The only real way to know if you had a single atom tip was to image a known surface. If the image was junk you probably had some funky tip states going on. HOPG (graphite) was the standard we typically used.
A good tip could be just about anything, from a nice cone to really jagged. One problem was any of the methods one has to view the tip can't actually resolve the single atom that is doing the imaging.
As someone who has been a longtime longtime Zotero user is there any good reason for me to check out Mendeley? I played with it once awhile back, but not enough to get a good feel for it. Zotero worked well, and continues to work well for me. Are there different use cases for one vs. the other that I might be missing?
I think hardhead might have just been referring to keeping a "full time job" which is impossible in many of the STEM PhD programs in the US. A lab-mate of mine has a child, and I know a few others in my program that have children as well. Almost all STEM PhD programs offer stipends for TAs and/or RAs, so you might get on the order of 20K/year to be a student. That being said, there are no shortage of people claiming the grad student -> postdoc -> nontenured prof. -> tenured prof. route is hostile to those wanting a family.
Also be sure to check out IBM's STM gallery for some more amazing images.
http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?i...