The Honda Foundation, co-founded by Soichiro Honda and his younger brother Benjiro Honda, and currently headed by Hiromori Kawashima, is pleased to announce the Honda Prize for the year 2008 will be awarded to a German team of researchers of electron microscopy led by Dr. Maximilian Haider, Dr. Harald Rose, and Dr. Knut Urban.

Jülich scientists have succeeded in precisely measuring atomic spacings down to a few picometres using new methods in ultrahigh-resolution electron microscopy.

A novel super-resolution X-ray microscope developed by a team of researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) and EPFL in Switzerland combines the high penetration power of x-rays with high spatial resolution, making it possible for the first time to shed light on the detailed interior composition of semiconductor devices and cellular structures.

A team led by a Purdue University researcher has achieved images of a virus in detail two times greater than had previously been achieved.

Using an existing technique in a novel way, Cornell physicist Keith Schwab and colleagues at Cornell and Boston University have made the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) -- which can image individual atoms on a surface -- at least 100 times faster.

Layer-by-layer light microscopic nanoscale images of cells and without having to prepare thin sections? A team led by Stefan Hell and Mariano Bossi at the Max Planck Intstitute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen is now leading the way with a technique called optical 3D far-field microscopy—with nanoscale resolution, good signal-to-noise ratio, and relatively short exposure times.