In her new Book of the Dead, Patricia Cornwell's crime-solving forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta, uses Y‑12's Large-Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope to find crucial information that helps solve the crime.

I got an email from a colleague who still works in "the old country". He tells me Cornwell visited earlier this year and was fascinated with the SEM that has a chamber large enough to scan a V-6 engine block.

“For more than twenty years,” Cornwell said, “I've been researching scientific techniques and instruments here and abroad, and I've never seen anything as stunning as the LC-SEM at Y‑12.”

She has since used the instrument in her ongoing research as to the true identity of Jack the Ripper.