During the past decade, aberration correction instrumentation has revolutionized how we use electron microscopy. These advances in instrumentation have now been applied in the Nion Co. UltraSTEM to improve EELS energy resolution to a little less than 9 meV, using a 1-1.2Å probe with a beam current of a few pico-amps at 60 KeV. During the summer of 2015, we also introduced a new corrected spectrometer, to increase collection angles for very low loss excitations, and to deliver true high resolution for core loss studies. This work required environmental control of magnetic fields, floor vibration, and acoustic and thermal noise sources, allowing efficient identification and correction of sources interference in the experimental results. To date we have obtained optical phonon spectra down to 40 meV in energy. Intensities are very strong, reaching 1% of the no-loss intensity for the lowest energies we have measured. At large scattering angles, we notice a broadening of the tails of the no-loss peak which we believe is related to “Doppler” shifting of the electron velocity by collisions with the vibrating atomic nuclei. We have observed surface phonons -- Fuchs-Kliewer modes -- and are characterizing their behavior as a function of probe position and distance from surfaces in the aloof scattering geometry. There are also a multitude of plasmonic and photonic excitations in the 100-2000 meV range that have not been explored in the past with spatial resolution, including acoustic plasmons, carrier plasmons, and band edge excitons. Aloof scattering is very long ranged, producing results that are very similar to IR absorption. Thus, new measurement capabilities are resulting in qualitatively new and exciting information about the nanoscale behavior of materials. PEB and MJL acknowledge financial support of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award # DE-SC0005132.