Comments on: How to Take Stunning Microscopic Images–Without a Microscope

By: Florencia Goldmann

Florencia Goldmann — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:14:00 +0000

I wanna see

By: Raju

Raju — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 04:29:39 +0000

how?

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:53:13 +0000

How odd that there’s no way to see the content without commenting.

By: Harsh

Harsh — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:07:39 +0000

cool..really cool

By: Jiri Polivka

Jiri Polivka — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:37:35 +0000

As a small boy I saw a ~1942 journal for tinkerers. It described an easy-to-make microscope with a lens made of a water drop. The design comprised a metal strip anchored on a side of a wooden board with a large ~2″ hole in it. The other flat side of the metal strip was held above the hole with a screw and a nut. Next to the screw, in the metal strip there was a ~0.1″ hole. With a grease applied on this hole circumference, a water drop hung down against the 2″ hole in the wooden board. Across the large hole one can put a glass sample carrier, light entering from below e.g. by a mirror. Look into the drop from above- and it magnified ~100x!
The cost was zero, but this contraption allowed me to use a powerful microscope in looking at microbes in water, tiny components of vacuum tubes (after breaking the bulb), insects, butterflies and many more fascinating micro-objects.
My later better and more expensive microscopes gave me less fascination than this self-made toy. Recommended to anyone!

By: Veronique Greenwood

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:47:01 +0000

Hey folks–it seems that people were indeed having difficulty seeing the gallery’s text on their phones, but we’ve fixed the problem now. Thanks for telling us about it, and do let us know if anything else crops up. Happy browsing!

By: bob mcbob

bob mcbob — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:39:50 +0000

opera mobile. I have heard opera was proxied through their servers, so I guess that explains the same IP address.

By: Veronique Greenwood

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:41:05 +0000

Everyone’s who is having trouble seeing the text appears to be coming from the same IP address. Can you guys let me know here in the comments what browser you’re using?

By: Annoying

Annoying — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:02:15 +0000

To save time for others, here’s the text of the article:

To see the world on the microscopic level, you usually need, well, microscopes. But with sensitive cameras and a gel that deforms around even the ink on a printed page, a team at MIT has developed a compact, portable equivalent. A device about the size of a soda can, it can register objects as small as two micrometers across.
A little pad of gel, coated on one side with metallic paint, is at the center of the device. When pressed against a finger, a dollar bill, or a Post-It, the paint on the gel gently bends to fit the form of the object. Cameras arrayed above the gel snap images of the pattern imprinted in the paint, and computer vision algorithms reconstruct the surface in 3D. The result is beautifully detailed imagesof such objects as the individual barbules of a feather, shown above.

By: Annoying

Annoying — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:59:10 +0000

Why can’t I just read the article? How annoying is that?