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First Color Images Produced By an Electron Microscope (sciencemag.org)
Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: Imagine spending your whole life seeing the world in black and white, and then seeing a vase of roses in full color for the first time. That's kind of what it was like for the scientists who have taken the first multicolor images of cells using an electron microscope. Electron microscopes can magnify an object up to 10 million times, allowing researchers to peer into the inner workings of, say, a cell or a fly's eye, but until now they've only been able to see in black and white. The new advance -- 15 years in the making -- uses three different kinds of rare earth metals called lanthanides...layered one-by-one over cells on a microscope slide. The microscope detects when each metal loses electrons and records each unique loss as an artificial color.
Ugh, that is awful phrasing. Almost like "three different kinds of cars called automobiles".
Ezekiel 23:20
There is no color at that scale, that's false color, and we've seen colorized images plenty...
If they really want to show some "color" then shift the spectrum of the feature size and map it to visible light, that will at least be proportional color reproduction instead of a few arbitrary dots in a grayscale image.
captcah is "COMPOST" which is what the article claim is
This is cool, but not color electron microscopy. It is pseudocolor at best based on what things in a cell that the lanthanides bind to. A real color electron microscope would somehow use electrons at different energies to try and figure out the chemical makeup of subcellular structures. Or maybe vaporize the sample line by line by scanning with the electron beam on high after taking the image with lower energy electrons, and then analyze the ions produced. But this is still pretty cool.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
I wasn't aware electrons came in different colors.
This doesn't seem such a huge advance - we've been making elemental maps in STEMs for ages and combining several in false colour images for like also ages. As far as I can tell the new thing is that they're doing this by actually imaging selected portions of an electron energy loss spectra (rather than just recording the spectra point-wise) - I guess this makes it slightly faster to generate the image - but there's not really any new science in this.
right here.
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Now we can finally see what Trumps micropenis looks like.
The title is misleading - this is false color, but one generated by the electron microscope itself instead of postprocessing. As the article states, it allows for much better contrast than grayscale.
Big whoop. Cellies.
rewriting history since 2109
Electron microscope images are gray scale.
Also, features much smaller than the wavelength of light will not reflect specific dominant wavelengths. I.e. color. This is a method for sudocoloringof images.
Transmission electron energy loss microscopy is well established technique. I guess it's neat they did it with cells, I suppose it's kinda hard to do in high vacuum without destroying the cell; but material science has been downing this for a while... I suppose it's typical for when biology uses a well established technique used in the physical sciences to make a big deal out of it. Hopefully, they'll make some cell biology discoveries using this instead of more technique papers...
Obviously it has to be a pseudo-color plot corresponding to the energy loss, the detected electrons don't have visible color...
Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy is pretty old
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The TEM version is a bit newer. It's only 20 years old.
election microscope?
> Vaporizing the sample to look at it? That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
It's kinda like "we have to pass the bill to find out what's in it."
given the properties of light photos, the nature of color, and the relationships between color as a perceptual phenomenon, photons, and objects of this scale, I would have imagined that "color" (as in natural color, i.e. color in the conventional sense and its relationship to perception and human anatomy) is not a terribly meaningful of important concept at this scale. Am I wrong?
This is color used as an unrelated tool—applying color to enhance, essentially, actuance. Yes?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Benjamin: Come on, Mr. Simpson, you'll never pass this course without learning the periodic table.
Homer: I'll write it on my hand.
Benjamin: Hoh! Including all known lanthanides & actinides? Good luck!
Electron microscopes can only image conductors. To view a cell you have to coat the cell, an ant, etc in a thin layer of metal via deposition. There is only one color to see because you're taking reflections off a metal, not the object being studied.