Volume 17, Issue 6 (November 2003)

The achievements of Frits Zernike, his pioneering work with Carl Zeiss, and the early recognition of the Royal Microscopical Society, were commemorated on October 15th at a joint RMS/Carl Zeiss meeting. Held at the Institute of Physics in London, it celebrated the achievements resulting from the discovery of phase imaging and looked at current concepts and new imaging techniques that are further advancing live cell research...

Atomic force microscopy is becoming widely used, together with optical techniques that include confocal microscopy, to study a range of biological processes. This article describes three such examples using a specially adapted AFM and a confocal microscope to study single cell mechano-transduction and modulation, membrane receptor-ligand interaction and cell surface and intracellular topography...

A late 18th/early 19th century lacquered, brass, chest microscope is described. The Cuff-type body tube is raised via a compass joint from the base of the fitted mahogany case...

The recent development of environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM) allows the observation of porosity in cellulose sponges under humidity conditions corresponding to their normal use. The observation parameters can be tailored to prevent sample degradation during the analysis, and microporosity can be detected within the internal structure of industrially made sponges...

Internal material features for the entire three-dimensional volume of a sample are recorded in high resolution by a newly developed method in acoustic microimaging. By scanning the physical sample to collect all echo signals from all depths, this method creates a data file or 'virtual sample' that can be rescanned when the physical sample is no longer available...