Why is this beetle so crisp? The clarity results from the image being not a single photograph but a composite. I took 50 exposures at different focal depths and merged them in a file sharp enough to cut diamonds. This extra-clean look is increasingly common, and for a reason. Digital cameras and focus-stacking software are [...]

This blog often covers small things: insects, spiders, slime molds and so on. In the scheme of biology, though, the usual fare here is pretty big. In contrast, here is something truly small- the first high-contrast microscope image of an isolated molecule bundle of DNA: Researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia strung a molecule [...]

It’s a happy day for those of us who appreciate the small things! Nikon has announced the 2012 winners of its venerable Small World Photomicrography Competition. The prestigious contest, now in its 38th year, ranks images captured with various methods of microscopy. And I must say, the galleries are stunning! Go visit: Nikon Small World [...]

The proverbial primordial soup from which our earliest, multi-cellular ancestors emerged was presumably seething with many much simpler, single-celled organisms. Finding the first indications of evolution into more advanced, embryonic development has proved difficult, however, both because of the organisms’ small size and soft structures. A famous collection of minute 570-million-year-old fossils, from the Doushantuo [...]

Three-dimensional movies are everywhere these days, and the novelty is poised to become a big-screen mainstay. Now the field of microscopy is getting into the act, too, but the end product is very different from 3-D movies such as Toy Story 3 or Avatar. Oh-Hoon Kwon and Ahmed Zewail of the California Institute of Technology [...]

Even in sleep, the human body is rarely still—and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within. Until now, scientists have had to estimate the speed of complex but common actions such as protein folding (which turns an unorganized polypeptide strand into a complex and useful [...]

I have a confession to make — even though I work with ciliates at the moment, I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with amoebae. I love them to the point that I get offended whenever anyone within earshot insults them as ‘formless’ or ‘shapeless blobs’. Amoebae might be fairly squishy, but one cannot [...]

Am back, I hope! Don’t pay any attention to the dust… “What dust?” Exactly. It took a while, but after finally attaining the necessary potentially-overpriced fancy pieces of glass, the lab scope can now take acceptable DIC images. Meaning yours truly can once again slightly misappropriate lab resources during strange hours of the night and [...]