 What happens at the nano level can have a big impact on the effectiveness of body armor for future soldiers. At the U.S. Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, material scientists use cutting-edge technology to peer into a world rarely seen. When you see the reconstruction, it's made up of millions of dots. Well, these dots are actual individual atoms that has been captured during the analysis process, and why this is so cool is because if you're actually collecting the atoms itself, you can't get more accurate in terms of chemistry than that. The atomic world is explored at the nano level. Obviously, as Americans, we're not great with the metric system, but basically a meter is roughly a yard. Well, if you can take a meter and divide it by ten to the negative ninth, so we're talking size of the analysis that's done in this machine, think of the end of your hair. It's a thousand times smaller than the end of your hair. Basically, my sample looks like a flying spaceship that will come in and get loaded in right here, so you'll actually see that. This machine gives scientists a 3D reconstruction for a more meaningful analysis, possibly leading to stronger or even more heat-resistant materials. Well, I can give you a specific example of how it's helped our research. We were a lecture depositing copper in a magnetic field, and we found an unknown chemical phase. We weren't sure what the phase was, and it was hard to determine what it was using other methods. But Adam Probe told us quite easily that that unknown phase was two different types of a copper hydride phase, and that's not something that we could have detected using those other methods. It's pretty impressive, because you can sort of see the atoms show up in real time. Again, it's on the nanometer scale, so it's much finer than all of the other characterization techniques that are out there. What I'm doing now is I found the sample that I want to run or analyze today, and I'm pulling it off the carousel. So now I'll move the carousel out of the way. So that's what you're seeing there is the actual sample itself is a silicon coupon with roughly 22 individual tips on it, and each one of those tips is a sample. We get these new materials, and maybe they show some great properties, but how do we ensure that we can do that each and every time with that sample? So this machine allows us to control at the truly atomic level. Certain atoms are sitting certain positions versus other positions. Can we ensure that property is going to occur each and every time? So this machine allows us to measure almost on that scale and reproduce that over and over again by looking at the chemistry. So you really want to try to understand how things work and how things, you know, what the microstructure looks like from a very small level in order to be able to bring that into fruition and eventually use it for the army. When you see things that, in theory, no other human's ever seen before when you run a new material. So yes, it's very cool to think, oh, I'm discovering and help push the envelope of new modern material science, which then obviously is used for the army. So the army has, you know, a multitude of applications. So every time we run a new material, you think, you know, how can I help the soldier with this new discovery?