For hundreds of years, the optical microscope was the only tool available to scientists wanting to study the movement of cells, bacteria and yeast. But the diffraction of light made it impossible to ...

[Robert Murray-Smith] wanted to recreate how some ancient microscopes worked: with a drop of water as a lens. The idea is that the meniscus of a drop of water will work as a lens. This works because ...

An engineer at Stanford University has created a DIY microscope, called the Foldscope, that is fashioned out of a single piece of printed-and-folded A4 paper, origami-style. This paper-based ...

Aside from idle curiosity, very few of us need to see inside chips and components to diagnose a circuit. But reverse engineering is another story; being able to see what lies beneath the inscrutable ...

Add one more thing to the list of tasks your smartphone can perform. University of Houston researchers have released an open-source dataset offering instructions to people interested in building their ...

Professor Timo Betz is a biophysicist at the University of Göttingen in Germany. His name is found on widely cited research papers with serious-sounding titles like Neurite branch retraction is caused ...

Eyes trained on the cells under his microscope, Gustavo Batista Menezes had more on his mind than just science. Menezes was using a specialized confocal microscope at the University of Calgary, Canada ...

Researchers at German universities have devised a way to get microscopes into the hands of science-curious kids on a budget using scavenged iPhone 5 lenses and Lego. Researchers Bart E. Vos, Emil Betz ...

Scientists at EPFL have published a guide to building an add-on that turns a standard optical microscope into an instrument capable of producing super resolution, 3D images of cells, organoids, and ...