An electron microscope is like a flashlight that only works in total darkness. Any speck of air is to its beam what a bump is to a cyclist on a road. So before, anything you wanted to look at had to be frozen or dried first. But rust, glass melting, and a mite's life happen in air, not in a vacuum.
The engineers built a channel where the pressure doesn't drop smoothly but in sharp vortex steps. The beam dives into this serpentine and comes out at nearly room pressure. The detector that catches reflected electrons was swapped from a sharp needle to a flat plate, so it doesn't spark. And the sample is heated by three lasers through a transparent prism: they heat only the spot you want, not the whole chamber.
Now you can put a living creature in the microscope and watch it move. At a pressure of 20,000 Pa, a mite wiggled its legs as long as it was humid; when the moisture was removed, it froze. A glass mixture was heated to 1400 °C, and they saw it flow. Before, you had to choose: either hot or humid. Now you can have both at once.
A live mite under an electron beam is not science fiction but a routine demonstration: at 20,000 Pa it wiggled its legs until humidity dropped to 100 Pa. And the pressure difference from the sample chamber to the electron gun spans 14 orders of magnitude, like from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to open space.