All scientist who studies microscopic life forms dealt with problems regarding the use of a microscope. Microscope is used by micrologists to view small objects, such as mineral samples or animal or plant cells, typically magnified several hundred times. Now, using a new electron microscope, colors of things that are viewed can be colored.
Electron microscope is a microscope with a high magnification and resolution, employing electron beams in place of light and using electron lenses. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a higher resolving power than light microscopes and can reveal the structure of smaller objects.
Small elements such as photons, bits of light essential to discerning color, are too clunky to resolve anything much smaller than say, a synapse connecting two neurons. If you want to look at things like viruses, bacteria, or molecules passing through cell walls, you must use an electron microscope.
According to Wired, the devices, developed in the 1930s, use electromagnetic coils to bombard a chemically-prepped, vacuum-sealed specimen with, you guessed it, electrons. The resulting image is more like a shadow casting than a photograph, with the particles revealing shapes, depth, contours, and texture. But not color. Which sucks, because color is an excellent way of finding things—important things—hidden in an image.
“So now we have something that makes Waldo stand out from everything else, because we take one picture where everything that wasn’t Waldo disappears into grayscale, and then assign the Waldo molecules a color, like orange, and then put that back together with the greyscale,” says Mark Ellisman, microscopist at CRBS and co-author of the study. “We’ve found a way of making multiple Waldos stand out based on the way they interact with the electrons we throw at them.” That’s fine, but Waldo wore a red (striped) shirt, not orange.
As of now, the team can add just two or three colors per image. “The hardest part is being able to use several metal treatments in sequence without one cross contaminating the others,” says Ellisman. This electron colorizing method work builds upon research that earned co-author Roger Tsien, who died in August, a Nobel in 2008. His death has done more than leave the team without a leader. It’s left them hurting for money. “We are thinking of crowdfunding to keep his vision going,” says Ellisman. The next big objective of the team is finding the color green in the electron microscope.
