In December 1959, physicist Richard Feynman presented his famous lecture "There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom", now seen by many as the founding vision for nanoscience.

When he spoke about electron microscopy, Feynman posed this challenge: "The electron microscope is not quite good enough, with the greatest care and effort, it can only resolve about 10 angstroms ... Is there no way to make the electron microscope more powerful?"

In 2009, exactly 50 years later, a group of scientists will meet the Feynman challenge with delivery of the TEAM microscope, an instrument to provide unprecedented opportunities to observe atomic scale order, electronic structure and dynamics of individual nanostructures.