Researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas have claimed that they’ve figure out how to prevent the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope from crashing into the surface of a material during imaging or lithography. They found that there was a small electronic barrier that controls the rate of tunneling, and so they figured out a way of measuring that local barrier height and adjusting the gain on the control system. As an end result, they believe that the can build structures atom by atom in order to guarantee “new, extraordinary materials.”