Using a tiny, spherical glass lens sandwiched between two brass plates, the 17th century Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first to officially describe red blood cells and sperm cells ...

Attempts to break the diffraction limit with 'super lenses' have all hit the hurdle of extreme visual losses. Now physicists have shown a new pathway to achieve superlensing with minimal losses, ...

When measuring with light, the lateral extent of the structures that can be resolved by an optical imaging system is fundamentally diffraction limited. Overcoming this limitation is a topic of great ...

To unravel the complexities of biological phenomena, scientists have long relied on microscopy to visualize the intricate details of their specimens, including tissue architecture, cell morphology, ...

Modern microscopes opened up the world of the minute to an amazing degree, allowing people to see all the way down to a bacterium wriggling on a slide. But if you want to see down even smaller in ...

A “superlens” that refracts light in unconventional ways to let an optical microscope see beyond the normal limit of its vision has been created by US researchers. They hope to develop a cheaper, mass ...

You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light shining at it: Optical light illuminates a material's surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a ...

A new atom camera uses one ultracold rubidium atom to map light intensity and polarization with spatial resolution below 100 nanometers. (Nanowerk News) Researchers in Japan have turned a single, ...

This article has been updated in January 2024. High resolution images of microscopic samples can be obtained experimentally using Scanning Electron Transmission Microscopy (STEM). It is an effective ...