Volume 20, Issue 6 (November 2006)

The microwave has always promised to shorten tissue processing times. However, historically much of the use of the microwave has produced inadequate and varied results. This science has been further hampered by assumptions and misunderstandings as to how the microwave shortens processing times...

A focus-dependent displacement between the positions in the darkfield and brightfield images of small crystalline particles has been noted in the past. Delocalisation is an imaging artifact that can result in the presence of lattice fringes outside a crystal imaged in a transmission electron microscope in the presence of spherical aberration and/or defocus...

Because many conventional, high-vacuum scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) are still in use, their full potential should always be explored. With this aim in mind, two uncoated stainless-steel blood lancets, used for finger puncturing in a study carried out 20 months earlier, were examined for possible blood smears in an SEM using secondary electron imaging at an accelerating voltage of 0.5 kV...

When leprosy is not recognized and treated at an early stage, peripheral nerve damage ensues, leading to weakness of muscles, paralysis and severe deformities. Although Mycobacterium leprae can be visualized by light microscopy it is not possible to clearly delineate its morphology, surface structures and its relation to host cells by light microscopy...

DNA Microarray analysis is a newly developed technique that can be used to simultaneously measure expression levels of thousands of genes in normal and diseased tissue. To date, few studies have investigated gene expression inpituitary neoplasms...

Concrete, a widely used material in civil engineering, suffers from weathering. Among the known weathering factors, biological factors are often neglected in spite of their synergistic action with chemical and/or mechanical factors...