Hello.
While we probably don't give it much thought,
chemical reactions are taking place everywhere in the world all the time.
In fact, they're the backbone of modern society.
The energy we use, the medicines we take, the foods we eat,
our housing materials are all created by reacting different substances together.
And if we could zoom in,
would find that it's the atoms within these substances that are rearranging themselves to give rise to new substances with the properties we need.
But chemical reactions are far from perfect.
They're often inefficient and their weight products can be harmful to the environment.
Understanding them down to the atomic scale has been a sticking point for chemists.
Perhaps not surprising given just how small atoms are.
Enter the young scientist Pratiba Guy.
Not satisfied with the conventional wisdom that claimed it couldn't be done,
she spent much of her career pioneering novel microscopes to bring the seemingly inaccessible world of chemical reactions into sharp,
atomic focus.
Today, Pratiba is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at York University, and her microscope,
known as the Environmental Transmission Electron Microscope,
is housed in many labs around the world,
allowing scientists like herself to observe chemical reactions in real time in exquisite atomic detail,