Benjamin Bammes

Downtown Frederick, MD looks amazing during the Christmas season.

Visiting the cryo-EM facility at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. The Apollo camera is humming along nicely, delivering clean, low-noise data, with high-throughput.

In progress. 😃

I hope to see (and collaborate with) many more people adopt and push forward continuous-rotation tomography!

Effective continuous-rotation tomography was enabled by the Apollo camera's unique, ultra-fast on-chip electron counting (to capture the movie of the rotating specimen with fine angular sampling), combined with it's ultra-low noise from on-chip CDS (to enable frame alignment and maximize contrast).

Seeing how continuous-rotation eliminated of the artifacts caused by discrete angular sampling in conventional tomography reminded me of seeing motion correction for SPA for the first time many years ago. I didn't realize these artifacts were so significant until I saw them eliminated.

Today, at the Rice University Center for Nanoscale Imaging Sciences Conference, Prof. Steve Ludtke (BCM) presented impressive results of continuous-rotation cryo-ET, enabled by the ultra-fast counting of the DE Apollo camera. #teamtomo

Just finished my poster for the 3DEM GRC next week. (It's got both pretty pictures and math equations.) Can't wait to see everyone there!

DE's Carter Francis speaking at HyperSpy Workshop 2025 June 2-6 - Direct Electron We're excited to share that Dr. Carter Francis, Application Scientist at Direct Electron, will be presenting multiple tutorial sessions at the upcoming

Attending Diamond's HyperSpy Workshop 2025 next week? Don’t miss Direct Electron’s @csfrancis.bsky.social‬ tutorials on large data analysis, accelerating python and using pyxem for 4D STEM analysis. Learn from the expert!
directelectron.com/des-carter-f...

Thanks for putting "Christian" in quotes. Sadly, just because someone is (or claims to be) a Christian doesn't necessarily mean all their actions are consistent with Jesus's character. (That's personally true of me, too.) But political actions clearly have much wider impacts and are heartbreaking.

Please consider donating now to World Relief or any other charity you prefer that serves refugee populations that are suddenly especially vulnerable here in the US.

Stand in the Gap We Need You to Stand In the Gap Millions of lives are at risk. Donate today Your generosity is now critical in our ability to provide for these basic

My wife and I donated to World Relief, a Christian organization that serves 4000 refugees who have already arrived in the US, in addition to helping vulnerable populations in Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti, and the DRC. They have a 98% score on Charity Navigator.

worldrelief.org/stand-in-the...

Please consider donating to a charity that serves refugee communities in the US and around the world. Recent political actions in the US have abruptly cut off funding for these vulnerable groups. Charities are trying to fill the gap, but they need a massive influx of donations.

Learning Center - Direct Electron Read scientific application notes and helpful tips

We recently a uploaded several posters covering a range of electron microscopy topics & products to our Learning Center. Check them out or watch product webinars, read tech notes, and search our extensive publications database!

Visit: directelectron.com/learning-cen...

It's been a blast getting to play with some volume EM at SLAC this week. Some areas of images look absolutely brilliant, and some are streaky and have extremely poor contrast. I'm working to better understand the nature of contrast generation and specimen charging in cryo-SEM. 🤔

As I prepared a lecture on the science of electron detection for a class at Stanford, I came across this powerful quote, which I added to a slide. In electron microscopy, observation = detection. Detection matters for scientific discovery. This is why I'm passionate about what I work on!

I believe I heard them say they would share a recording at some point. Not sure of the details though.

I am particularly interested in this because, for many years, we've been pushing and developing continuous rotation tomography with our fast Apollo sensor technology. This has the potential to not only dramatically increase throughout but also improve data quality for cellular imaging.

Chlamy or maybe Julia's mycoplasma system seem appropriate, but then we need metrics to judge progress. For SPA of apoF, we have resolution, B-factor, Q score, etc. What metrics do we use for cellular imaging? The data is so rich.

Both statements were humorous, but also profound. For all the grief that apoF gets due to seeming overuse, it's been tremendously beneficial for technology, methods, and software development. The cell is MUCH more complex, but we need a similar model (like apoF) for development of cellular methods.

There are certainly applications where machine learning is a beneficial tool, but it's not ALWAYS the best option and even when it is, just because you can ultimately predict something doesn't mean you truly understand it.

"I'm kind of an AI skeptic, because I find that the machine learned something, but I didn't." - David DeRosier (paraphrase), at the "Cryo-EM: the next 50 years" symposium.

This is going to be a great day!

Looking forward to seeing lots of phenomenal people and stellar scientists at the cryo-EM symposium at Berkeley this Saturday! mcb.berkeley.edu/news-and-eve...

Working on optimizing some of our CUDA code for image processing... Simply reorganizing the kernel to use a binary tree structure, coalescing memory access, and unrolling loops increased the speed of one GPU function by >600x!

Nina Miolane, Asst Prof at UCSB, presented this fascinating segmentation of the last 500 years of scientific discovery into broad eras based on the overall method used to make progress. Is AI really ushering in a new era of science, or is AI just an improved tool in the era of data-driven science?

There is a lot of excitement over the biological insights that can be gained by visualizing cells and tissues, and it's clear that this will require a multi-modal approach, using a variety of techniques and requiring a variety of new technologies and methods. There's a lot of exciting work to do!

Exciting discussions at the CZI Imaging meeting this week covering diverse topics, from high-throughput tomography with Apollo, to the potential of 4D STEM for visualizing different types of information about the cell and cell-to-cell interfaces, to ideas for new SEM technology to improve volume EM.

Thanks! I guess I should have checked before sending the message. Still learning this new platform... But I'm thankful that the cryo-EM community is coming together like this again after things kind of deteriorated on the place formerly known as Twitter. 😃

Always great to see Wah and fellow Chiu-lab alumni! I am profoundly grateful for the impact Wah has had on my scientific career and for our continued collaborations!