; see the right of [Fig. 2]’’. A certain linear operation that is attracting attention is defined by the integral: Z N fa ðuÞ  Ka ðu; u0 Þf ðu0 Þdu0 ; N

Ka ðu; u0 Þ  Aa exp½ipðcot a u2  2 cosec a uu0 þ cot a u02 Þ ; pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi Aa  1  i cot a; a  ap=2; when aa2j: Do you recognize this? It is the fractional Fourier transform, about which H.M. Ozaktas, Z. Zalevsky and M.A. Kutay have

written a full account [24] that covers the basic ideas and their relation to the Wigner distribution and then goes on to explain the role of the fractional transform in optics, in filtering, estimation and signal recovery and pattern recognition. If you need to know about this transform, this is certainly an excellent place to find out about it. In Modern Sampling Theory, Mathematics and Applications edited by J.J. Benedetto and P.J.S.G. Ferreira, I discovered that there is more to sampling than the sampling theorem that we met first as undergraduates and later in the work of A.J. Jerri and I was pleased to read that Jerri’s work ‘‘has had an enormous influence’’. This book [25] is again very mathematical but the explanations are so full and accessible that most physicists will have no difficulty in following them. It opens with an introduction by the editors, in which they explain why there is so much more to sampling than the basic theorem. Then, as an aperitif before the main text, we are given an English translation of the celebrated 1933 paper of V.A. Kotel’nikov. This brings us to Part I, ‘Sampling, wavelets and the uncertainly principle’ with chapters by G.G. Walter, J.A. Hogan and J.D. Lakey,

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Fig. 2. Left: A sequence of snapshots of lip motion. Right: The reconstruction of lip images after projection on to a 20-dimensional optimal subspace. Courtesy of M. Kirby and John Wiley and Sons.

J.-P. Gabardo and A.I. Zayed. Part II is concerned with ‘Sampling topics from mathematical analysis’, among the five chapters of which is ‘Residue and sampling techniques in deconvolution’ by S. Casey and D. Walnut. Last comes a part on ‘Sampling tools and applications’ with contributions on nonequispaced data (D. Potts et al.), minimum rate sampling of signals with frequency support over non-commensurable sets (C. Herley and P.W. Wong), oversampled filter banks (T. Strohmer), noisy and grouped data (M. Pawlak and U. Stadtmuller), . MRI images (M. Bourgeois et al.) and lastly, sampling of the rotation-invariant Radon transform (L. Desbat and C. Mennessier). All extremely useful and well organized. The computer tools for displaying images and data that can be cast into the form of an image are increasingly flexible and powerful. But they are also so numerous that the very tool you need may exist unbeknown to you in a distant field. My last book in this section is an example of this. P. Volino and N. Magnenat-Thalmann have written an entirely serious and instructive volume [26] on Virtual Clothing, the simulation of clothes and clothing in which they observe that ‘‘a trend of employing a multi-disciplinary approach has started. The community of textile engineering and computer graphics has begun to combine their expertise to come up with solutions that can satisfy that of both communities. While the textile engineering offers precise details of modeling cloth, at a microscopic level, the computer graphics provides the framework for animation and visualization. Since it is difficult to cover all

the methods with adequate details in the book, additional details of the modeling of cloth and garment simulation have been included for the MIRACloth system as a case study. The current techniques in computer graphics enable the simulation of a piece of cloth as well as a complete set of garments with the interaction with their environment’’. Collision detection, which ‘‘determines the contact of the cloth with its environment, as in the case of a garment in contact with the body’’, is examined, as is seaming, rendering and wrinkling. A whole chapter is devoted to MIRACloth, which builds and animates garments on virtual actors. The opening chapters are full of basic physics and mechanics: the elastic constants (Young’s modulus, Poisson’s ratio and so on) are given for a ‘‘plain wool–polyester fabric of 125g/m2 density’’ in the warp and weft and diagonal directions, for example. Finally, we arrive at ‘MIRACloth at work’, a versatile system capable of simulating ‘‘rapid and changing motion and numerous collisions, not encountered in usual garment simulation situations’’, the first of which is indeed a challenge: cloth and rigid object in a rotating tumble-drier. ‘‘At no point did cloth objects interpenetrate or cross each othery The cloth pieces were crumpled by high deformations, but they could be unfolded at any time. This test exhibits the effectiveness of the system in handling complex cloth motion in a very general animation context’’. The next example is even more impressive: ‘‘A severe self-collision and response demonstration is carried out by letting a very long and flexible ribbon fall on itself. The ribbon contains

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20 000 triangles, forming a globally anisotropic mesh with about ten triangles wide. The ribbon initially hangs vertically above a surface and is then left to fall freely onto the surface. As it falls, the ribbon folds and crumples on the surface and forms loosely folded pile of loops, that soon becomes too heavy and falls over as more cloth material falls. Aerodynamic effects deform the ribbon still in the air from its initial vertical position. While the ribbon falls, the surface slowly tilts so that the ribbon eventually slides off. The loops unfold and disappear as the ribbon is stretched by its falling parts’’. ‘‘The crumpling dress’’ likewise exhibits great verisimilitude. Then we attend a fashion show on ‘The virtual catwalk’: ‘‘Using the system described in this chapter, a fashion show exhibiting several garments worn by different top-models has been created virtually. Some of the garments presented are tight-fitting garments, such as skirts or trousers. Another creation is a wedding dress with a long tail that glides over the ground. A complex de! cor and high-quality rendering were used. The system successfully simulates skirts and trousers clinging to the body using friction only, as well as realistic wrinkles as the wedding dress tail glides over the floor. The same mechanical model was used for all the simulations, demonstrating its versatility for reproducing cloth in various contexts’’. And lastly, a bra and panties are built onto a model: ‘‘By reducing the friction, the garment quickly reaches its most relaxed position on the body, while turning on the friction back on [sic] maintains it realistically as the body is moving’’. Attached to the back cover is a CD-ROM, not multi-platform but this no longer obliges me to find a free PC as I have now equipped my iMAC with the ‘‘Virtual PC’’ software, with which Windows CDs can be read (rather sluggishly, presumably this is the Mac’s revenge for this slight to its supremacy). 1.3. Optics J. Pe$rina has been contributing to coherence theory for many decades and has now edited a volume on Coherence and Statistics of Photons and Atoms. The 11 chapters of this compilation [27] are

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very difficult reading unless you are well versed in the subject—the editor is conscious of this for a formidable list of recent books on quantum optics is offered in the Preface as ‘‘excellent prerequisites for reading this book’’, adding that ‘‘Of course, classical books—[Louisell and Loudon]—are also quite helpful’’. But if this IS your subject, then I have no doubt that the wealth of up-to-date information collected here will be found invaluable. Several topics related to Pe$rina’s subject are covered in the latest volume of Progress in Optics [28]. The themes of the six contributions are all a little far from ultramicroscopy and I therefore just list them briefly. First, S.Ya. Kilin from Minsk surveys Quanta and information. G. Kurizki et al. (Rehovot and Tel Aviv) then discuss Optical solitons in periodic media with resonant and offresonant nonlinearities. Next, P. Facchi and S. Pascazio (Bari) on Quantum Zeno and inverse quantum Zeno effects followed by M.S. Soskin and M.V. Vasnetzov (Kiev) on Singular optics and G. Jaeger and A.V. Sergienko (Boston MA) on Multi-phonon quantum interferometry. The volume concludes with Transverse mode shaping and selection in laser resonators by R. Oron et al. (Rehovot and Haifa). Lagrangian Optics by V. Lakshminarayanan, A.K. Ghatak and K. Thyagarajan comes as a relief after the mental challenge of Pe$rina’s collection; this is a gentle old-fashioned book [29] about rays and Fermat’s principle, which goes beyond some earlier texts in that gradient-index media (the photon’s answer to the electron lens) are also included. There is a chapter on the Lie algebraic handling of geometrical aberrations, based on the work of A. Dragt and E. Forrest. Its principle interest is the explicit treatment of the less familiar types of optical device. 1.4. Meat Mistress: There’s boiled mutton, but don’t give your master any carrots. (To him) Relations are strained between you and carrots, aren’t they, Ned dear? Edward Burne-Jones: Carrots and I are not on speaking terms. When I see a carrot in the street I

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walk on the other side. Potatoes and I are on speaking terms merely, there’s no friendship between us. Burne-Jones Talking When Marcel Dekker sent me their press release for Meat Science and Applications edited by Y.H. Hui, W.-k. Nip, R.W. Rogers and O.A. Young and I saw that this last editor works at MIRINZ, the New Zealand address of a former President of the New Zealand microscopy society, I asked the publisher to send a review copy if the book contained any microscopy. He kindly supplied one [30], even though the index indicates that microscopy is mentioned only on pp. 22–25, two of which are unfortunately blank on my copy so if you buy the book, make sure that yours is not defective. There may not be much microscopy but there is information of all kinds for the edification of carnivorous ultramicroscopists. The more squeamish should avoid Part III, ‘Slaughtering and carcass processing’ though the whole purpose of T. Grandin’s chapter on ‘Antemortem handling and welfare’ is to emphasize the importance of ‘‘maintaining high standards of animal welfare’’, ‘‘because it is the right thing to do’’ and because ‘‘careful, quiet handling will also improve safety and reduce employee injuries. Large animals are dangerous when they become agitated’’ and who can blame them? In ‘Distractions that cause balking’, he tells us that ‘‘animals may balk and refuse to move when they see things in the race that scare themy A calm animal will stop and look right at the distractions that scare it (Fig. 2) [which shows us a calm pig gazing at a sparkling reflection]. You should crouch down and look up the race to see what the animals are seeing. It is important to get right down at the animal’s eye level’’. We can only hope that most slaughterhouses have a T. Grandin, down on his hands and knees among the balking pigs! The other five sections cover the chemistry, biochemistry and biotechnology of meat, meat safety, processing meats, and meat production byproducts, workers’ safety and waste management. In ‘Processing’, P.C. Coggins has a fascinating chapter on ‘Spices and flavoringsy’. ‘‘Spice is a magical word. Names that imply adventure and

romance such as Zanzibar, Ceylon, and Java are used to describe varieties of spices that we know and use consistently. It is often the allure of these names or varieties of spices that entice us into flavoring our foods, perfumes, or other concoctions with such exotic additions. The term spice is derived from the Latin word species which means ‘‘fruits of the earth’’. Spices were sought after as zealously as gold and were accepted as currency in the late 13th century. Spices inspired nations to compete globally with fervor in search of new trade routes and even to go to war. The search for spices actually was behind the discovery of new continents and the merging of Eastern and Western civilizationsy Spices have played a major role in shaping world history. They were used in a host of applications, including ingredients of incense, embalming preservatives, perfumes, cosmetics, and medicines. They were also found to change insipid food into more palatable food and were used to preserve some foods. The early uses of spices can be traced back to Egypt, China, Mesopotamia in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, India, and to the ancient Romans and Greeks. Spices were a valuable commodity, and as a result, the spice trade was disputed over. Spices were used as money and for payment of debt in historical times. Therefore, if a country possessed all of a certain spice, or controlled the cultivation and distribution of such spice, then there was much power to be had and used. The story of spices and the spice trade is complete with battles, romance, power struggles, conquests, and much more mystery and suspense. It is indeed a blueprint of world historyy. Toward the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, immigrants from Europe and Asia began entering the United States in enormous waves. Each group of immigrants brought with them their own unique culture, ethnic food preferences, and habits. Usually the newcomers continued their traditional culinary habits for one or more generations. To satisfy these demands, they brought with them spices and herbs from the Old Country, many of which were unknown in their new land. These unknown spices and herbs created another virtually unstoppable

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trading explosion. Due to this explosion in demand for spices, dominance in the ancient spice trade shifted to the United States. Today, the heart of the spice trade is at Wall Street in New York City. Western ports such as San Francisco and Los Angeles also have substantial volumes of spices entering their ports’’. It is an effort to stop quoting from Ms Coggins’s chapter. I learnt that ‘‘white pepper comes from the same plant as black pepper, but the berries are picked ripe instead of green’’. Two-thirds of the world’s cloves come from Tanzania, half of Grenada’s revenues come from nutmeg and mace, and vanilla (not a spice) is the second largest product of the Malagasy Republic. I knew from experience that ‘‘Capsicum peppers are known to have a very hot bite, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming’’ (a peasant in my local openair market assured me that they should be eaten raw chopped up in salads—one minute fragment was enough to convince me that they should not); pungency is measured by the ‘‘Scoville heat value method’’, which requires at least five expert, trained panellists: ‘‘ the extracts of red peppers, oleoresins, have a very concentrated pungencyy from 200 000 to 1 000 000 Scoville heat units’’ (not in Cardarelli [31] incidentally, who goes from schoeme=6912 m or 21 600 zareths in the ancient Assyrio–Chaldean–Persian system to scripulum=1.135416667 g=1/24 uncia). Another irresistible chapter is ‘Intermediate-moisture meat and dehydrated meat’ by T.-c. Huang and W.-K. Nip, Table 1 of which classifies such meat into ham (chunk), 8 items; slab, sheet, slice, 10 items; strip, 7 items; pieces, 3 items; floss, 3 items; powder, only one item (Sudanese sharmoot) and sausage, a mere 5 items, none of which is French or English. ‘‘Parma ham’’, for example, ‘‘is made from 1-yearold pigs weighing roughly 180 kg raised in the yregion around Parma. The pigs must be fed exclusively on corn (maize), oats and rinds from Parmesan cheese’’. If pemmican is a reminder of Arthur Ransome, you may like to know that ‘‘The original pemmican was invented by the American Indians, specifically the Cree. It is a dried meat product made from buffalo, caribou, or deer and later beef, which was packed in melted fat into specially made rawhide bags. The meat was dried

