ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,315,696, issued on May 27, was assigned to NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR MATERIALS SCIENCE (Tsukuba, Japan).

"Device for observing permeation and diffusion path of observation target gas, observation target gas measuring method, point-defect location detecting device, point-defect location detecting method, and observation samples" was invented by Akiko Nakamura (Tsukuba, Japan), Yoshiharu Murase (Tsukuba, Japan), Hideaki Nishikawa (Tsukuba, Japan), Taro Yakabe (Tsukuba, Japan) and Naoya Miyauchi (Tsukuba, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The device for observing permeation and diffusion path of observation target gas includes: a scanning e...