Nanoparticles are known for their strange and unexpected properties, like providing bendable ceramics, switchable magnetization and so on. To figure out why these things happen, it would be useful to see how the structures are built, but it’s hard to take a picture of a thinly stretched clump of atoms.

Now a group of researchers in Europe have figured out a way to do it, and translate those pictures into colorful 3-D graphics that allow them to count individual atoms and see how they're arranged.