Fairly interesting stuff, not newsworthy according to the digg community, but I don't think there are many scientist on there.
At Georgia Tech, this is what they call a nanoscale probe, or the Scanning Mass Spectrometry probe (SMS). It seems like what they are trying to do is take some mass spectrums of protiens, metabolites, and peptides without separating them from the cell/tissue. The associate professor responsible for doing this work is Andrei G. Fedorov. His research is pretty hardcore, talking about crazy ideas for ion sources, see project 7.
I think the way it works is the substrate gets a positive charge, the scanning tip has a negative charge. The scanning tip pulls molecules by charge, but also uses something called Taylor electrohydrodynamic focusing of jets to produce charged ions.
