A college intern taught an X-ray microscope to pick its own targets, cutting a 44-hour air pollution analysis to 10 hours

[u/intengineering]

https://interestingengineering.com/science/us-students-tool-cuts-particle-analysis-10-hours

Air pollution is full of microscopic particles with very different chemistry, and figuring out which ones matter used to mean a researcher manually hunting through a sample for days. During an internship at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Carlos DeLeon built software called X-AutoMap that does a quick low-res scan, spots particles matching preset chemical patterns, then automatically zooms in on them.

It handled about 500 urban pollution particles in 10 hours instead of 44, and it separated iron-rich particles that looked like industrial emissions from ones that looked geological. The catch is that it only finds what scientists tell it to look for, and may miss very small or weakly signaling particles.