microscope

Metallurgical eye candy

Metallurgical eye candy

An alloy of 1.3% copper, 0.3% magnesium, and 0.3% manganese in aluminum, etched with potassium permanganate and lye. So I woke up this morning all pumped up to blog about metallography. If you don’t already know, metallography is a type of scientific microimaging that involves mirror-polishing metal surfaces and then etching them with various reagents […]

Early microscopes

Early microscopes

Peacay at BibliOdyssey has a roundup of illustrations of early microscopes. “They were incredibly small, nay so small, in my sight, that I judged that even if 100 of these very wee animals lay stretched out one against another, they could not reach to the length of a grain of coarse Sand.” [Antonie van Leeuwenhoek […]

Lensless micro-microscope on a chip

Lensless micro-microscope on a chip

Fig. 1 (a) Architecture of the optofluidic microscope (OFM); set of three arrows: illumination; single arrow: flow direction. (b) Photograph of the OFM prototype compared with a U.S. quarter. The actual nanoaperture array is 600 µm long. (c) The top view of the OFM; denotes the isolated aperture; denotes the corresponding aperture, as explained in […]

Phytochemical microscopy

Phytochemical microscopy

If you decide to hang out indoors this week, take a look at this Florida State University gallery of phytochemical micrographs– micrographs are photographs taken through microscopes; phytochemicals are chemicals produced by plants. Capsaicin – This chili pepper-derived spice packs the wallop in your hot tamale, but it is also a digestive aid, a topical […]