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in the sun and pounded or shredded prior to being mixed with the melted fat. This preserving method is based on the air exclusion provided by the fat, which not only reduces oxidative changes but diminishes microbial growth. This is accomplished not only by suppressing the growth of aerobic bacteria, but also because the combination of a fat medium and dry conditions deprives the microorganisms of the water indispensable to metabolic functions. Mostly, the pemmican was flavored and partially preserved by the addition of dried, acid berries’’. I cannot recall encountering ndariko in my youth, though it too must surely have figured in the travellers’ tales: ‘‘Ndariko is a Fufulde (i.e., Fulani) and Hausa name for sun-dried meat with or without salt and spices. It is prepared mostly from beef and occasionally mutton and goat meat. The meat is boned and the flesh torn into strips no more than 2 cm thick. The best products are obtained by tearing the muscle to pieces so that a group of muscle fibers can be dried as a unit. Salt, if applied, is only at a seasoning, rather than a preservative, level; so also is the use of spices. The meat strips and cleaned intestines, with or without salt seasoning, are hung out in the sun on sticks, ropes and galvanized/barb wire or spread on grass mats to dry. Drying takes usually 6 to 7 days depending mainly on the weather and to some extent the nature and size of meat strips. During drying the meat strips are turned daily, especially if spread on mats, to ensure uniform dehydration. The fully dried product is stored in sacks, pots or metal cans and has a shelf life of 3 to 6 months under ambient conditions’’. 1.5. Writing skills and abbreviations Sir,—I must protest at [your reviewer’s] use of the phrase ‘‘pretentious mediocrity’’ to describe Anne-Marie Albiach. Any ‘‘English prejudice about the hermetic’’ natureyresides fairly and squarely, or rather unfairly and roundly, in the reviewer’s mind-setyAt the same time, one major and practical problem with the work of AnneMarie Albiach yis that it does not lend itself easily to being extracted from the book-length matrices she fertilizes. From a letter in the Times Literary Supplement

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He [Ruskin] was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteaux, bags, rugs and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight in building up their sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art. Friedrich Max Muller . It is not often that I am at a loss to know what to say about a book but Guide to Writing Empirical Papers, Theses and Dissertations by G.D. Garson has almost stumped me [32]. Not that there is anything wrong with it, it is filled with information, advice, sources of guidance and checklists at the ends of the chapters to make sure that the reader has got the message. Indeed, the best way of illustrating my bewilderment is to list the sections, which begin with ‘Selecting a topic’, followed by ‘Reviewing the literature’, ‘Developing your model’, ‘Presenting your case’, ‘Coming to a conclusion’ and ‘Final topics’. (Incidentally, these sections are divided into sub-sections: ‘A. Choosing a subject’ and ‘B. Forming an outline’ in the case of the section on selecting a topic but these section and sub-section headings appear only in the Contents List, nowhere in the text. The book thus begins with ‘1. Brainstorming’, which is the third level of subdivision. This in turn has a subheading ‘I. Choosing a subject’, with further subdivisions 1–5; then we meet ‘A. Brainstorming’, again subdivided into 1–4, some of which are yet again divided into (a), (b)y I cannot believe that this appalling tangle is part of the message that G.D. Garson wishes to get across to us.) Let us now look at what he has to say about some of these topics. ‘‘Selecting a subject seems like an easy task, but it is entirely possible to make critical mistakes at this early stage, sabotaging the ultimate outcome. Many students make bad choices at the outset— choices that, in the case of a dissertation, can literally waste years of effort. A good choice will not only be better from a scholarly point of view, but it will also provide a more do-able, fun, and satisfying creative activity for the writer. A good subject has five attributes: 1. A good subject is importanty 2. A good subject is focused y3. A

good subject is organizedy 4. A good subjective is informativey.5. Finally, a good subject is readabley Choosing a subject can sometimes be a real obstacle for writers, particularly beginning authors. The conventional advice, apart from asking one’s advisor for ideas, is to write about something that is of interest to you personally. If you are in a position to conduct personal interviews related to a topic, this, too will help you understand your topic better and may generate ideas to refine your topic. Other common prewriting activities include outlining, talking with others, reading, field trips, doodling, creating lists, writing journals, and creating story boards. The prewriting book by McKay (1989) contains no fewer than 70 types of prewriting exercises! Searching the world wide web can be a useful way of generating a topic. At least one web site, ‘‘Filamentality’’ at http://www.kn.pacbell.com/ wired/fil/, is designed as a fill-in-the-blank interactive web site that guides novice users through using the web to pick a writing topic. There are also web sites such as ‘‘Hot Sheets’’ (http:// www.hotsheet.com) and ‘‘Research Paper Help’’ (http://www.researchpaper.com) that categorize topics and provide Internet links to help prospective writers explore possible topics. The former includes links to dozens of web search engines. The latter includes an ‘‘Idea Directory’’ that generates research ideas with Internet links based on user input’’. The book is intended for all disciplines, but much of the advice seems irrelevant as far as the physical and life sciences are concerned. Could a physicist or a cell biologist, say, about to begin work for a Ph.D. really know enough about the various research areas to select a topic by brainstorming? (‘‘Brainstorming should not be considered an optional exercise. In almost all cases, a serious effort at brainstorming will generate significant improvement in the writer’s research concept. Brainstorming is a worthwhile effort’’): ‘‘You, as leader, start the brainstorming session by outlining the objective (for example, to generate interesting topics in the area of criminal justice). Keep the atmosphere relaxed and emphasize that the purpose is to generate as many ideas

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as possible, not to evaluate the ideas’’. There is much more along these lines, which seemed to me divorced from reality. But then I expect that G.D. Garson would retort that it is I who am divorced from reality. ‘‘Well, I wonder if I am’’, as Max Beerbohm mused when accused of being ‘‘the inimitable, and the incomparable, and the sprightly and whimsical’’. Again much later in the book, we find ‘Writing fundamentals’. ‘‘Even with the best style of writing, organization and logical appearance of evidence, the researcher’s presentation can be undermined by ignorance of the fundamentals of grammar, discussed briefly here before turning to more significant writing concerns. The twelve most common grammatical mistakes of the elementary variety are’’ then listed. All 12 are indeed heinous but it is difficult to believe than anyone capable of committing such blunders will have got this far into the book. They range from ‘‘Wrong: womens’ sports. Correct: women’s sports’’ to ‘‘Wrong: Waiting for the necessary resources, including paper, pens, and ink cartridges, employees speedily warehousing incoming cartons in bulk containers’’. Correct: ‘‘Waiting for the necessary resources, including paper, pens. and ink cartridges, employees speedily warehoused incoming cartons in bulk containers.’’ To be fair, I found the ‘Writing fundamentals checklist’ full of good sense, with advice on keeping multiple back-up copies of any electronic documents and on lubricating friction in the home (‘‘Have you negociated with your spouse some sort of exchange that recognizes the sacrifices involved in his or her support of your thesis or dissertation efforts?’’). I was less happy about ‘‘Have you used ‘who’ with verbs and ‘whom’ with prepositions? Wrong: I don’t know whom that was. That is who it was for. Correct: I don’t know who that was. That was whom it was for’’. It is much easier to comment on The Work of Writing by Elizabeth Rankin, who came to realize that, when colleagues asked her to ‘‘recommend a good book on writing’’, what they wanted was ‘‘something that acknowledges the challenges of academic and professional writing yet makes the work of writing easier. Or, if not easier then at least more comprehensive, more manageable and more

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productive. What would such a book look like? Ideally it would focus on the intellectual work of writing, that is, on the thinking, strategizing, and decision making that academic and professional writers do. It would also have to deal with the complex issues of purpose, audience, genre and voice that all writers face. That’s what this book [33] sets out to do’’. Her five chapters cover The work of writing, Contributing to the professional conversation, Meeting readers’ needs and expectations, Finding your professional voice and Seeing the project through. The three appendices explain how to organize a writing group, furnish sample book proposal guidelines and list ‘A few good books on writing’ (few of which are mentioned by Garson [32], though as his references are scattered throughout the book and grouped by theme, I may have missed some). This book is intended for would-be writers who are shy, or blocked or uncertain, or self-conscious or simply modest. I think that many of them will gain confidence from it. Scientific and Technical Acronyms, Symbols, and Abbreviations collected by U. Erb and H. Keller [34] is as bulky and almost as heavy as the MSA Proceedings [47]. Its 2074 pages take us from ‘‘A aaxis to b-axis ratio (of crystal lattice) [Symbol]’’ and ‘‘A Abdomen; abdominal’’ to ‘‘ZZ Zero Zone [Navigation]’’ and ‘‘Z-Z Axes (through any point) [Symbol]’’. The authors have cast their net very wide and we meet not only ‘‘serious’’ acronyms such as HOLZ and STEM but also the more casual ones such as AFAIK (as far as I know); this incited me to make sure that FYI (for your information) was also there. It is, next to FYM (farm yard manure), which led me to check DH (dung heap), but apparently that is not in use. As in all such compilations, it is easy to point out gaps. In the world of microscopy, IFSEM is there but CES(E)M, CAPSEM and CIASEM are all absent. Of the individual microscopy societies, EMSA, EMAG, RMS, SFME, SIME, SEME, JSEM and DGEM are all in but MSA, SFm (or . SFMu), SSOM, SCANDEM, OGEM, NVvM, KSEM and MSSA are not. SBME is in but SBM, BVEM and BVM are not; likewise, MSC is there but not SMC (except as the Socie! te! des Mathe! matiques du Congo). Many of the Internet

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terminations (.gov, .edu, .uk, etc) are included but .gouv (the French equivalent of .gov) is not, doubtless because it requires .fr after it. (Nor is the guv affected by Edwardian sons and London taxi-drivers.) Numerous abbreviations of journal titles are given, often in the very short form used by habitue! s of the corresponding speciality (JJAP, for example and JVST). I have no idea how these journals were selected, there are certainly very many more than are included; thus JACS is there (J. Am. Chem. Soc.) but JACC (J. Am. Coll. Cardiol.) is not, though it is present in the expanded form. Numerous currencies are listed (GTQ, Guatemalan quetzal) and vast numbers of official bodies. The Dutch SEN, however, is absent. One important missing acronym is IBAN. Accents and diacritical marks are treated somewhat cavalierly, thus the Czech hatcheks are missing on Cesk. Cas. Fys., most Polish dots and slashes are ignored and even such common accents as the Spanish tilde and e! in French have often vanished. It is all too easy to snipe but the completeness of this huge list (about 200 000 entries, we are told) is already very remarkable; the compilers deserve more praise for what is there than criticism for what is not! 1.6. A translation Italian readers may like to know that La structure de la matie"re, du ciel bleu a" la mati"ere plastique by A. Guinier is now available in their language [35]. Lecturers will no doubt pirate some of the less technical illustrations, one of which shows workmen creating from roughly cubic paving stones the circular patterns that still decorate many Paris streets while another represents a 1-D repeating pattern from a Cairo mosque and a 2-D pattern in a 16th century Italian carpet.

