Imperial College London currently has the most powerful microscope commercially available today. Known as TITAN, the transmission electron microscope was created by FEI Company and costs around GBP 2.4 million or roughly US$ 4.8 million.

It is capable of imaging objects just 0.14 nanometers in diameter (one nanometer is one-billionth of one meter). The machine works by firing electrons through "a sample, just microns (one millionth of a metre) thick, and observing the changes to the particles as they pass through and out the other side".

Once TITAN is in use, everyone has to stay quiet as this is one of the operational requirements of the machine. You see, the vibrations caused by talking too loudly are enough to spoil a sample being viewed by TITAN.

According to Imperial College London's Dr. David McComb, TITAN will be used to probe everything from new materials for supercomputers as well as tissue samples that will help the medical community understand certain diseases. McComb explained,

Clearly, if we want to tackle diseases like osteoporosis, we need new drugs and clinical trials. But in order to develop those we also need to understand the process of osteoporosis. We need to understand how bone and tissue interact and why that process changes as we get older.

We are not quite sure what the state of the iron is or how it interacts with the tissues in the brain. But if we can understand that then potentially we can feed that into research into something that can disrupt or modify that process. We're ramping up, we're starting to get results. I expect over the summer we'll really start rocketing.