In a nod to what I used to do, a blog post caught my eye. It regards a bit of a controversy in a field I used to be quite familiar with; nanoscale surface science. The question basically boils down to whether the “stripes” being seen on a very small scale in a STM image are real or some sort of artefact. Given I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the strange things can happen when performing probe microscopy (my masters dissertation has quite a lot of space dedicated to consideration of hysteresis loops in AFM imaging—sorry, no idea where to find an electronic copy of that just now) it’s tickled my fancy.