Narrator:        This is Science Today. Understanding and observing just how materials react to chemical reactions or structural deformations is key to the future design of new and improved materials and devices. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, researchers redesigned an electron microscope to get a better glimpse of a material's micro-structure. Scientist Geoffrey Campbell says it's called the Dynamic Transmission Electron Microscope.

Campbell:       It produces enough electrons to form an image in just fifteen nanoseconds. So, it's sort of like stop-action photography, if you will. So, it's a way of reducing motion blur if you have a moving object in your image. If you illuminate it for a very short period of time, you can get a stop-action image of what it's doing. If you can get a series of images. Then you can understand how these features are evolving with time.

Narrator:        Campbell works a lot with metals, including aluminum alloys, which are used to build airplanes.

Campbell:       The strength of materials is something that we're very interested in here and have worked on for many decades.

Narrator:        For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.