Explore the diverse world of microscopy techniques with our in-depth articles and guides. This category covers various methods, such as bright field, dark field, phase contrast, and fluorescence microscopy, allowing you to enhance your skills and knowledge in the field of microscopy.
Learning how to view soil under a microscope comes down to five steps: collect a fresh sample from the top 2–4 inches of ground, disperse a small amount in distilled water, pipette a drop of the cloudy liquid onto a slide, add a coverslip, and scan from low to high magnification. Done right, you’ll find …
Knowing how to view a butterfly under a microscope opens up one of the most visually stunning specimens in amateur microscopy. Use a stereo (dissecting) microscope at 10–40x for whole structures like wings, the proboscis, compound eyes, and antennae, and switch to a compound microscope at 40–400x when you want to resolve individual wing-scale ridges …
A wet mount slide suspends a specimen in a drop of liquid between a glass slide and a coverslip — the fastest and most beginner-friendly way to observe living specimens under a compound microscope. Here are the six steps at a glance: Clean your glass slide and coverslip. Place your specimen on the center of …
Tardigrades — also called water bears — are microscopic eight-legged animals that hide inside dry moss and lichen, waiting to be rehydrated. With a basic microscope and a handful of dry moss, you can find them yourself; the method is simpler than most people expect, and the steps below cover everything you need to get …
Learn how clinical laboratories prepare stool samples and examine them for parasite eggs, protozoa, blood cells, fat droplets and look-alike artifacts.
A blood smear under a microscope shows three things at once: pale pink red cells scattered like coins, purple-stained white cells with wildly different shapes, and tiny lilac specks called platelets. To read one, you move the slide to the monolayer just behind the feathered edge, sweep from 10x up to 100x oil immersion, and …
Explore the microscopes crime labs use to identify and compare hair, fibers, glass, paint and other trace evidence—and the method’s limits.
For most of human history, the atom was a philosophical concept — matter’s smallest theorized unit, invisible by definition. That changed in 1931, when a pair of German scientists aimed a beam of electrons at a thin specimen and produced an image no light microscope could ever rival. Today, we don’t just see atoms; we …
Mankind’s innate curiosity and our desire to learn and grow has continuously pushed us to figure out better ways of doing things, and this includes being able to see things smaller and smaller, hence the invention of the microscope. The definition of a microscope is a piece of optical instrument that is designed to view …
Dark field microscopy illuminates a specimen with a hollow cone of oblique light so that only the light scattered or diffracted by the specimen reaches the objective — leaving everything else in pitch-black. That simple optical trick turns colourless, unstained, and nearly transparent specimens into bright glowing structures you simply cannot see under conventional bright …