News

  • Lens free microscopy

    Byscientist

    Lens free microscopy Microscopy whether electron microscopy or with visible light requires lenses. For electron microscopy, lenses incur significant design challenges and add aberrations. A startup in UK uses technology invented by Professor John Rodenberg to remove lenses altogether and compute the image from the diffraction pattern of the sample. This is similar to a…

  • Micro-Microscope

    Byscientist

    Cell phone camera’s are small. However, typically microscopes are large bulky devices that have large lenses to collect light and are used for getting high resolution magnified images that are coupled to bulkier high sensitivity camera’s. But what about in-vivo microscopy where the animal needs to be brought below the microscope to focus. The laboratories…

  • Bluesky: Diffraction images from flow cytometer

    Byscientist

    Flow cytometry typically flows particles or cells through a laminar flow cell into an interrogating laser beam to be read out as flourescent signal with a photomultiplier or photodiode. The read out is typically the integrated intensity or a two dimensional projection of a cell. The residence time is in order of 10 micro-seconds. Cellular…

  • Open source goodies

    Byscientist

    Open source text search engine There are many technologies available that get slightly better packaged and then sold commercially. Often times the technologies are so superb and crowd sourced so well that it is surprising that many people do not consider it as a valid strategy for their laboratories or companies. Take the example of…

  • Bioluminiscent imaging

    Byscientist

    Bio-luminescent imaging Hair growth has been on ongoing research topic It is thought that stem cells can regenerate hair follicles when injected into animals and humans. However, this process has not been imaged very clearly. A group of scientists from Kyungpook National University School of Medicine, Daegu, Republic of Korea have used bioluminescent imaging to…

  • Controls and standards

    Byscientist

    Controls and standards: Often times it is easy to get lost in the process of image quantitation rather than controlling the parameters. For example, it is easy to start writing the specifications of the camera, intensity of light, how many pixels per inch while having no control of what can be done. Next time doing…

  • 3D microscopy

    Byscientist

    Super resolution microscopy One of the problems with Quantum dots and some fluorescent proteins/molecules is that they blink. And they all photo-bleach. Bayesian analysis of blinking and bleaching or 3B microscopy analyzes images using Hidden Markov Model (HMM) allows useful information to be extracted from the data. Dr Susan Cox has come up with unique…

  • Squid camouflage

    Byscientist

    Distributed light sensing Squid can really hide well in their environment. It is important for their survival since they have minimal active defenses but how is it important to us? Office of Naval Research thought that it was important enough to grant a $ 6 million grant to Roger Hanlon of Woods Hole Marine Biological…

  • Elastomer for surface imaging

    Byscientist

    Surface geometry made easy It is extremely difficult to measure the cell surface topology using microscopes or camera’s. Typically, the choice is to use reflected light, refracted light or some unique modification that requires light to enter at correct angles, be altered and then measured with the camera. Typically, setup like that cost hundreds to…