Illustration of a cryo-transmission electron microscope, the class of instrument the laser phase plate upgrades. Image: Ryan Kissinger, courtesy of NIAID, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has transformed how scientists see the molecules of life, earning its pioneers the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yet it has a stubborn blind spot: most human proteins are too small to image clearly. Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have now built ...