Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Today, we take for granted the instruments that let us look at tiny ...

It’s relatively easy to understand how optical microscopes work at low magnifications: one lens magnifies an image, the next magnifies the already-magnified image, and so on until it reaches the eye ...

Those of you who have suffered through my writing before will know that I have a thing for imaging. A paper that offered experimental results on a new super-resolution technique was like offering me ...

The Micro Phone Lens can turn any smartphone or tablet computer into a hand-held microscope. The soft, pliable lens sticks to a device's camera without any adhesive or glue and makes it possible to ...

In the late 17th century, a Dutch draper and self-taught scientist named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek earned renown for building some of the best microscopes available at a time when the instrument was ...

A lens-free microscope that can be used to detect the presence of cancer or other cell-level abnormalities with the same accuracy as larger and more expensive optical microscopes, has been developed ...

Stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy has shown that diffraction-unlimited spatial resolution is viable with conventional lenses and visible light. Stefan W Hell, Lars Kastrup and Katrin I ...

Zooming in: image of mouse embryo. (Courtesy: Gail McConnell/University of Strathclyde) A new microscope lens that offers the unique combination of a large field of view with high resolution has been ...