2. Proceedings ‘‘Gentlemen, the time is coming when life will be taken up solely with the present, and men will keep from the past only the revealed truths that live for ever. All the rest will be chaff, a trail of litter clogging minds and buildings. When that

time comes’’, he added in a tone of voice that I am bound to call prophetic, ‘‘The Caesar of the day will issue a decree to this effect: ‘The entire contents of all public and private libraries are hereby declared null and void with no value beyond that of their constituent materials. Chemical analysis having shown that wood pulp, seasoned by time, provides a magnificent fertilizer for the land, we henceforth dispose that all books, old and new, be taken to large municipal dumps at the entrance to every village, so that farm labourers can help themselves to as much of the precious substance as they need, depending on the amount of land they have to till’.’’ ! Nazar!ın Benito Pere! z Galdos, 2.1. Supra-national meetings Every 2 years since 1993, there has been a Multinational Conference on Electron Microscopy (MCEM); today these bring together microscopists from Austria, Croatia, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Italy and Slovenia. The fifth of these was held in the delightful baroque city of Lecce in September 2001 and the abstracts [36] fill a substantial volume (578pp). The opening lecture (by me) is followed by the plenary lectures sponsored by the European Microscopy Society: A.M. de Schryver on ‘Single molecule and ensemble fluorescence of dendritic systems’, B. Jouffrey et al. on ‘Inelastic events: some physics behind and their use in electron microscopy’ and D. Keller on ‘Microscopical study of single molecules’. H. Gundlach (from Carl Zeiss) then describes the Leonardo da Vinci programme ‘‘Teaching microscopy’’, of which ‘‘The most evident achievement of the Leonardo activities in Pavia is the institutionyof a Master in Techniques of Microscopy Analysis in Biology’’. Next, two parallel plenary sessions [sic, though it seems a contradiction in terms] on Arts and environment and on Advances in specimen preparation. I always enjoy the first theme and there is plenty of fascinating material here. The session is opened by P. Albertano, who gives a very professional and detailed account of what lives on stone surfaces in Roman hypogea. G. Bottiroli et al. then tell us about the binding media (animal

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glue, egg yolk and casein, gum Arabic and linseed oil) and final varnishes (sandarac, dammar, colophony, carnauba, copal, mastic and waxes) in Old Master paintings, notably by Leonardo da Vinci, Piero della Francesca and Giotto. Several papers on air pollution and one on harmful algal blooms (HABs, not in Erb and Muller [34]) off the Tyrrhenian coast bring us to the Sultanate of Oman, and in particular, to the Bronze Age site of Ra’s al-Jinz. There, L. Constantini et al. found ‘‘Insect remainsyinside charred fruits and stones of date palms during their archeobotanical analysis’’y . The remains of Phoenix dactylifera were in a test trench excavated during the 1993–94 season in the southern slope of RJ-2 and were associated with fruits and stones of Zizyphys spina-christi and with heads of yellow tunnafish (Thunnus albacares (Bonaterre)). The achaeological units, in which plant and animal remains were found, have been dated to the second half of the third millennium BCyThe archaeobotanical study of about 300 charred date stones revealed that many of them were damaged by holes, burrows and biting areas produced by spermatophagous beetles. A more careful analysis allowed the recovering of five adults, two larvae and 14 isolated fragments of mature adults. The insects were evidently present in the date stones before their carbonization and probably, several other insects could be present also inside the most solid of the collected stones’’. A LEO variable-pressure SEM revealed that only one insect species was present and some ingenious detective work showed that this was Coccotrypes dactyliperda, ‘‘a spermatophagous beetle widespread throughout the temperate, subtropical and tropical areas, well-known as the most dangerous pest of the immature fruit of Phoenix dactylifera’’. After refreshing our memories concerning the life cycle and habits of the beetle, the authors conclude that ‘‘while the exploitation of the fruit trees Zizphus spina-christi and Phoenix dactylifera is, to some extent, well known and archaeologically documented, less is known about the ancient biogeographical relation between the date palm and its most important pest, Coccotrypes dactyliperda. The only record available concerns the remains found at Abi’or cave, near Jericho, but they are relatively too

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recent (3rd century BC) to have had some relevance in the study of the domestication of the date palm. On the contrary, the insect remains from RJ-2 belonging to a period (3rd millennium BC) and to a geographical region (the Oman Peninsula) considered of crucial importance in several papers dealing on the spread of the date palm. There is no other information available about the presence of infested date stones and associated beetle remains in the archaeobotanical literature. At present, the remains of RH-2 seem to be the more ancient records for the occurrence of the date palm pest in the Arabian Peninsula’’. The title of the contribution by C. Genestar and J. Palou says it all: ‘Evaluation of the biodeterioration process of a coffered coating from an historical building’ in Palma de Majorca. The same authors have also identified ‘several blue pigments by electron microscopy’ in ‘‘some religious Majorca works of art’’, though we are told no more about these. Finally, D. Hradil et al. $ z and Prague) describe their work on a (from Re$ ‘‘polychromed wooden sculpture (St Nicolas church in B!ılovec), wall paintings (St Ann’s Church in Prague), gothic wood panel painting (National Gallery in Prague) and baroque canvas painting of Ch. A. Coyper (Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava)’’. Art watchdogs will be relieved to know that ‘‘Wary sampling [was] realized by qualified restorers’’. This has only brought us to p. 56 of these proceedings and I must treat the remainder more superficially. ‘Advances in specimen preparation’ opens with a masterly (or is mistressly more correct these days?) review by A. Warley followed by contributed papers. We then have four long sections on Biology, Materials science, Advances in instrumentation and Advances in probe microscopy, from which the quality of research in the MCEM countries can be assessed. I was, however somewhat taken aback by the fact that, whereas ‘Plant cell biology’ deals with onions, cupressus, apples, olives, Urtica and Parieteria, Oxalis petals, and blackberries, the majority of the articles in ‘Microscopy in human health II’ [my italics] deal with rats and mice, with one on the myosalpinx of the mare, and even one on the (admittedly unusual) jellyfish Turritopsis

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nutricula! To be fair, there is one paper on human hair, from ‘‘12 persons without any conclamated diseasey and a patient affected by trichorhinophalangeal syndrome’’. Every 4 years, the microscopy societies of Germany, Switzerland and Austria meet together at a Dreil.andertagung. The 2001 meeting was held in Innsbruck and, for the first time, the one official language was English, thereby making the contents of this traditionally very high-level congress potentially accessible to a much wider audience. It is all the more regrettable, therefore, that the abstracts do not form a supplement to Optik and the European Journal of Cell Biology as have those of all the preceding Dreil.andertagungen and many DGEM congresses. The abstracts book distributed to participants [37] begins with the opening lectures (M. Ruhle . on ‘TEM at the cutting edge’ and U.B.Sleytr on ‘2-D protein crystals (S-layers): from cell structure to nanotechnology and biomimetics’ and three tutorials by H. Heinrich, F. Hofer et al. and R. Hegerl. These are followed by four symposia: Instrumentation and methods; Applications in biology and medicine; Applications in physics and materials science; and State of the art specimen preparation techniques. The abstracts of the EDO-Kolloquium (which used to be published in extenso in BEDO) fill the next six pages and five workshops and an author index (five pages with four columns each) conclude this dazzling collection. There are numerous contributions of great interest throughout but I concentrate here on the first symposium, which begins with ‘New concepts in electron optics’: instabilities in EM (R. Hoeschen and F. Phillipp), live phase . imaging by electron holography (E. Volkl), SESAM 1 (D. Krahl et al.), electrostatic correction of Cc and Cs (C. Weissb.acker and H. Rose), the nanosecond, multi-frame TEM (O. Bostanjoglo . and H. Domer), Zernike- and Boersch-type phase . plates (E. Majorovits and R. Schroder), novel components [a monochromator] for high-resolution TEM (M. Haider and S. Uhlemann), applications of Cs-corrected TEM (K. Urban et al.), beam splitters (H. Friedrich), quadrupole projectors (V. Gerheim and H. Rose), a mirror corrector (P. Hartel et al.), a multi-channel off-axis SE detector (M. Kienle and E. Plies), a pulsed mirror

EM (O. Bostanjoglo and H. Kleinschmidt), graphical imputs and outputs for computations (B. Lencova! et al.), the Triebenberg Laboratory (H. Lichte et al.), miniaturized electrostatic lenses (R.Y. Lutsch et al., M. Rauscher et al. and S. Schubert et al.) and electron interferometry and holography in reciprocal space (F. Zhou and E. Plies). Next, 23 abstracts under ‘Combination of modern microscopical methods’ followed by ‘Quantitative high-resolution TEM’. I should like to give a full list of the contributions to this symposium, which are all close to the interests of readers of Ultramicroscopy, but feel compelled to be selective. Among the abstracts, then, are quantitative HRTEM (T. Gemming), inversion of dynamic scattering (K. Scheerschmidt), quantitative off-axis holography (M. Lehmann et al.), aberration-corrected microscopy (M. Lentzen et al.), EELS and HRTEM of dislocation cores (W. Sigle et al.), the contrast mismatch between real and simulated images (K. Du and F. Phillipp), the influence of elliptical illumination on acquisition and correction of off-axis holograms (M. Lehmann), aberration determination (R.R. Meyer and A.L. Kirkland), violation of the weak phase-object approximation (R. Knippelmeyer et al.), differential phase contrast in STEM (T. Uhlig and J. Zweck) and experiment design in quantitative TEM (S. van Aert et al.). The last two parts of this first section are concerned with advanced analytical TEM and modern SEM methods (which includes a somewhat way-out contribution by P. Melchert and K. Techmer, who have studied fish from ‘‘rivers in North-Eastern Mongolia, where excessive gold mining led to a change within the distribution of grain sizes and grain morphology of the surrounding sediment’’). Here too, we meet aberration correction, this time for LVSEM (D. Maas et al.). I think that this is sufficient to display the merits of this meeting. It bodes well for the forthcoming ICEM in Durban if the travel costs can be found. SCANDEM brings together microscopists from the four Nordic counties. In 2001, they met in Stockholm and nine symposia, plus three plenary lectures and four ‘presentations related to the exhibitions’ made a busy week [38]. The plenary lectures were delivered by J.L. Hutchison

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(analysing 1-D crystals inside carbon nanotubes by HREM), A. Brisson (Cryo-EM and AFM reveal how annexins self-organize into functional 2-D arrays on lipid membranes) and N.J. Zaluzec (TelePresence collaboratories). The nine symposia covered the expected themes very adequately, with a marked pedagogic flavour, a substantial proportion of the lectures being invited (all, in the case of Symposium 6, Thin films and grain boundaries). The Proceedings is an archival document, for most abstracts fill two pages, with micrographs and line drawing as well as text. It is pity that it does not form a supplement to a journal, which would ensure that it survived in subscribing libraries. At Microscopy Barcelona 2001, microscopists from Spain, France and Portugal met together, joined on this occasion by the Spanish cell biologists. As a result, there were rather more biological papers and posters than usual. A plenary lecture on ‘Conservation science and cultural heritage’ by P. Lave! drine is followed by two common sessions, the first on Digital imaging (with papers by N. Bonnet, M. Chami et al., A. Pascual-Montano et al. and C. Plisson et al.), the second on New techniques and improvements in microscopics (B. Lencova! , P. de Wolf and S. Lesko, G. Matteucci, A. Pe! rez-Pe! rez and myself). Ten sessions on cell biology and a further eight on biological applications of microscopy occupy the next 349 pages. Then come ‘Materials applications of microscopy’ and ‘SPM and new microscopies’. A rich and varied collection [39]. It is not easy to detect specifically Iberic subjects, in the absence of a detailed list of contents, but I noticed a study of alpeorujo compost (‘‘a semisolid waste produced by the two-phase centrifugation technique to extract the oil in olive oil mills’’) by F. Carmona and F. Torrella; like P. Albertano at MCEM, M. Herna! ndez-Marine! et al. have examined ‘‘biofilms attached to surfaces of hypogean monuments’’. L. Corral et al. and P. Vita et al. remind us that there are still close links between Brazil and Portugal in their papers on Amazonian fish. From Amazonian fish to the VI Congreso ! Interamericano de Microscop!ıa Electronica in Mexico is not too large a step. This sixth meeting held under the auspices of CIASEM (the South American counterpart of CAPSEM and the EMS)

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took place in Veracruz in October 2001 and the Proceedings [40] fill a substantial special issue of ! Acta Microscopica. At first sight, this seems very well organized, with a detailed list of contents, the abstracts and an author index but the absence of page numbers in the list of contents makes it difficult to locate individual articles. First, we have * on phase the four plenary lectures: V.M. Castano space E.M.; M. Lozada–Cassou on macroion adsorption; V. Rodrigues et al. on an in situ HRTEM study of nanowires; and V. Tsutsumi et al. on the protozoan parasite Entamoeba histolytica (which causes amebiasis). These are followed by a long section on Materials Science, with sub-sections on Metallurgy, Amorphous materials and polymers, Semiconductors, Composites, Natural resources, Nanoparticles, Catalysis, Thin films, and Hydroxyapatite. Since this last section is mostly about teeth, with a single excursion to the shells of ostrich eggs, it leads us naturally to the Biological Sciences section, which is subdivided into Cell biology, Parasitology, Pathology and General biology. Throughout, the subject matter is very modern and the quality of many abstracts can perfectly stand comparison with those in the MSA proceedings, for example. ‘Natural resources’ has some unusual and regional material. You may recall that the Popocatepetl volcano erupted violently in June 1997, and G. ! Mondragon–Galacia et al. have not only collected samples of the ash during the eruptions but have also ventured bravely down into the Xitle crater to fill more Petri dishes with specimens. The material was then examined by light microscopy,(where it appears to have looked rather drab (‘‘black, glasslike, brown amber’’); in SEM, grains with wrinkled surfaces because visible; EDS showed that silicon and oxygen are dominant, many other elements being present in small quantities; XRD found albite and anortite structures; and finally, TEM gave further information about the nanometric particles present, which appeared to correspond to illminute phases. G. Gonza! lez M. et al. have examined serpentinite textures in the TEM : ‘‘In Tehuitzingo, State of Puebla, the Xayacatlan formation of the early Paleozoic Acatlan Complex [is] composed of more than 1000 m of serpentinite and related metasomatic rocks’’. Samples of

