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.

Comments

Re:"rare earth metals called lanthanides"?

[ArmoredDragon]

The article itself is full of fail in that regard. They literally call it a color image when it's psuedocolor, just like we've always gotten out of SEM images, the only thing is that the methodology is different in this case.

Electrons don't come in colors

[Lisandro]

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.