Volume 24 Issue 2 March 2010

Ming Q. Chu, Department of Metallurgy and Materials, University of Birmingham, UK

The silicon drift detector (SDD) has been available for the analysis of X-rays in SEM for a few years now. Recently, the application of a new large area (80 mm2) SDD to TEM has improved the solid angle which is specially beneficial where counts are low in nanoprobe mode ...

Mark Nelson, Jonathan Ledoux, Mark Taylor, Adrian Bonev, Rachael Hannah, Viktoriya Solodushko, Bo Shui, Yvonne Tallini, Michael Kotlikoff
Department of Pharmacology, College of Medicine, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA.  Department of Physiology, College of Medicine, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL, USA. 
Department of Biomedical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.

Spinning disk confocal laser microscopy systems can be used for observing fast events occurring in a small volume when they include a sensitive electron-multiplying CCD camera. Such a confocal system was recently used to capture the first pictures of intracellular calcium signalling within the projections of endothelial cells to the adjacent smooth muscle cells in the blood vessel wall...

Geraint J. Parfitt, Christian Pinali, Philip N. Lewis, Robert D. Young, Andrew J. Quantock and Carlo Knupp. Structural Biophysics Group, School of Optometry and Vision Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales, UK

Corneal transparency is fundamental to vision and is attributed to the organised collagen fibril architecture the tissue maintains, which is regulated by proteoglycans. To understand the inter-relationships between collagen and proteoglycans in the cornea, three-dimensional reconstructions were obtained of mouse and bovine corneas which allow the conformations that proteoglycans adopt three-dimensionally to be observed for the first time...