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several pages of the Grolier codex have been examined by low-vacuum SEM by V. Rodr!ıguez Lugo et al., whose results ‘‘represent a very important contribution in the authenticity evaluation and origin of the document’’. We are expected to know what the Grolier codex is, but the authors could perfectly well have refreshed our memories as half a page of their two-page abstract has been left blank. From the references, I deduce that it is ! the Codice Techcaloyan de San Pedro Totoltepec (Estado de Me! xico), but I still don’t know what is ! on art in it. (There was a long session at Cancun and archaeology but nothing about San Pedro.) Moving on to hydroxyapatite, we learn a great deal about dental crystallography and discover that the materials science of avian eggshells is poorly understood. Mammoths too belong to this section and their ‘‘Bonesy offer a lot of information about the diet of the studied specimen, as well as [being] useful in its dating’’. G. Garc!ıa–Rosales et al. have attempted to shed light on the uranium and thorium isotope dating technique but ‘‘The environmental conditions cause preferential leaching of the uranium and thorium owed to the deterioration of the crystalline structure of the hydroxyapatite that constitutes the major percentage of the bony structure. In general, bony remains of mammoths are located in lacustrine zonesy’’. The oral presentations in the life sciences cover many medical themes: trypanosomes, Trichomonas vaginalis and AIDS, Leishmania mexicana, osteoarthrosic cartilage, sialolitiasis (‘‘an uncommon disorder of the salivary glands’’), the Gerstmann– Str.aussler–Scheinker syndrome (another of the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or ‘‘prionopathies’’), colon adenocarcinoma liver metastases, Alzheimer’s disease, hepatitis C and several cancers. There is ‘pure’ cell biology too, with a new view of meiosis by G.H. Va! zquez–Nin and ‘The discovery and ultrastructural characterization of a novel structure in the cell nucleus of plants’ by L.F. Jime! nez–Garc!ıa. On the last morning, it was the turn of the leaves of the white mangrove, retinal adaptations in nocturnal birds and starch granules in strawberries. The fragrance of the ‘‘Camarosa strawberry nursery crownsyfrom Zamora, Michoaca! n’’ inspires more poetic prose than scientists usually allow

themselves: ‘‘The vesicle size was always constant’’, write L. Maca! s–Rodr!ıguez et al., ‘‘resembling a bird’s egg and a pool of them simulate a nest of birds’’. The posters again span many areas of medicine and biology—and although the materials scientists may have appropriated teeth (and tusks), the biologists keep a firm hold on gastronomy. Admittedly the paper by C. Gutie! rrez–Wing et al. on the abalone is concerned with organisms that live on and perhaps spoil the shell and not on the edible parts of the creature but the abstract of C. Lopez–G. et al. will be digested eagerly worldwide, from the fish-and-chip shops of England to the consumers of French fries in the USA, not forgetting the amateurs of moules frites in Flanders: ‘SEM image analysis of changes in potato parenchyma, at different temperature and times of frying’ is their subject and I feel that G.D. Garson and his brainstormers [32] would agree that it satisfies all their criteria for a good research subject. ‘‘Processing of potato induces major changes in the parenchyma thus influencing its physical and sensorial properties. Food frying process combines cooking and drying in hot oil, at around 2001C. This induces the formation of a crispy and oily outer layer, and a cooked core. Given the large daily consumption of fried products in the world and the trend towards reducing fat consumption in the diet, there is a need to understand the mechanisms of textural changes, dehydration and oil absorption along the process. This work contribute with information generated with SEM routines on microstructural changes induced by frying of potato parenchyma, at different temperatures and time of fryingy. The more time of frying at constant temperature (1801C) in potato parenchyma induces the more dehydration, which in turns induces bigger spaces filled with oil. No cell wall rupture is observed. The increase of roughness support the founds made with light microscopy and those made by Pedreschi et al. with Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy (CLSM), the latter who proposes the oil arrangement into the fried parenchyma as an ‘‘eggbox’’, where no cell wall rupture occurs’’. This subject has a long history, for R.M. Reeve and E.M. Neel published an article on ‘Microscopic structure of potato chips’ in the American Potato

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Journal as long ago as 1960. Still in the kitchen, X. Montiel (in the section on Pathology) examines ultrastructural changes in ‘‘postmortem tenderization’’ of meat, for the results of such treatment are apparently unpredictable and the consumer complains.

2.2. National meetings Let us set out in Asia, where several congresses have been held, some familiar, others less well known. The better known ones are the two Japanese happenings, the Annual Meeting held in May 2001 in ACROS Fukuoka and the Symposium, held in November 2001 in the National Institute for Materials Science, in conjunction with the Seventh International Symposium on Advanced Physical Fields. The volume of Denshi Kenbikyo% in which the Annual Meeting is recorded [41] is largely in Japanese, with only a few texts in English; in the Symposium volume [42], however, papers in Japanese are in the minority and the titles of those that are in Japanese are frequently provided in English. The 42 oral contributions and 59 posters cover a selection of themes from materials science and cell biology, with numerous invited speakers from Europe and the USA. In the former area, nanomaterials figure largely, with contributions on atomic-scale composition analysis of semiconductor quantum dots by TEM, nano-analysis for properties of nanodevices in real world, nanoceramics and nanocomposites, quantized deformation mechanics of nanomaterials, micro- and meso-porous materials, lattice fringes formed by low-loss electrons as observed using spatially resolved EELS, sub-nano analysis by STEM–EELS and creating a filtered image. These are from the oral contributions only, the coverage of the posters is still wider. In cell biology, we meet glucose transporters, the role of membrane phospholipids, T-cell triggering, singleparticle analysis, kinesin-family motor proteins complexed to microtubules, self-assembly and polymorphic supercoiling of the bacterial flagellum, AFM, SNOM and SPM in cell biology, muscle contraction studied by cryo-microscopy and probabilistic distance geometry, bacterio-

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rhodopsin and the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. An extremely impressive collection. It is however, much less well known outside Asia that many other CAPSEM countries have flourishing electron microscopy societies, several of which publish their own journals. The Electron Microscopy Society of Malaysia, for example, holds annual meetings and issues a Bulletin entitled MicroSoM [43] to its members, handsomely produced and printed on glossy micrograph-friendly paper. This is not just a news bulletin, each issue contains a few scientific articles (‘‘Synthesis and TEM study of tubular titania– alumina nanoparticlesy’’ by T.G. Ling et al., for example, in a recent issue, and a study of the bacteria that cause cause tail-rot and scale-drop in sea bass, groupers, golden snappers and mangrove snappers cultured in floating cages off the Malay coast, by K.K. Win and T.S.T. Muhammad). The Microscopy Society of the Philippines is a more recent foundation. It held its second General Assembly and Scientific Conference in Diliman, Quezon City in November 2001. The Korean Electron Microscopy Society held its first meeting as long ago as 1967 and has published a journal since 1969 [44], incomplete sets of which are to be found in some European Libraries. The Journal of the Electron Microscopy Society of Thailand, on the other hand, was new to me though I find that it has already reached volume 16 in 2002 [45]. This too is very well produced and supplements contain the abstracts of the papers delivered at the annual conferences of the Society. In the issue before me (1999), most of the contributions in materials science could be found in any major conference today, but there is one specifically Thai study: P. Dararutana et al. are engaged in the Fabrication of Ancient Thai Glass Project, under the sponsorship of Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn and both the Bureau of the Royal Household and the Chemical Department of the Royal Thai Army are thanked for their support. (Other Royal Houses, please note!) In the paper included here, ancient China glass is studied by SEM and inductive coupling plasma techniques; related work on ancient Thai glass has already appeared in J. Electron Microsc. Soc. Thailand. The papers in the life sciences are more concerned

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with local creatures, the abalone Haliotis asinina, for example, Fasciola gigantica, which appears to be a parasitic worm, and most exotic of all, the worm Acanthostomum burminis, which was ‘‘collected from the intestine of snake, Xenochropis piscator in Maesa stream, Doi Suthep-Pui National Park, Chiang Mai Province’’. Most interesting, I hope to be able to report on subsequent meetings in due course. India too has a flourishing electron microscopy society, which held its 24th conference at the Punjab University in Chandigarh in February 2001 [46]. In the physical sciences, there were sessions on Nanostructure, Metallurgical and other materials sciences, Surface morphology and Thin films; in the life sciences, there were naturally Cell biology and Biomedicine but also Aquatic sciences, Plant ultrastructure and Entomology. There are good things throughout, including a study by H.R. Esmaeili et al. of a very rare fish Aphanius ginaonis, which lives only in a hot, sulphurous spring in the protected area of Geno, near Bandar Abbas (Iran). Glyptothorax garhwali is another unusual fish, ‘‘inhabiting the fastflowing hillstreams of Western Himalayas. The most important characteristics in response to the harsh water current coupled with the variety of substrate is the integumentary modification in the form of an adhesive disk which has become a life saving kit for this fish’’ (A.K. Tyor et al.). In entomology, S. Dey et al. tell us that ‘Electron microscopy promises to solve some major problems in Muga silk industry’: ‘‘for indoor rearing of muga silkworm, vertical posture during feeding will play a very important role’’. It is all too easy to be carried away by the Life Sciences and I must now turn to the physics. There are papers on surface rutilation of catalysts (P.N. Mhan Das et al.), on the surface topology of jute non-woven fabrics (A.K. Majumder et al.), on rubber surfaces (K.N. Pandey et al.), on steam-turbine bearing metal surfaces exposed to contaminated lubricants (A. Prabhakaran and C.R. Jagga) and many other topics. In the Earth Sciences, we encounter a most fascinatng paper on fossil conchostraca from a bore-hole in Raniganj coalfield (S.C. Ghosh et al.). All the sections contain new and interesting findings. Before leaving India, I should just

mention that the EMSI has resumed publication of a Bulletin, which contains scientific contributions as well as society news. The Indonesian Society of Microscopy and Microanalysis and the Chinese Society of Microscopy (based in Taiwan) meet regularly but I have not seen any publications. We now leave Asia for the Americas, where several meetings have been held. First, the annual MSA meeting, which was held in Long Beach CA in August 2001, though not in the former Cunarder Queen Mary where I once participated in a Scanning congress. The immensely heavy proceedings volume [47] is not popular with the FedEx delivery man, who makes a point of driving as close as he can to the front door of my laboratory to minimize the portage, and this year is no exception, with 1296 thick glossy American A4 pages (plus lviii pages of front matter). From the foreword, we can guess that the frailer members of MSA have also been complaining: ‘‘We expect that this will be the last year that our proceedings will be published in this large book format’’, write R.M. Anderson (MSA) and R.W. Linton (MAS), who are ‘‘evaluating different options for future proceedings’’, to be published by Cambridge University Press who take over from Springer in 2002. I cannot even list all the sessions here, for there are more than 50 of them in the 32-page list of contents, which very usefully gives the authors and titles of every abstract; there are also subject and author indexes. The first section to catch my eye was on electron tomography (17 abstracts), which shows that this technique is gradually finding its way into the physical sciences. I should have liked to pass hastily over ‘Emerging pathogens: something old, something new’ but the book sprang open at p. 164 where S.E. Miller and D.N. Howell describe the enemy: ‘‘The mention of emerging pathogens brings to mind sensational exotic and feared microorganisms such as Ebola virus, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hantavirus, West Nile virus, Yersinia pestis (plague), and prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE, ‘‘mad cow’’ disease) which have been associated with variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. However, other organisms that

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have been known for some time can be classified as emerging pathogens as they continually mutate, recombine, and adapt, causing misery and death. Crowded, unsanitary living conditions can play a role in both recombination of viruses and in rapid spread of new and old agents. Influenza virus, with its ever-changing antigenicity and immune evasiveness, is a prime example. A major category of emerging diseases is that of drug-resistant organisms, such as vancomycinresistant enterococci, methicillin-resistant staphylococci, and multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Many of these cause nosocomial (hospital-acquired) diseases. Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Plasmodium falicipirum (malaria), staphylococcus, streptococcus, pseudomonas, enterococcus, and HIV have all developed resistance to therapies. Re-emergence of an old disease can result from an increase of a nonvaccinated population. Rubella virus has re-emerged in unvaccinated migrant workers who are from foreign countries and/or of lower socioeconomic status. A wide variety of new pathogens capable of infecting man, other animals, and plants have emerged in recent years, and they continue to evolve and spread. A few of these agents are truly new agents or newly discovered or identified organisms. Examples are Legionella pneumophila (Legionnaire’s disease), Clostridium difficile (necrotizing colitis), Helicobacter pylori (ulcers), and Bartonella henselae (cat scratch fever). In some cases, diseases such as stomach ulcers and some cancers have existed for years but have only recently been discovered to be associated with etiological agents. Increased awareness due to better detection and identification methods has brought these organisms to the forefront. Cyclospora, helicobacter, bartonella, hepatitis C virus (HCV), legionella, papillomaviruses and retroviruses are all agents which have been associated with specific maladies as a result of improved detection methodsy. As a result of the sexual revolution and relaxed moral standards, sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s) are on the increase. These include HIV, hepatitis viruses (hepatitis B virus [HBV], HCV), herpes viruses (herpes simplex virus [HSV], cytomegalovirus [CNV], human

