
A sense of scale: the best microscopy of 2016 - Tomte
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/a-sense-of-scale-the-best-microscopy-of-2016/
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amelius
Color disappears at small scales (how small exactly?) So I guess those images
are artificially colored.

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sveme
Some of it will be dyed with fluorescent markers or some of the cellular
pictures will use fluorescent proteins (artificially) expressed by the
organism itself. Others are probably composites using several different
fluorescent markers - and indeed, some look as if they are enhanced.

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ralusek
The scale to which they're referring is the scale at which optics/light/color
are no longer used in the process of capturing the image. Coloring the subject
wouldn't help at that scale, as light waves are too large to be used. Think
electron microscopes.

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twic
None of the pictures in the gallery are at that scale, though. The smallest
things there are the single cells - the cell dividing, the fibroblast (the
"lining the walls of blood vessels" one), the single-celled algae, the
Frontonia - and those pictures are all taken with light microscopes.

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.

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whafro
I misread this as "the best microcopy" and thought it'd be a potentially-
interesting UX piece.

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountain#Visual_effects)

~~~
lobster_johnson
The effects (by a team lead by Douglas Trumbull) for the amazing creation
sequence in The Tree of Life were also partly analog, using fluid dynamics:
[http://nofilmschool.com/2013/05/microscopic-cosmic-
organic-v...](http://nofilmschool.com/2013/05/microscopic-cosmic-organic-vfx-
fountain-tree-life)

Whole sequence: [https://youtu.be/9EEIeH7ymwA](https://youtu.be/9EEIeH7ymwA)

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jacquesm
The cell division one and the memory one are amazing.

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bschwindHN
Totally off topic, but as soon as I started viewing these, I immediately felt
the urge to play the Metroid Prime intro music. It enhances the experience, I
think.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42u0KB6f5eU&list=PLB8DF09F4B...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42u0KB6f5eU&list=PLB8DF09F4BD991868)

