I'm no expert in medical imaging or microscopy but a layman can readily see that that's a fundamentally different technology from conventional MRI, targeting samples of fundamentally different sizes. To compare the two as they are doing with their "100 million x" statement seems almost meaningless, as it would be to compare electron microscopy to SLR photography.

I was wondering the same thing PuffyJacket. Conventional medical MRI has resolution of about 1mm³. 100 million times finer? It would interesting to know if they have plans to develop this for medical scanning, or if it's constrained to exceptionally small samples.

Either way - very cool stuff. The ability to visualize proteins in action should produce HUGE payoffs.

um... guys would you use the world's smallest tweezers to fix a car? If it is 1e8 times better, you wouldn't use it on a person like a MRI.

That's the question I was asking joe - can it be scaled up to use on larger sample sizes? Nothing in the vid really suggests yes or no. Maybe it's a fair assumption that trying to get something that works on that scale to work on a macro scale is unlikely, but it's not certain.

Old news. I invented this two years ago with some paper clips, a watch battery, lemon juice and four pointy cups from a water cooler. They'll soon discover the magnetic field "domes" fall prey to quantum nonlinear space-time diffeomorphisms that thwart all attempts at clear readouts of volume resolution.

(All right, I'm lying. I used two paper cups).

I think they'll use it to scan certain molecules like proteins. And I don't think that you could scan anything bigger then a protein because it seems like they test the behaviour of the molecule to the magnetic field and therefor get some answers about its shape.