Sergei Kalinin and colleagues discuss the latest developments in manipulating matter at the nanoscale, using beams of electrons in aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEMs) (Nature 539, 485–487; 2016). Such investigations have a long history of success, hidden in the hexagonal image of uranium atoms portrayed in their article.

The STEM micrograph shown is a colorized version of one taken by my group more than three decades ago (see M. Isaacson, M. Utlaut and M. Ohtsuki in Introduction to Analytical Electron Microscopy (eds J. J. Hren et al.); Springer, 1979). It was later displayed on the cover of R. H. Petrucci's General Chemistry textbook in 1982, with appropriate credits.

Probes with 0.5-nanometre resolution were developed in the 1970s and soon used to fabricate nanometre-scale structures in STEM (see, for example, A. Muray et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 45, 589–591; 1984). The advent of aberration-corrected STEMs in the past decade and of probes of 0.1-nm diameter now allows us to push the limits of imaging and fabrication to the ångström level.