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herpes virus [HHV]-8), genital papillomaviruses, and drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhea. Changes in technology permit organism spread by contaminated water and air conditioning systems (e.g., legionella), by surgical and diagnostic instruments (e.g., helicobacter on endoscopes), or by transplantation (e.g., HCV, CJD). Geographic spread of disease organisms through more widespread human travel (e.g., Dengue, Ebola viruses), transport of vectors in shipping containers (e.g., mosquitoes in tires containing stagnant water), and increased mobility of insects and animals (e.g., rabies virus, West Nile virus, Borellia burgdorferi (Lyme disease) accounts for some emerging diseases. Food-borne illnesses are a world wide problem. In addition to agents that actually invade and cause disease, numerous organisms cause tremendous morbidity and some mortality through toxin production. Food-borne organisms include Clostridium botulinum, Staphlococcus aureus, cyclospora, Norwalk virus, E. coli O157:H7, and Listera monocytogenes.’’ And these are merely excerpts: it seems amazing that any of us survive to read their abstract, but this is a common fallacy shared by the poet Zygmunt Frankel: WITH ALL THE pills, IUDs, condoms diaphragms, safe periods, coitus interruptus, abortions, accidents, wars, and emigration, why is the bus so crowded? The last paper in this section, ‘Public Health Laboratory preparedness: bioterrorism the new challenge’ by R.F. Meyer of the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program needs no comment by me. A section on quantitative STEM honouring ‘the contributions of John Silcox’, concludes with an account of ‘Progress with the IBM very high

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resolution STEM’ by P.E. Batson et al. A long section is devoted to quantitative TEM of interfaces and a later section on ALCHEMI is organized by J.C.H. Spence. Another long section is entitled ‘Microscopy in the real world’ and is subdivided into Forensics and environmental issues, Semiconductors and materials, TEM, Natural materials and Alloys and other materials. In the first subsection, E. Doehne et al. (of the Getty Conservation Institute) tell us that ‘‘Salt weathering [of monuments] by thenardite (sodium sulfate) and mirabilite (sodium sulfate decahydrate) is especially destructive, yet is still not fully understood’’. W. Moorehead, from the Orange Country Sheriff–Coroner Department, lists ‘‘The following casework examples [which] show the variety of evidence confronting the trace analyst: *

*

*

*

*

*

a substance poured into a clear liquid to render a vending machine inoperable so the suspects could burglarize the moneybox multi-colored fibers from a little girl’s dress found on the carpet of a suspect in a child abduction case green particles taken from the wound tracks in an officer involved shooting and homicide using an arrow are linked a yellow–orange rock-like substance that a narcotic officer was insisting contained methamphetamine when the drug analysis showed no controlled substance green substance in the nose of a bullet confirming part of a suspect’s story in an attempt homicide case and the powder substance on a space heater in an arson homicide.’’

Forward some 400 pages to the ‘Corporate session’, in which instrumental developments are described by representatives of the various microscope firms, sometimes finished designs, sometimes early prototypes. It is here that the Cc corrector for LVSEM of T. Steffen et al. at FEI is described, for example. There are several papers on AEM, recent types of SEM and ‘Nano SIMS’, and an interesting idea of P. Camus et al., who describe compass, ‘‘a new method of analyzing this [sic] 3-D data [EDS spectra et each location within a field-ofview]y. The algorithm finds those image locations

which have the same spectral fingerprint’’. Immediately after this is the session on TEM instrument development, most of which is of immediate interest to ultramicroscopists: the Triebenberg Laboratory (H. Lichte et al.), aberration( corrected STEM (O.L. Krivanek et al.), sub-A TEM at 300 keV (M.A. O’Keefe et al.); TEM aberration correction and applications (M. Haider, B. Kabius et al., M. Lentzen et al.), the ORNL aberration-corrected STEM (L.F. Allard et al.), an EEL spectrometer for microscopes equipped with monochromators (H.A. Brink et al.), TEM cameras (P. Favia et al.), a nanoindentation stage (A.M. Minor et al.), reconstruction of the projected potential from a through-voltage-series of dynamical diffraction patterns including absorption (C. Koch and J.C.H. Spence), alpha-null defocus (M.A. O’Keefe), 1-MV FE TEM (A. Tonomura), UHV EM (Y. Kondo et al.), gun monochromators (F. . Kahl and E. Volkl) and SESAME-1 (D. Krahl et al.). The ‘‘entirely new method for reconstructing the crystal potential’’ proposed by C. Koch and J.C.H. Spence is particularly exciting, for it ‘‘is capable of reconstructing the projected potential with a resolution far better than that of any method using HRTEM images’’. A few pages later is Instrument automation, which again I should like to list in its entirety but must be selective. It begins with a microscopist’s wish list by P.A. Crozier, which concludes with the sentence ‘‘Indeed the simplest way of standardizing commands may be through the development of speech recognition where the microscopist would conduct a dialog with the microscope to guide it through complex operations. The microscopist would control the strategy and interpret the result while the microscope handled the underlying technical issues associated with alignment and data acquisition’’. Readers of my last group review [81], and in particular followers of Eck the Grin in his whisky binge, may be skeptical: ‘‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’’, claimed Glendower. ‘‘Why so can I, and so can any man. But will they come when you do call to them?’’ retorted Hotspur. Subsequent papers deal with computerbased reconstruction from serial sections (R. Ferna! ndez-Gonza! lez et al.), embedding intelligence in a SEM (N.H.M. Caldwell et al.), auto-

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mated tomography (T. van der Krift et al., B. Carragher et al., P. Zhang et al.), remote-control (A. Yamada et al.), a variety of applications and lastly, elimination of effects caused by biprism . drift in holography (F. Kahl and E. Volkl). Moving on again, we encounter Biological microanalysis, Challenges of confocal microscopy, Labelling, EDS and WDS, Catalysts and composites, before arriving at EELS microanalysis at high sensitivity: advances in spectrum imaging energy filtering and detection. Here again, there are many papers on instrumentation as well as on applications, in both the physical and life sciences. The session begins with a progress report on SESAM by W. Sigle et al., who are followed by T. Oikawa et al. on a new EF-TEM with an omega filter and FE gun. P.C. Tiemeijer et al. present the first results with a monochromatized 200 kV TEM. There are papers on elemental mapping, spectrumimage analysis, quantitative EELS mapping, ELNES, ESI series, multivariate statistical analysis, difference spectrum images, 3-D EFTEM, the use of principal component analysis and artificial neural networks, the magic angle and many other topics. A real show-stopper is, however, provided by A. Aitouchen et al., who are intrigued by ‘The spatial distribution of water in soap’: ‘‘Soap bars can be viewed as pseudo-binary two-phase composites consisting of solid particulate suspended in water-enriched medium. Understanding the size and the distribution of the two phases in a bar is of interest to cosmetic industry. Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EELS) combined with Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope (STEM) has been used to perform water mapping in certain biological systems. Here, we report preliminary analysis of soap–water matrix in a soap bar by employing EELS and spectrum imaging techniques.’’ They found that ‘‘the size of the solid soap particulate ranged from about 50 nm to B300 nm. Pools of water were present surrounding solid material and in between such pure solid and pure water regions, water and soap matrix was seen to coexist’’. Post-session conversation in the toilets must surely have reached unusually scholarly levels. Further north, Canadian microscopists were holding their meeting at the University of New

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Brunswick in Fredericton. Although very much smaller than the huge MSA congress, a wide range of topics and of microscopies is to be found in the 100 pages of proceedings [48]. The microscopes used range from TEMs and STEMs to traditional light and polarization microscopes. Since I am writing this during the festive season, my attention was caught by the contributions of K. Benhalima and M. Moriyasu, who work on the snow and Jonah crabs (but not the ‘‘brawny’’ Dungeness variety). The former is ‘‘the most important commercial crab species in Atlantic Canada, with total landings exceeding 80 000 t in 2000 with a corresponding landing value of more than 700 million dollars’’ (that makes just over ten euros per kilogram, much less than the price of crab in my local poissonnerie). We are told a great deal about the sex life of these creatures; the males store two kinds of spermatophores in their median vas deferens, ‘‘one with an extremely wrinkled spermatophoric wall found mainly in adolescent and adult males with soft or new carapace and the other with smooth and thin spermatophoric wall, mainly found in adult males with hard and older carapace. Wrinkled spermatophores had extremely low rate of dehiscence in the seminal fluid extracted from females, but a rapid dehiscencey was observed for the latter type of spermatophores’’. So far as female snow crabs are concerned, ‘‘The prevalence of bacteria in primiparous and old barren females suggests that they infect individuals with a weak anti-microbial protection. The absence of bacteria in the highly acid seminal fluid derived from males upon copulation suggests that it may provide antimicrobial protection’’. Another good argument against coyness! In addition, there are invited papers on microscopy in the environmental sciences (M.F. Hochella), fungal pathogens (R.J. Howard et al.), 3-D reconstruction (F.P. Ottensmeyer et al.) and MRI of materials (B.J. Balcom) and a wide range of papers in materials science and biology. South now to Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia. I am rather behind in my reporting of the activities of the Sociedad Colombiana de Microscop!ıa ! Electronica, for the most recent document I have received is the proceedings of their second

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symposium on electron microscopy applied to geoscientific research (1996). This contains nine full papers, two on gold, one each on iron, emeralds, diamonds, clay and steels. The book [49] concludes with ‘Application of geology in the forensic sciences’ (C.M. Molina Gallego) and ! ‘Ana! lisis de imagen modal y grado de liberacion’ (A. Morrison). I mentioned the 17th congress of the Brazilian Society for Microscopy and Microanalysis briefly last time [81]; this was held in Santos (SP) in 1999, jointly with the Brazilian Society for Cell Biology. I have now seen the third part of the Proceedings [50], which form three supplements to Acta ! Microscopica. Part A contains the ‘‘General Contributions’’, with sections on biomaterials, ceramics, composites, corrosion and oxidation, geologic materials, image processing, intermetallics, junction or welding, non-ferrous materials, polymers, steels, surfaces, techniques, texture and orientation, thin films and ‘‘miscellaneous’’. There are also ‘‘conferences’’ delivered by D.B. Williams and M. Watanabe on ‘Single-atom detection by Xray microanalysis in the AEM ?’, D.B. Williams and V.J. Keast on brittle failure, and by K.M. Krishnan on characterization by electron probe techniques (two half-page abstracts only). This volume contains numerous excellent contributions and a somewhat alarming one by M.V. Oliveira et al. on ‘Characterization of a stainless steel surgical implant’, which shows the orthopaedic implants studied (plate, screws and cotter pin) and concludes that ‘‘for efficient operation the operator knowledge in stereology, acquisition and image processing is of great importance, considering the requirement of an adequate methodology definition for retaining more reliable results’’. The 18th Congress was held in Agua de Lindoia (BP) in October 2001, more about that next time, I hope. Still in Brazil, Micromat-7 was held in Fonte Colina Verde, S*ao Pedro (SP) in December 2001; the abstracts are all available on the SBMM website at www.dema.ufscar.br/sbmm/alberto. More about this once I have seen the printed version. Electron microscopy congresses are regularly held in Venezuela; the ninth was held in the city of Cumana! in November 2000; once again, full

details in my next review as the proceedings [51] have not yet reached Toulouse. To conclude this section, back across the Atlantic to Europe, where a few purely national meetings complemented the supra-national congresses already listed. The 15th congress of the Turkish Electron Microscopy Society was held in Kus-adası in 2001 and the abstracts volume is as usual beautifully printed on glossy paper [52]. It was clearly a busy and varied meeting but I cannot comment on the contents, almost wholly in Turkish. Further north, the 11th Russian national symposium SEM-99 was held in Chernogolovka and the English translation of the proceedings is now available [53]. There is plenty of instrumentation and techniques here, with papers by E.I. Rau et al. on the electron optical parameters of a toroidal spectrometer, by L.B. Rozenfel’d et al. on parasitic aberrations of deflection systems, and by V.A. Zhukov et al. on planar multislit magnetic lenses. V.D. Gelever describes guns for Auger spectrometry and lens systems for probe formation. B.N. Vasichev discusses a system for precision microlithography. In addition, there are numerous applications. If you are into SEM, do not overlook these Russian congresses. The Annual Conferences of the Armenian Electron Microscopy Society may not be so well known, though I have mentioned here the World of Microstructure in which some earlier meetings of this society were recorded. The ninth conference was held in Yerevan in October 2000 and the president, K.O. Hovnanyan, presents the goals and aspirations of the AEMS in one of the opening talks. I reproduce his concluding remarks: ‘‘The Society has a team of highly qualified specialists who could give their knowledge and experience to young personnel in the presence of appropriate physical structuresy After strategic plan, we organized courses for young scientists on ‘Theoretical and practical bases of electron microscopy’, published a news-letter called ‘Microscopist’, purchased computer and printing equipment, established an Internet access, published IX Annual Conference’s materials, created a documentary video-film. The tradition of educationalmethodic manuals’ preparation is continuing.

