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First Color Images Produced By an Electron Microscope (sciencemag.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the color-your-judgments dept.

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.

6 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. "rare earth metals called lanthanides"? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

    Ugh, that is awful phrasing. Almost like "three different kinds of cars called automobiles".

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:"rare earth metals called lanthanides"? by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Psuedocolor please... by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. ...and the news is....? by gb · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Electrons don't come in colors by Lisandro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. oh, biologists... by Goldsmith · · Score: 2

    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.