At Insight Chips we often sit by the TEM and observe fascinating and beautiful phenomena that we cannot explain. Because these things often are not what we set out to observe or simply because we cannot explain exactly what happens we refrain from sharing these experiences.

But we thought: Why not simply share more of what we see? It is a shame that we sit in awe and wonder for ourselves. We could share some of the fun with you!

And also, perhaps you can help shed some light on some of the mysterious things we encounter from time to time.

Here’s a brief intro to what happens in this video and our best guess as to what the strange things that occur, are:

• We have injected a liquid suspension of lipid nanoparticles into our Nano Channel Chip with channels of 150 nm liquid thickness and membranes of 19 nm SiN on both top and bottom.

• The particles are made by assoc. Prof. Anan Yaghmur and PhD candidate Zahra Babaie from Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen.

• The video shows two clips in sequence - sped up 6 times - of two channels where we see some circular 'blobs' that look like LNPs.

• But these blobs break down under the beam and new crystals start forming.

• This is clearly beam-induced, but what is it? It looks almost as if the LNPs dissolve only to re-assemble into new crystals.

But then again, it could also be that the LNPs are forever gone and what we see forming is salts from the buffer used in the solution.What do you think? And have you seen something like this before?

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