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Institute of Molecular Biology NAS RA, department of EM, in fact is a methodic center for AEMS’s members. During the period of transition for our republic, it is evident that this is the most optimal way of establishing a material-technical base’’. The 45 abstracts that follow [54] span a good range of topics, in biology, medicine and the physical sciences, which are in the minority here. There are papers on biopolymers in human myocardial tissue sections, on intermitochondrial contacts and synapses, on diagnosis of heart failure, on components of the blood of patients with stroke, on liver cells in acute pancreatitis, on specific phosphatases in the human myocardium and on the sex chromosomes of black flies, of which there are a great many species in Armenia; the females ‘‘cause enormous harm to humans, cattle, and other animals through their blood-sucking habits and transmission of pathogens that cause diseases’’. With the end of communism, however, ‘‘the black fly fauna has undergone considerable changesy Before the political changes, the main impact on flowing waters in Armenia was pollution from industrial, agricultural, and domestic sources, as well as hydro- and thermoelectric power stations. Currently, the main impact on streams and rivers in Armenia involves land reclamation. The recent privatization of land has led to uncontrolled land development and a considerable increase in covered channels. As a result the area of natural waters has been reduced sharply. Many streams and small rivers in the regions of Kotike, Vike, Syunic, and Ararat are severely damaged. The courses of the rivers have changed and, accordingly, so too have their hydrological parameters. These impacts have had a strong influence on the biodiversity of the black fly fauna. As a result, the more tolerant species dominate and the others decrease or become excluded. At present, species of the subgenus Wilhelmia are dominant. They are notable for being eurytopic, inhabiting both small streams with weak current and large rivers with strong current. They are malicious blood-sucking black flies and cause tremendous losses to agriculture by feeding on cattle’’. There were presumably no black flies in Noah’s Ark.

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The plant Mandragora conjures up memories of Shakespeare (Iago: ‘‘Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owed’st yesterday’’ and Cleopatra: ‘‘Ha ha ! Give me to drink mandragoray That I might sleep out this great gap of time, My Anthony is away’’) and probably best known of all, Donne’s misogynistic ‘‘Go and catch a falling star/Get with child a mandrake root’’ (for the latter was ‘‘once thought to resemble human form and to shriek when plucked’’). It is however, a quite other part of this member of the nightshade family that interests A.M. Hayrapetyan, who has studied the pollen of several species of Mandragora, before going on to examine the exine ornamentation of 103 species from 55 genera of the family Solanaceae (to which Mandragora belongs). Even the references are poetic: Bull. Bot. Soc. Bengal, Pollen et Spores, Atlas Polinico de Andaluc!ıa Occidental. I noticed two specifically Armenian contributions, a study of the crystalline phase in Armenian obsidians by V. Israelyan and R. Mkhitaryan, and ‘Some ‘‘secrets’’ of Armenian ancient monuments’ longevity’ by V.R. Israelyan et al. In the latter, the authors discuss (and comment favourably on) the choice of building materials used in a variety of ancient monuments; a reservoir of the 6th or 7th century B.C., the Garni Pagan Temple (2nd or 3rd century B.C.), the Tatev monastery complex (9th century A.D.), Zvarnots Temple (641 A.D.), the seismic stability of which was enhanced by the use of bloated obsidians. Gypsum was employed in mortar as early as the fourth century AD in Kasakh Basilica, long before it was used in European and Russian monuments, where the first evidence dates from the 10-11th centuries. A short account of this work is to be found ! in the Proceedings of ICEM-14 (Cancun); for fuller details you will have to track down the somewhat recondite Russian-language references. The Armenian Electron Microscopy Society has recently celebrated its tenth anniversary and I hope to describe the corresponding proceedings next time. In 2001, the University of Utrecht was invited to organize the annual meeting of the Dutch Microscopy Society (NVvM) in Papendal; as A. Verkleij,

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chairman of the organizing committee, tells us, the themes selected were those of particular interest to the ‘‘Utrecht microscopy family’’: immuno-detection, molecular interactions in living cells, the application of EBSD to materials, analytical electron microscopy, yeast and filamentous fungi, intracellular transport in cells, cryo-transmission electron microscopy and high-resolution electron microscopy. There were also plenary lectures by R. Pepperkop on ‘4D microscopy of proteins’, W. Baumeister on ‘Tomography and cryo-electron microscopy’, D. van der Wal on ‘ESEM’ and A. Verkleij on ‘Electron microscopy in life sciences’. I was unfortunately unable to find ‘From Pharaoh ink to individual carbon nanotubes’ by O. Regev among the abstracts, though this was in principle an oral presentation but another title of particular interest to ultramicroscopists is there: ‘Electrostatic aberration correction in LV-SEM’. Papers on electrostatic aberration correction by A. Henstra, M.P.C.M. Krijn and S.A.M. Mentink have been appearing during the last 2 or 3 years but not many details were given; a little more information is divulged here by D. Maas et al. but we are still awaiting the full paper that will make the principle of the corrector easier to grasp. As always, the abstracts are beautifully printed in the NVvM Jaarboek [55]. There was an EMAG meeting in September 2001, held for the first time in Dundee. The 520 pages of the proceedings [56] maintain the high standard of the series, with sections on HREM and electron crystallography, Advanced SEM and surface science, New instrumentation, imaging and analysis, Ferrous metals and intermetallics, Advanced microanalysis and elemental imaging, Carbons, ceramics and composites, Microscopy of interfaces and surfaces, Catalysts, sensors and environmental materials, Semiconductors, superconductors and magnetic materials and lastly, Scanning probe microscopy. The two plenary lectures are on the ‘Electron microscopy of nanocrystals inside microcrystals’ (U. Dahmen et al.) and ‘Analysis of biological structures by EELS and energy fitering’ (R.D. Leapman). There are interesting papers throughout but ultramicroscopists will turn first to the sections on HREM, advanced SEM and instrumentation. They will not

be disappointed. The HREM session begins with a paper by K.L. Langley et al. on a real application of focal series reconstruction; later there are contributions by R.R. Meyer et al. on an ingenious way of determining the coefficients of the wave aberration function and L.Y. Chang et al. (the same group) on simulation for exit-wave recon. struction. G. Mobus et al. provide a careful discussion and assessment of the benefits of Cs correction and A.R. Lupini et al. bring us up to date with the STEM corrector that O.L. Krivanek announced at the 1997 EMAG. There is more about the phase problem in the section on instrumentation, where O.S. Makin et al. discuss ‘Direct specimen plane wave recovery from strong objects’. This is a very rich section, with contributions on ‘Extreme FESEM’ by E.D. Boyes, tomographic reconstruction from HAADF images in STEM (M. Weyland et al.), software for remotely operated TEMs, analysis of the Wienerfilter aberration corrector of S.A.M. Mentink et al. (see also [55]), 3-D STEM (N. Tanaka et al.), microscopy on Mars (W.T. Pike et al.), and the undesirable effects of stray scattering in the FE . gun area (A.J. Scott). G. Mobus and S. Nufer enquire whether atomic resolution EELS is possible but I could not decide what their answer is. In the section on advanced SEM, I discovered from K. Sato et al. that there is a Japanese project on Super Metal Technology (will the dictionary soon include ‘‘supermetal’’ alongside superconductor and superwoman?), and that in-lens SEM is the way to study super metals. J.M. Rodenburg has moved away from the STEM to the ESEM, where he has detected time- and space-dependent image contrast mechanisms. I pass over the sections on various kinds of specimens, full of interest though they are, and conclude with a paper by G. Zabow and M.G. Prentiss, ‘Towards scanned neutral particle microscopy: developing neutral particle analogues of charged particle lenses’. This is absolutely fascinating; the authors propose several lens configurations for such particles and examine the magnetostatic aperture lens in detail. Not strictly speaking ‘‘EMAG’’, but the organizers were right to accept it even so; but would it not have been more logical to classify it with ‘new instrumentation’?

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The Israel Society for Microscopy meets annually and their 2001 congress was held in the Haifa Technion in May [57]. Fifteen oral presentations and 24 posters were fitted into a single day. Among the invited speakers is D. Brandon, who provides ‘An unbalanced history’ of electron microscopy, which is more unbalanced than he intended for he moves the first electron lens back to ‘‘over 80 years ago’’, and hence to about 1920 and asserts that ‘‘the first commercial, Siemens-manufactured instrument with a resolution exceeding that of the optical microscope’’ came on the market in 1929. Also, I do not think that users of the first RCA electron microscopes would agree that they were severely handicapped by the failure of the USA to ‘‘take advantage of this bonanza’’ (acquisition of the first Siemens microscopes as war booty). Among the lectures, there is a fascinating (but tantalizingly short) abstract by Y. Talmon on TEM studies of microstructured liquids and an account by E. Moses et al. of ‘Chemotactic recruitment of ‘‘midwives’’ in the division of amoeba’. Occasionally, these creatures fail to divide correctly and ‘‘Surprisingly,y a neighboring amoeba is seen to perform directed motion towards the dividing pair, and physically causes separation by sending a pseudopod in-between them. yThis recruitment is mediated by a chemotactic mechanism. Such cooperative behaviour in the reproduction of asexual organisms has never been observed before’’. Microscopy of fluids reappears in an abstract by M. Lavochkin et al. on cryo-SEM of milk, which is adjacent to two abstracts by M. Uzzan et al. and E. Kesselman et al. on the study of bakery products, and in particular, on the ‘‘Microstructure of microwave-heated bread’; ‘‘Microwave heatingytends to produce an irregularly tough texture, comparing to a conventionally heated bread. However, very little is known about the physical mechanism of microwave-induced toughness and its dependence on heating patterns’’. From their findings, it is safe to conclude that the authors buy their bread daily from their neighbourhood baker. There are also numerous very respectable but less colourful abstracts in materials science. Altogether a most interesting collection.

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Lastly, down to South Africa for the annual MSSA meeting, held in 2001 in Johannesburg. The unusually high readability of the MSSA proceedings [58] is an example to be followed by all of us with Durban abstracts to compose. As always, the book opens with the John Matthews Memorial Lecture, given this year by J. van Landuyt, and the Boris Balinsky Lecture, in which P. Berjak describes ‘Microscopical revelations from seeds under stress’. I glanced idly at the latter, only to be hooked immediately, not only because of the lively style but because I had no idea that there are ‘recalcitrant’ seeds, which die if dried, as well as ‘orthodox’ ones, which behave in the way we expect. But, even before learning about seeds (or ‘propagules’, as I have learnt to call them), I warmed to Ms Berjak when she tells us that ‘‘After originally training as a biochemisty I decided that there had to be more to the study of life than that afforded by blood and urine samples!’’ In little more than two pages, we learn a great deal about ‘‘recalcitrant (obstinately disobedient) seeds that are shed at high water contents from the parent plant, and resist all attempts to dry them’’. She began work on a species of mangrove but ‘‘nonorthodoxy poses a serious problem, which is a matter of global concern, as an increasing number of species are revealed as producing this type of propagule’’. I must leave you to follow this up for yourselves (in Seed Sci. Res., to judge from the reference list). A third invited lecture was given by G. Kothleitner, on EFTEM, after which come a wide-ranging collection of abstracts from the physical sciences: stripe domains, furnace slag, U–Th–Pb dating of monazite, cermets, sintered polycrystalline diamond, all kinds of thin films, leading up to P.D.G. Richards et al. on ‘The osteology of rock’. The question here is, can slightly invasive techniques ‘‘be used to investigate, with minimal damage the rare specimens of South Africa’s [extremely rich and diverse] fossil record [that dates from many millions of years ago]’’ and contains ‘‘the long bones of a large range of primates and non-primate species’’? They tested their ideas on two bovid specimens, the poor state of preservation of one of which ‘‘might be associated with its possible passage through the

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gut of a carnivore’’. They conclude that ‘‘given that potentially there is a large return on the amount and quality of information that can be obtained using this technique, there should be little reason for not utilizing the more valuable primate specimens for this more invasive technique’’. This is probably not music to museum curators’ ears. This has brought us to the life sciences, with plenty of papers on fungi, Bacillus on rootnodules, seeds, rhizospheres and the hydrolysis of bagasse pulp (the residue of sugar-cane or sugarbeet, says the C.O.D.). C. Marangoni et al. have found a Pseudo-nitzschia species in Lambert’s Bay, which is disquieting for ‘‘Pseudo-nitzschia has been in the spotlight over the last 14 years because of its role in the human syndrome, Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning. Mild symptomsy involve gastrointestinal disorders while amnesia, seizures and death may occur in extreme cases’’. Y. Nidoo have made the first study ever of the leaf salt glands of Leptochloa fusca (a.k.a. Diplachne fusca), glands that enable plants to thrive in saline environments. L.L. van As et al. have been lucky enough to find some Argulus benones, only the second time they have been encountered in 50 years—but alas, they were all females: no male has ever been found and ‘‘The main challenge for this century is to discover the males’’. The saga of the anatomy of the Nile crocodile continues, with a study of the roof of its pharyngeal cavity (about which ‘‘There is a paucity of information in the literature’’) by J.F. Putterill and J.T. Soley, who give only one reference, to a Japanese study published in 1920. My eye was caught by ‘SEM features of ART surfaces using the ‘‘press finger’’ technique’ but this proved to be about dentistry in ‘‘areas without access to electricity, clean running water or dental equipment’’ and I recalled that we have met the ‘‘press finger’’ technique before in these Proceedings. Almost everything is quotable in this section but I must limit myself to M.I. Cooper et al., who show that the simple model proposed by H. Durrer and W. Villiger to explain iridescent colours in feathers and lizard skins does not predict the colours of the violet and green woodhoopoes correctly. I shall scrutinize the Durban Proceedings eagerly to see whether these authors have found a better formula.

