WOODBURY, N.Y., Sept. 20 -- More than 200 scientists from 20 countries attended the third annual Seeing at the Nanoscale conference, held last month in Santa Barbara, Calif., co-sponsored by Veeco Instruments and the California NanoSystems Institute. Veeco, based in Woodbury, N.Y., is a provider of technology for nanoscale applications for the semiconductor, data storage, HB-LED/wireless and scientific research markets. Craig Prater, PhD, Veeco's director of new technology development, said, "Over 200 leading scientists from 20 countries attended this year's event, which has gotten larger and attracted more notable scientific papers and abstracts every year." Masakazu Aono, director general of the Nanomaterials Laboratory at Japan's National Institute for Materials Science, was the keynote speaker. Charles Ying and Stephen Hsu, scientists with the Nanotribology unit at the National Institue of Standards and Technology (NIST), described results of their research on the fundamental mechanisms of friction, including quantitative analysis of plowing effects by sharp probe tips. Martin Stolz, a researcher at the Maurice E. Mueller Institute for Structure Biology (Basel, Switzerland) presented a new atomic force microscopy (AFM)-based protocol for measuring the elastic properties of tissue. They showed AFM images illustrating the molecular origin of loss of elasticity in cartilage due to aging. Franz Giessibl, a researcher with the scanning probe microscopy group and a lecturer at the University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany, reported on capturing an image of a single atom with subangstrom lateral resolution using higher-harmonic atomic force microscopy. Philipp Thurner, a postdoctoral fellow in the physics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, showed how AFM images help reveal the nanometer-scale structure of human bone and how this furthers the efforts to develop a 3-D model of the complex nanocomposite bone. Arthur Baddorf, a research staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, showed maps of naturally occurring piezoelectric properties in teeth and butterfly wings. University of California, Santa Barbara, Paul Hansma Research Group researchers Georg Schitter, a project scientist working on high-speed atomic force microscopy, and Georg Fantner, a graduate student working toward his PhD in physics, showed first results of a new high-speed AFM system and batch-produced small cantilevers for high-speed imaging. Tilman Schaffer, a senior scientist with the Interface Physics Group at the University of Munster (Munster, Germany) demonstrated methods of high-speed imaging of elastic properties of chromosomes and showed a video of the digestion of a chromosome viewed with this technique. For more information, visit: www.veeco.com/nanoconference/call_for_papers.asp