A sense of scale: the best microscopy of 2016
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Something that was shocking to me when I first performed fluorescent microscopy was how much "prettifying" is done on these images. Many fluorescent microscopes output a single brightness value that you interpret to be the color you are looking for, meaning that you could literally color your image however you wanted. This was especially useful because red and green were commonly detected colors, but a lab member was color blind.
The size of the fringes depends on the instrument. But in a very high numerical-aperture microscope, it will be around about the wavelength of the light itself.
The pictures of the dividing cell and the fibroblast are done with a fluorescence microscope, so the colour is a reconstruction of what was there rather than a direct capture. In the case of the fibroblast, it's a rather Warhol-esque reconstruction with false colour; the actin in the picture is white, which it couldn't have been in the microscope. The algae look like natural colour under UV illumination. I'm not sure about the Frontonia; that looks like differential interference contrast, which would mean it has to be natural colour.
The dividing cell is probably on the order of 10 µm across. Light used in microscopy has a wavelength of 400 - 700 nm, and so gives a resolution of roughly 200 - 350 nm. That's enough to see structure in something 30 - 50 times bigger.
As an aside, the pictures dividing cell and the fibroblast both look like they were taken with a confocal microscope - there's not enough out-of-plane light for a widefield microscope. The dividing cell looks like a projection of a quite thick stack of confocal planes, whereas the fibroblast looks like a single plane. That means those images only ever existed in a computer; you couldn't have seen anything like that by looking down an eyepiece.
Still, some amazing images here. Conceptually, it reminds me of the bacterial imagery used in the movie The Fountain for many of its deep space visual effects (to avoid the cost of CGI): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountain#Visual_effects
Whole sequence: https://youtu.be/9EEIeH7ymwA
That's amazing! I adore The Fountain, but I had no idea that's how they did the special effects. I did notice they were 'otherworldly' and quite unlike anything I'd seen before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42u0KB6f5eU&list=PLB8DF09F4B...