2.3. Thematic meetings Yes, I suppose that there will always be times when her [George Eliot’s] books will be studied. But ladies never give us any fighting—they only give us magnificent sentiments instead. I like a Dumas duel. I can’t fight myself; I suppose that’s why I like to read about it. Burne-Jones Talking The series of international conferences on scalespace in computer vision reached the third in July 2001. This meeting, held in Vancouver, was in fact one of the workshops at the ICCV, and the theme was Scale-space and Morphology. The proceedings [59] offer us the texts of 18 oral presentations and 23 posters, almost all of which are of some interest to ultramicroscopists who process their images. The oral presentations begin with an account of vector distance functions by J. Gomes and O. Faugeras. M. Nielsen and M. Lillholm ask ‘What do features tell us about images?’ In their experiments, they ‘‘examine the suitability of the various priors to create visually appealing reconstruction from blobs and edges. We examine how to represent the features: by their feature strength or by the fact that they are features (local maxima of feature strength). We discuss and show experiments of how to select features, and finally we show that feature points are better for representing images than random points’’. C. Kervrann explains ‘Bayesian object detection through level curves selection’ and F. Malgouyres discusses ‘Totalvariation-based oversampling of noisy images’. P. Maragos investigates ‘Algebraic and PDE approaches for multiscale image operators with global constraints’, F. Meyer describes ‘Hierarchies of partitions and morphological segmentations’ and R. van den Boomgaard and R. van der Weij explore ‘Gaussian convolutions’. There is a paper by H.J.A.M. Heijmans (who distributes the invaluable e-mail Morphology Digest, see www.cwi.nl/ projects/morphology) on ‘Scale-spaces, PDE’s and scale-invariance’. Among the posters are numerous original contributions on related themes. Highly recommended if this is your subject. In November 1999, the tenth International Congress for Stereology was held in Melbourne

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and just after, a satellite conference on Image Analysis in Materials and Life Sciences (SCIAMAL-99) was held in Kalpakkam, in India. The latter has given rise to a well-produced proceedings volume [60], the contributions to which range over ‘‘stereological concepts, image-generating algorithms, image grammar and analysis, the role of image analysis in metallography, physics of condensed matter, materials science and nondestructive testing, applications of stereological concepts in anatomy, neuroscience and plant science, and medical imaging’’. This is a very varied collection, with papers on grain-boundary detection, HRTEM, particle-size measurement, fuel pins, cell numbers in the testis, soil structure, neurostereology, cervical cancer, glomerular haematuria and MRI. At the end of the book is a paper of interest to all except bald ultramicroscopists by R. Iyer et al. on ‘SEM-based quantitative morphological comparison of herbal shampoo effects on hair’: ‘‘Formulation of completely natural cosmetics is a challenging and formidable task. Currently, a completely natural shampoo formulation is being developed whose performance characteristics match those of the synthetic ones. The conditioning effect is one of the most important attributes of a modern shampoo. The term conditioning implies that the shampoo must leave the hair smooth, lustrous and easily manageable. Obviously, no single test can be used to quantify the conditioning effects of a shampoo. The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) is a valuable tool to demonstrate the effects of various toiletry treatments on the hair, especially the conditioning effect. We used the SEM as one of the tests to compare the conditioning effects of different shampoo formulations. The present paper focuses on the use of quantitative morphological analysis with the SEM images in studying the effects of a range of shampoos on hair, using the freeware, Scion Image analysis package’’. What do the SEM and the SCION package reveal? ‘‘This comparison shows clearly that the damage caused to the hair strands by the use of SLS-based formulations is the maximum, followed by the market shampoo. Use of SLS-based and market shampoos actually worsened the condition of the strand in terms of scale upliftment, indicating

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difficulty in combing. The Lab shampoos show the least uplift, and amongst them, the Lab 2 sample was the best. The successful effect of Lab 2 formulation on the hair strand is confirmed by other tests like the protein loss determination’’. Hirsute ultramicroscopists will regret that they do not give us the recipe. Just before this is a paper by A.K. Biswal et al. on the role of thylakoid membrane-bound kinases on the salt-tolerance mechanism in a salt-tolerant plant, Indian mustard (Brassica juncea) and a salt-susceptible plant, the Mung bean (Vigna radiata). This appears to have no connection with the title of the book but if you have a soft spot for the tribulations of the Mung bean, keep it away from salt. I have only just seen the special issue of Pattern Recognition on Mathematical Morphology and Non Linear Image Processing [61] but I draw attention to it albeit belatedly since most of the MM pundits are represented. It begins with a most fascinating paper by J.B.T.M. Roerdink on ‘Group morphology’, in which he ‘‘surveys and extends constructions of morphological operators which are invariant under a more general group [than the group of Euclidean translations], such as the motion group, the affine group, or the projective group’’. I. Bloch then studies ‘Geodesic balls in a fuzzy set and fuzzy geodesic mathematical morphology’ for ‘‘Although fuzzy operators have deserved a large attention in the Euclidean case, almost nothing exists concerning the geodesic case’’. She is followed by A. Bienik and A. Moga on ‘An efficient watershed algorithm based on connected components’ and F. Cheng and A.N. Venetsanopoulos on adaptive morphological operators. The next contribution, P.D. Gader et al. on ‘Morphological regularization neural networks’, establishes ‘‘a relationship between regularization theory and morphological shared-weight neural networks’’. This involves ‘‘deriving the Fourier transforms of the min and max operators’’. L.F.C. Pessoa and P. Maragos propose a unifying framework for neural networks with hybrid morphological/rank/linear modes. They are followed by S. Saryazdi et al. (a new non-uniform morphological sampling), A.V. Tuzikov et al. (similarity measures), J.G.M. Schavemaker et al. (image sharpen-

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ing by morphological filtering) and two papers on hardware and analogue implementations (A. Gasteratos and I. Andreadis; S. Vlassis et al.). D.G. Jones and P.T. Jackway introduce granolds and S. Batman et al. describe ‘Heterogenerous morphological granulometries’. N.S.T. Hirata et al. propose ‘A switching algorithm for design of optimal increasing binary filters over large windows’ and A. Aubert and D. Jeulin estimate ‘the influence of second- and third-order moments on random set reconstructions’. The issue concludes with a paper by A.L. Kesidis and N. Papamarkos on ‘A window-based inverse Hough transform’. In February 2000, a conference on the Microscopy and Microanalysis of Engineering Materials (MMEM 2000) was held in Melbourne and the papers presented are reproduced in a special issue of Micron [62]. These are all highly ‘‘applied’’ articles and I just give the flavour of them here: microstructure of the Ni binder phase in a cermet; microstructure of steels and hardmetals (which I assume to be accepted jargon as it is used consistently—and why not, the biologists talk cheerfully about fatbodies); ferricyanide accelerated chromate conversion coatings (some hyphens needed there!); EFTEM for measuring particle-size distributions; carbonitrided austenitic steels; formation of cementite; a frustrated model. The latest Scanning congress is as usual recorded in Scanning and covers a wide range of themes: EBSD, SPM, anthropology, nanotechnology and nanofabrication, probe microscopy for nanostructured material, modern optical microscopy, forensic science, electron/instrument modelling in SEM, advances in biological and biomedical scanning microscopy, museum applications, food pharmaceuticals, advances in SEM, advances in materials science and applications of SPM in biotechnology [63]. I turned first to anthropology, half expecting a comparative study of matrilineal kinship or tribal structures in microscopical societies; in fact the one paper in this section examines ‘Variations in the growth and modeling of the human maxilla’ for ‘‘little information exists regarding the extent to which craniofacial surface remodeling varies between sexes, and among individuals of differing race/ geographic origin’’. M.A. McCollum finds that

‘‘growth remodeling of the anterior maxilla is more variable than currently recognized. Some of this variation may relate to the ethnic origin, as several cephalometric studies have found a tendency for African Americans to display an anteriorly positional anterior maxillary surface’’. I was also intrigued by those ‘‘nanostructured materials’’—I thought that all matter was nanostructured! L. Chi explains that ‘‘Lateral ordered nanoscopic structures over macroscopic regions can be obtained by adjusting the subtle balance of molecule–molecule interactions and molecule–substrate interactions when preparing thin organic films with Langmuir–Blodgett (LB) and selfassembly (SA) techniques. Scanning probe microscopy methods, especially scanning force microscopy (SFM), which turned out to be of great success for inspecting various organized organic molecular assembles, are used to characterize the structures obtained. The operation of SFM in dynamic mode, especially in the attractive regime by means of an active feedback controller, can minimize the damaging interaction between the tip and the sample, thus allowing the non-destructive imaging of weekly bound monolayers and soft molecular assemblies’’ (a warning that spellcheckers cannot know which homophone you meant). The SEM has long been useful for forensic purposes and the corresponding section here reflects this. In the space of a column, Detective C.N. Bruno gives a vivid concentrated account of smokeless ball powder: ‘‘The production starts with a nitrocellulose base and a stabilizer, such as ethyl centralite or diphenylamine, is added. The nitroglycerin and deterrent/plasticizer and/or burning rate modifier are then added. The grains are coated with graphite and, as a final step, additional inorganic ignition aids, flash suppressors, and fouling prevention agents are added. The inorganic components are generally comprised of lead styphnate (mono or dibasic), as the primary explosive; barium nitrate, as the oxidizer; and antimony sulfide, as the fuel. All of these components are typically present in the primer (center fire) and would be analyzed by SEM/EDS for their characteristic elements (cations) of lead, barium, and antimony. Rimfire cartridges have

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various combinations of any of these components (one to three), depending on the manufacturer. In addition, in recent years, organic explosives have been substituted for lead free primers, as well as the presence of manganese, aluminum, titanium, zinc, etc. Other elements present in inorganic GSR analysis could be iron, from the gun; calcium and silicon, from the primer explosive composition; nickel, copper, and zinc, from the cartridge case or primer container; and sodium, potassium and sulfur, from the smokeless powder’’. Is he wise to divulge all these details of recipes for destruction? Be that as it may, C.N. Bruno has performed elemental analyses of more than 70 different smokeless powders using SEM/EDS ; the results are tabulated and recorded as spectra. ‘Lead: lead us not astray’ by J.R. Giacalone is no less instructive. His problem is that lead particles are often encounted during gunshot residue analysis but do they in fact come from firearm discharge residue? After a most interesting discussion of the uses of lead and of the physics and metallurgy of shooting, J.R. Giacalone tells us how he collected lead-containing objects from ‘‘hobby shops, hardware stores, plumbing suppliers, home supply stores, automotive repair shops, sporting good stores and roofing material distributors’’—not toyshops, I noted, no lead soldiers, no fishing weights either. G. Gorzawski et al. have looked at another material that is ‘‘one of the major types of evidence in crimes such as traffic accidents, burglary, and vandalism’’, glass. J.P. Krusemann . of FEI then discussed the usefulness of ESEM in . forensic science and finally, L. Niewohner et al. presented their ‘Report on the 2nd International Proficiency Test on identification of gun shot residue by scanning electron microscopy/energydispersive X-ray’. From this I learnt that there is a European Network of Forensic Science Institutes and that 49 laboratories from Europe and North America participated in the proficiency test. The results are uneven: participants were required to detect PbSb particles of different sizes. ‘‘From all participating laboratories, 84% detected all 6 mm particles; 47% detected 95% of the 2.5 mm particles; and 27% detected 95% of the 1.2 mm particles’’.

