Collaborate Disseminate
In the hacker and DIY community, there are people who have exceptional knowledge and fantastic tools. These people are able to do what others could only dream about, and that others can only browse eBay looking for that one tool they need to do the job. One of these such …read more
Some of biology’s most visually striking images come from fluorescence microscopes. Their brilliant colors on black look like a neon sign from an empty highway. A brand new fluorescence microscope is beyond a hacker’s budget and even beyond some labs’, but there are ways to upgrade an entry-level scope for …read more
Continue reading Fluorescence Microcope on a Hacker’s Budget
Too many college students have been subject to teachers’ aids who think they are too clever to be stuck teaching mere underclassmen. For that reason, [The Thought Emporium] is important because he approaches learning with gusto and is always ready to learn something new himself and teach anyone who wants to learn. When he released a video about staining and observing plant samples, he avoided the biggest pitfalls often seen in college or high school labs. Instead of calling out the steps by rote, he walks us through them with useful camera angles and close-ups. Rather than just pointing at …read more
No matter how fine your fine motor skills may be, it’s really hard to manipulate anything on the stage of a microscope with any kind of accuracy. One jitter or caffeine-induced tremor means the feature of interest on the sample you’re looking at shoots off out of the field of view, and getting back to where you were is a tedious matter of trial and error.
Mechanical help on the microscope stage is nice, and electromechanical help is even better, but a DIY fully motorized microscope stage with complete motion control is the way to go for the serious microscopist …read more
Continue reading Motorized Stage Finesses the Microscopic World
Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, more is more. There is a type of person who believes that if enough photos of the same subject are taken, one of them will shine above the rest as a gleaming example of what is possible with a phone camera and a steady hand. Other people know how to frame a picture before hitting the shutter button. In some cases, the best method may be snapping a handful of photos to get one good one, not by chance, but by design.
[The Thought Emporium]’s video, also below the break, is about getting crisp pictures …read more
Continue reading Impossibly Huge Depth of Focus in Microscope Photographs
Advances in medical imaging, coupled with artificial intelligence, may obviate the need for additional surgeries. Continue reading Digital Imaging and AI Mean Fewer Surgeries for Breast Cancer Patients
Advances in medical imaging, coupled with artificial intelligence, may obviate the need for additional surgeries. Continue reading Digital Imaging and AI Mean Fewer Surgeries for Breast Cancer Patients
This new technique gives scientists a whole new perspective on the body’s insides. Continue reading Scientists Made Mice That Are See-Through, Shrunken, and Glow in the Dark
[Philip Nicovich] has been building laser sequencers over at the University of New South Wales. His platform is used to sequence laser excitation on his fluorescence microscopy systems. In [Philip]’s case, these systems are used for super-resolution microscopy, that is breaking the diffraction limit allowing the imaging of structures of only a few nanometers (1 millionth of a millimeter) in size.
Using an Arduino shield he designed in Eagle, [Philip] was able to build the system for less than half the cost of a commercial platform.
The control system is build around the simple Arduino shield shown to the right,
Continue reading Laser Sequencer uses Arduino to Enable Super-Microscope!
The microscope is one of the most useful instruments for the biological sciences, but they are expensive. Lucky for us, a factory in China can turn out webcams and plastic lenses and sell them for pennies. That’s the idea behind Flypi – a cheap microscope for scientific experiments and diagnostics that’s based on the ever-popular Raspberry Pi.
Flypi is designed to be a simple scientific tool and educational device. With that comes the challenges of being very cheap and very capable. It’s based around a Raspberry Pi and the Pi camera, with the relevant software for taking snapshots, recording movies, …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Cheap Robotic Microscope