Nature: ultra-cold STEM heads to labs; lead-ink scan for burned scrolls; El Niño warning

Nature News dated Sept. 22, 2026, reports that instrument maker Bruker plans to ship GAIA early next year.

GAIA is a scanning transmission electron microscope that cools samples with liquid helium near absolute zero for 30 hours or more.

The shipments are headed to labs in Canada, Germany, and the United States, including Oak Ridge, the Ernst Ruska-Centre in Jülich, and the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy.

A second Nature News piece the same day covers a PLoS ONE study by Douglas Seiler and colleagues.

They burned sample papyrus scrolls and used neutron and X-ray tomography to read lead-bearing ink, a path that may help carbonized Herculaneum scrolls where carbon-on-carbon imaging struggles.

Separately, a Nature World View by Zeke Hausfather, of Berkeley Earth and Stripe, dated Sept. 22, warns that early-September Pacific temperatures and forecasts point to a possibly record-strong El Niño.

Hausfather writes that early-September central tropical Pacific sea-surface temperatures were about 2.9 °C above the recent 30-year baseline, and that forecasts give a greater than 90% chance this year’s event surpasses every El Niño since the 1870s.

He urges fast drought, fire, and flood prep.

The El Niño piece is Confirmed as Hausfather’s authored view. It is not a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration advisory fetched here.