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Museum applications again make good reading, beginning with a contribution on dinosaur eggshell microstucture by F.D. Jackson. C.S. Chaboo and T. Nguyen then study the ‘Ultrastructure of antennae of tortoise beetles and leaf-mining beetles’ for ‘‘SEM has been applied very little to morphological study in these beetles and has never been used to investigate antennae, an important sensory structure’’. (The antennae were cleaned by sonication in soapy water.) A.V. Klaus then gives a general account of the uses to which the cold FE SEM at the American Museum of Natural History is put: ‘‘Applications for SEM at AMNH can be divided into three broad categories: biological, geological, and anthropological. The AMNH biological scientists use SEM imaging with one major application in mind—the analysis of anatomical features (characters). Character analysis is crucial to the sciences of systematic (taxonomy) and evolutionary biology. Entomologists and arachnologists are heavily dependent upon SEM imaging technology. Other biologists who use SEM at AMNH include paleonotologists, mammalogists, ichthyologists, and invertebrate zoologists. Geologists generally use the FE-SEM for its analytical capabilitiesyAnthropologists rely on both the imaging and analytical capabilities of SEM. Specimen morphology and elemental composition can help determine the temporal origin of an artifact or object as well as pinpoint its origin in terms of geographical location.’’ The section concludes with ‘Metallurgical examinations of medieval sword blades’ by J. Kinder et al. The two blades studied were ‘‘excavated around 1920 from one site on the river bank of the Rhine by a British officer. The appearance of the blades is typical for Viking swords showing normal shape (length below a meter, relatively wide if compared with younger swords). They are showing a welldeveloped damascene pattern which is typical for pattern-welded Viking swordsy. a very unique scanning electron microscope that is being developed and produced exclusively by VisiTec Microtechnik, combined with an X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy device could be used for the examination of the wider blade. This special microscope provides an evacuated specimen chamber which is indeed big enough to accommodate a whole

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Viking sword without any destruction by cutting the blade into pieces. Furthermore, conventional X-ray microradiography combined with digital image processing and X-ray computer tomography was used to collect as much information as possible from the interior of that blade.’’ The conclusion is that the requirements of the forging steps prove ‘‘the high skill of the ancient blade smith’’. I was about to put Scanning aside and turn to the next item when my eye was caught by a figure caption, ‘‘Log-Log plots of relative areas versus scales of measurements for successive measurements on one cornflake’’; this appears in ‘Area-scale analysis of food surfaces’ by T.G. Bergstrom and C.A. Brown, who tell us that ‘‘Many aspects of behavior and processing are suspected to be influenced by the roughness or influence the roughness of foods, for example, wetability, flavor, adhesiveness, appearance, coating volume, rheology, and biological growth; however, the interaction with roughness is often poorly understood. Average roughness, Ra, has been found inadequate for understanding functionality. Fractal methods may be better and have been applied to food. And, scale-sensitive fractal analysis can be used to determine scales of interaction. Methods: four Kellogg’s cornflakes were inserted in whole milk, two for 5 min and two for 10 min. Excess liquid was absorbed from the surfaces prior to the measurements by slow dabbing with a paper towel. Six regions, 5  5 mm, almost entirely overlapping, were measured on each flake before insertion and again after removal.’’ From all this it emerged that ‘‘relative areas increase dramatically with time after the flakes are removed from the milk’’. Here too, the references have their own poetry, with a Chilean thesis on the ‘Characterization of the changes in the structure of the potato during frying’ (see [40]) and a ‘Method for studying surface topography and roughness of onion and garlic skins for coating purposes’. The Proceedings of Micro- and Nano-Engineering 2000 have at last appeared (though not before the following MNE was held in Grenoble in September 2001) in Microelectronic Engineering

[64]. Over 1000 pages long, and thus nearly half as long again as the 1999 volume, they contain 142 of the 174 presentations at the meeting. The 11 sections are entitled ‘Photon based lithographies’, ‘Electron and ion beam technologies’, ‘Electron and ion beam lithographies’, ‘Imprint lithography’, ‘Advanced masks’, ‘Resists’, ‘Pattern transfer’, ‘Inspection’, ‘Micro systems’, ‘Nanofabrication’ and ‘Nanodevices’. The sections on electron and ion beams are probably the most interesting for ultramicroscopists for it is there that the optics, much of the instrumentation and the calculation of optical properties are to be found. Thus, there are papers on multiple-beam lithography (T.H.P. Chang et al.), on the muchlamented SCALPEL (D. Stenkamp et al., M. Kkrtchyan et al.), on field-emission photocathode arays (M.J. Wieland et al.), on PREVAIL (H.C. Pfeiffer et al.) and simulations of various kinds. It is amusing to note that S. van Kanen et al. argue that emittance can be advantageously increased by passing a beam through a grid lens—in the past, this was regarded as one of the disadvantages of these lenses! In the section on Inspection, S. Hosaka et al. describe their new AFM mode for looking at rugged surfaces. This is only a very selective and invidious appraisal of this vast collection; these proceedings, together with those of the Microprocesses and Nanotechnology conference, published each year in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, and those of the Three-beams conference, to be found in No. 12 of J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B, really summarize everything that has been done in the field in the last 12 months. A session of the San Diego meeting of SPIE was devoted to ‘Charged Particle Beam Optics Imaging’ and the proceedings occupy the second half only of one of the SPIE proceedings volumes [65]. The organizers, E. Munro and J. Rouse, have attracted a very varied group of papers, beginning with ‘S-filter; a compact in-column energy filter’ by K. Tsuno. There are several papers on methods of calculation and associated software packages; thus, H. Murata et al. describe an ‘Improved boundary charge method for high-accuracy calculation of potential and electric fields in composite

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dielectric systems’, L.H.A. Leunisson et al. present new features of their POCAD, G.X. Gu et al. apply genetic algorithms to electron optical optimization, A. Asi reconsiders the BEM, and Y. Tu et al. use an artificial neural network in gun design. There are two long papers by H. Murata, H. Shimoyama and T. Ohye on the computer simulation of electric fields for vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. M.W. Retsky tests an innovation in the electron beam deflection unit of a CRT. Finally, there are two papers on aberration correction, D.J. Maas et al. on electrostatic correction in a LVSEM and E. Munro et al. on correction for charged particle lithography. Note that the paper by Maas gives a fuller account of this corrector than the other papers on it that I have mentioned elsewhere (see [37,55]). There is also a poster by I.A. Petrov et al. on the theoretical analysis of achromatic deflectors. Plenty of interest for the electron optical community, therefore, in this collection. The next SPIE meeting on chargedparticle optics will be in 2003, as there is a CPO meeting in Maryland in 2002. For those of you who like to be busy, even while sitting listening to a congress presentation, I note that the 41st Congress of the International Federation of Knitting Technologists will be held in Zagreb in October 2002; their slogan: ‘‘Knitting—a challenge for university scientists, industrial researchers and practical experts in the future’’. On 10 July, 2001, the late B.K. Vainshtein would have been 80 and to mark the occasion, a special issue of Kristallografiya is a tribute to his memory [66], with papers on crystallographic symmetry, electron scattering and diffraction, Xray and synchrotron radiation scattering and diffraction, structure of macromolecular compounds, of organic compounds and of inorganic compounds, physical properties of crystals, liquid crystals and crystal growth. Most of the contributions are by Vainshtein’s former collegues and students, though the issue opens with a splendid article ‘On complexity’ by A.L. Mackay. The English translation is available as Crystallography Reports. Alain Bourret has also been accorded a special issue, to mark his retirement. J. Thibault and D. Dorignac are guest-editors of a number of

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Phil. Mag. B, with contributions from highresolution electron microscopists worldwide [67]. 2.4. Listings The following special issues and books are of potential interest to ultramicroscopists but I have not seen them—some will be covered next time. For image science, see [68] and [69] when it comes out. For SPM, see [70–72]. For materials science in general, see [73,74]. For a less-common type of microscopy, see [75]. This brings us to Greener Grass, always a lush meadow. Thus, T.C. Pearce has edited a Handbook of Machine Olfaction [76], subtitled ‘Electronic Nose Technology’. The blurb tells us that ‘‘Electronic noses are instruments which mimic the sense of smellythey are able to detect and distinguish odors precisely and at low costsyThe book covers biological and technical fundamentalsyas well as application-oriented news from successful E-nose manufacturers. It is a unique standard worky’’. The same publishers offer Culinary Math by L. Blocker and J. Hill, who apply ‘‘basic math concepts (such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) to measuring, costing, and sizing’’ but the readership is restricted to chefs [77]. A natural transition leads us to a CD-ROM on The Rehabilitation of Drains and Sewers by D. Stein [78]; here, ‘‘the reader has available for the first time a complete new working medium that is more descriptive and more understandable than is possible in a book. Intelligently networked data consisting of texts, pictures, videos, animations and Internet pages present the user with a selection of the damage-oriented maintenance processes’’. I should like to believe that there are clips from The Third Man but that is probably too much to hope for. The Archaeology of Geological Catastrophes [79] has a fascinating explanation of the origins of the oracle at Delphi by J.Z. de Boer and J.R. Hale, who find it ‘‘highly probableythat the Pythia’s inspiration resulted from the inhalation of light hydrocarbon gases, which rose along a fissure (fracture) in the Adyton below the Apollo temple’’. This is in agreement with earlier observations (Strabo, between 64 BC and 25 AD): ‘‘the seat of the oracle is a cave that is hollowed out deep down

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in the earth, with a rather narrow mouth, from which arises breath that inspires a divine frenzy; y over the mouth is placed a high tripod, mounting which the Pythian priestess receives the breath and then utters oracles in both verse and prose’’. And to conclude, an alarming special issue of the Int. J. Vehicle Design is devoted to ‘Car phone design and safety’ [80]. T. Fuse tells us that ‘‘the number of car accidents caused by using mobile phones in 1997 was 2297 in Japan. Twenty-five people were killed and 3328 people were injured. Seventy-five percent of the accidentsywere collision accidentsy41% of them occurred when the driver tried to take a telephone call and 28% occurred when the driver tried to make a telephone call’’. In Norway, however, F. Sagberg finds that ‘‘radios and CD players cause more accidents than mobile telephones’’. In Texas too, there are many other dangerous distractions: ‘‘Driver distracted by problems or behaviour of child (2–4 years): 37%; Driver asleep or unconscious: 22.3%’’; and so on. D. de Waard et al. in the Netherlands note that ‘‘This task, looking up telephone numbers while holding the phone in one hand, showed a serious deterioration in driving performance in terms of lane controly impaired driving could be detected automatically with a hit rate of almost 90%’’; ‘hit rate’ is all too often the mot juste.

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[41] Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Electron Microscopy, Denshi Kenbikyo% 36 (Suppl. 1) (2001). ISSN: 0417-0326. [42] Proceedings of the 45th Symposium of the Japanese Society of Electron Microscopy, Denshi Kenbikyo% 35 (Suppl. 2) (2000). ISSN: 0417-0326. [43] MicroSoM, Bulletin of the Electron Microscopy Society of Malaysia, Vol. 4, 2001. ISSN: 1511-760X. [44] Korean Journal of Electron Microscopy. [45] Journal of the Electron Microscopy Society of Thailand. ISSN: 0857-5285. [46] Abstracts, XXIV Annual Conference of EMSI on Electron Microscopy and Allied Fields, Panjab University Chandigarh, 9–11 February 2001, India. [47] Proceedings Microscopy and Microanalysis 2001, Microsc. Microanal. 7 (Suppl. 2) (2001), Springer, New York and Berlin; from Vol. 8, February 2002, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York. ISSN: 1431-9276. [48] Proceedings of the Microscopical Society of Canada, 28th Annual Meeting, Microscopical Society of Canada, Lethbridge, AB 2001. ISSBN: 0-920622-26-7. [49] Memorias Second Colombian Symposium of Electron microscopy applied to Geoscientific Research, Special publication No. 2, Colombian Society of Electron Microscopy, 1996. [50] Proceedings of the XVII Congress of the Brazilian Society for Microscopy and Microanalysis and X Congress of the Brazilian Society for Cell Biology, Acta Microsc. 8 (Suppl. A) (1999). ISSN: 0798-4545. [51] Proceedings IX Congreso Venezolano de Microscop!ıa ! Electronica, Cuman!a, 5–8 November 2000, Acta Microsc. (Suppl. 1) (2000). Price: US$ 80 (individuals), US$ 120 (institutions); ISSN: 0798-4545. [52] Uluslarası katımlı 15 Ulusal Elektron Microscopi Kongresi, Kus-adasi (Izmir), 18–21 September 2001. [53] Proceedings 11th National Symposium ‘‘SEM-99’’ on Scanning Electron Microscopy and Analytical Methods in the Study of Solids, Allerton Press, New York, NY, Bull. Russ. Acad. Sci. Phys. 64 (8) (2000). ISSN: 10628738. [54] Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Armenian Electron Microscopy Society, Yerevan, 17–20 October 2000. [55] Meeting of the Dutch Society for Microscopy, Papendal, Arnhem, 13–14 December 2001. Jaarb. NVvM (2000) 13– 151. ISSN: 1389-5362. [56] M. Aindow, C.J. Kiely (Eds.), Electron Microscopy and Analysis 2001, Proceedings EMAG 2001, Dundee, 5–7 September 2001, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia, 2001. Price: d100 or US$ 145; ISBN: 07503-0812-5. [57] The 35th Annual Meeting of the Israel Society for Microscopy, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 15 May 2001. [58] Proceedings of the Microscopy Society of Southern Africa, Vol. 31, Johannesburg 5–7 December, 2001. ISSN: 02500418; ISBN: 0-620-28339-4.

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