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Comment by october_sky | Hacker News Reader

I love how amateur the physical machine looks, with all of that aluminum foil stuck to it and the wires falling about. This immediately reminded me of how my codebase looks whenever I am doing a proof-of-concept just to show someone that something is possible. "Let's get it working before we make it look pretty" -- what I imagined they said.

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I worked with Dr. Lutz about 20yr ago, helping to make some of the early magnetically tipped cantilevers for the effort at single atom NMR. It's interesting to me that the NYT shifted the nomenclature to MRI... although with microscopic scanning that is what they can achieve. It's not that weird because (at the time) the tip magnetic field caused a torus to interact with the cantilever when the atom(s) resonate, so they do have to deconvolve the effect to localize the atom and I assume that they use force feedback control to maintain position much like STM (Tunneling Microscopy). I probably would have called it something like NMM (Nuclear Magnetic-Resonance Microscopy), but hey I didn't make it work!

I'd note that the same group headed by Lutz achieved single electron ESR with a similar scanning methodology at least 15 years back so this was follow on work. It's still amazing and incredibly difficult... just imagine how you would produce something (a test sample) that you know will have only 1 magnetically resonant atom in the affected scan area!

At the time the hope was to use single atom NMR to image DNA, but I think that has largely been accomplished by other methods.

edit: The paper in Nature for those with access. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0573-x

That's fascinating, and I deeply admire the kind of science that involves developing new tools to find answers.

Can I ask about the rationale motivating attempts to image DNA specifically - was it mainly that we were attempting to get better spacial understanding of the different molecular conformations it enters at different stages of the cellular cycle?

Or imaging DNA transcription? Or DNA polymerase in action?

or was imaging DNA this way an attractive goal because we already anticipated some particular applications?

imaging dna in this way should give high resolution, but if I understand the experimental conditions, they're not physically relevant, so would not be able to look at the molecular conformation of cellular DNA.

The imaging depth that I was aware of at the time (um) would have allowed imaging with the DNA is solution... so ostensibly introns and other physical attributes could have been imaged. Also 20 years ago we didn't have good automated shotgun techniques so everyone was trying to solve that problem.

Physicist here. True physical experiments are almost by definition one-off machinery, being built and hacked on as the experiments are conducted. The idea is, to measure something that hasn't been measured before. So basically there is no off-the shelf device for this. Designing an experiment means designing the machinery to conduct it. There are some standard components like oszilloscopes, at the core there is probably a custom machined part like a vacuum chamber, the rest is made out of duct tape, aluminium foil and hot glue :).

A bit like the first full-size MRI machine in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_magnetic_resonance_...

This is the 2015 preproduction of the original machine: http://www.ghat-art.org.uk/mark-1-the-worlds-first-whole-bod...

Gosh, if they didn’t have the pretty shrouding no one would ever get inside.

Even includes what appears to be a can of orange pop. Seriously. Placed sideways, near-end of the table. Weird.

Actually, that's an Arizona Iced Tea: https://i1.wp.com/sanpedrosupermarket.com/wp-content/uploads...

Wow, good eye. Looks like Arizona iced tea can perhaps for emi shielding?

I saw that too... pretty funny looking.

More silly experimental physics hacks:

* Hand drill: https://youtu.be/FmmNRaKpBTI?t=1812

* Bridgeport mill: https://youtu.be/FmmNRaKpBTI?t=1852

many physics experiments look like this. I've always been bothered by the use of aluminum foil for insulation but it works. a lot of the parts would have been precision cut using CNC, etc.

Aluminum foil is used on a bunch of spacecraft as well. The Voyager spacecrafts use aluminum foil bought at grocery stores (and then laid out in sheets and thorough scrubbed with bleach).

ha, even better is Kapton tape. It's weird using it on my 3d printer then seeing it all over the moon lander https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-Lunar-Landing-Module-look...

I spent years using the Department of Energy's giant X-ray generators, and foil wrappings are extremely common at the experimental endstations. My favorite however was the scientist who custom-built a robotic arm that for many years used wooden pencils as part of the gripping hand. (I'm still not sure why he used pencils, except they were exactly the right size and physical properties. The robot worked, anyway.)

Yessir. A lab I worked in had what had to be a $10M MBE, half covered in aluminium foil.

Just to clarify, the aluminum foil is for thermal insulation used for keeping the microscope warm?

Al-foil is ubiquitous in ultra-high vacuum labs because part of the process of reaching this vacuum level involves baking the whole chamber at 120-150dC for 24+ hours. The chambers are typically made of stainless steel which has a pretty mediocre thermal conductivity. Hence the Al-foil, to ensure even heating during the bake. Since you have to bake every time the chamber is opened, it’s easier to just leave the foil on.

It's amateur-looking because it's research - they're iterating on a new idea.

This is like a physical manifestation of what we come up with during an all-night Hackathon.

That was exactly my point.

The Science History Institute in Philadelphia has some neat early lab equipment like this. It's a free museum and much better than the nearby Liberty Bell if you're into this kind of stuff. I highly recommend it. The focus is more chemistry, particularly with biomedical applications.

“Let’s get it working before we make it pretty”, up to the “before” defines experimental physics.

This reminds me of Feynman’s observation of the labs of physicists working on early cyclotrons and how they were an outward expression of the philosophy of the scientists working on them. I’m sure he would approve of this setup and approach.

It is basically an alpha test of new scientific instrumentation. It's obviously very common to see non-blackbox instrumentation in research labs.

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