World's Most Powerful Optical Microscope

gamricstone writes "Scientists have produced the world's most powerful optical microscope, which could help understand the causes of many viruses and diseases. Previously, the standard optical microscope could only see items around one micrometre — 0.001 millimetres — clearly. But now, by combining an optical microscope with a transparent microsphere, dubbed the 'microsphere nanoscope,' the Manchester researchers can see 20 times smaller — 50 nanometres ((5 x 10-8m) — under normal lights. This is beyond the theoretical limit of optical microscopy. 'Seeing inside a cell directly without [it] dying and seeing living viruses directly could revolutionize the way cells are studied and allow us to examine closely viruses and biomedicine for the first time.'"

Comments

"Seeing a cell directly without dying"

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know microscopy was such a dangerous line of work...

50 nanometres ((5 x 10-8m) ????

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

What the hell? Don't you guys know the IEEE standard scientific notation for writing numbers with a characteristic and a mantissa? 5.0e-08 m

Lethal microscopes

[Zouden]

Seeing inside a cell directly without dying .. could revolutionize the way cells are studied

I work in a biology lab, and looking directly into a cell is one of my most dangerous tasks. Lesser men have been struck dead by viewing the horrors that lurk beneath the cell membrane. A microscope that lets us look inside a cell without dying would revolutionise biology forever!