• Question: what is the strongest microscope and what do you see down it? and what is your favourite microscope to look down?

    Asked by mewett123 to Aled on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Aled Roberts

      Aled Roberts answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Hey Mewett123!

      This is my favourite question to be asked so far!

      When you think of a microscope you might think of one you have seen in school… known as the light microscope (because it uses light! duh!). But this is a very poor microscope! There are fluorescent microscopes which are similar (however they use fluorescent light) and allow us to look at glowing proteins/proteins! If I want to get supper high resolution images I use atomic force microscopes which uses a little needle! I scrape this across the surface of a bacteria and the computer builds up an awesome 3D image! Other microscopes use electrons! and allow us to look in great detail within cells! There are so so so many types of microscopes and I have been really fortunate to use a lot of them! The best thing about a microscope is that you never know what you’re going to find when you look down it!

      I’m constantly amazed by what I see! It’s awesome! 🙂

      Hope that answers your question! If not, ask me another!

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