Microscope could ‘solve the cause of viruses’
[Via Eureka! Science News – Popular science news]
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team have created a microscope which shatters the record for the smallest object the eye can see, beating the diffraction limit of light.
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The description of how easy it might be to greatly increase the ability of optical microscopes to see minute images is exciting.
But, as mentioned here, others have not been able to replicate the work yet. And, more importantly, the images shown are all static ones, of things like wires that do not move.
Living things, like cells, are in a medium where Brownian motion often becomes huge. This is something that can be seen even at the lower magnifications seen today.
What happens when we look even smaller? The motion that just looks like wiggles now become huge translations. It would be really hard to focus on any one part.
Perhaps cooling things down would help.
I wonder if they could use software to ‘hold’ things in place?
That is what is exciting about new technologies – they give us the ability to try and answer questions we could not before. I’m hoping that this holds up because there are some interesting things that could be done.
A Man With A Ph.D. 