Using a tiny, spherical glass lens sandwiched between two brass plates, the 17th century Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first to officially describe red blood cells and sperm cells ...

When measuring with light, the lateral extent of the structures that can be resolved by an optical imaging system is fundamentally diffraction limited. Overcoming this limitation is a topic of great ...

Attempts to break the diffraction limit with 'super lenses' have all hit the hurdle of extreme visual losses. Now physicists have shown a new pathway to achieve superlensing with minimal losses, ...

To unravel the complexities of biological phenomena, scientists have long relied on microscopy to visualize the intricate details of their specimens, including tissue architecture, cell morphology, ...

Modern microscopes opened up the world of the minute to an amazing degree, allowing people to see all the way down to a bacterium wriggling on a slide. But if you want to see down even smaller in ...

There’s a mistake people often make when assessing the performance of a microscope or telescope— forgetting the diffraction limit. It is a theoretical limiting factor governing the maximum obtainable ...

You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light shining at it: Optical light illuminates a material's surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a ...

Researchers have built a reconfigurable light-sheet microscope that lets users swap oil, water and air objectives while ...

A new atom camera uses one ultracold rubidium atom to map light intensity and polarization with spatial resolution below 100 nanometers. (Nanowerk News) Researchers in Japan have turned a single, ...