Archive for the ‘Light Microscopes’ Category
See the Invisible With a Fluorescent Microscope
November 6th, 2009 | 
Author: Have you ever wondered how doctors and scientists seem to know exactly how cell divides, what they look like, and what they do? At some point in your life, you may have peeked under a microscope in a biology class. You probably felt the images weren’t that interesting or colorful. But if you had done the looking through a fluorescent microscope, you would have whistled a a different tune. Why?
Light and Colors
Contrary to the common field microscope that uses reflection and absorption techniques to create magnified images of specimen, the fluorescent microscope uses light to excite specimens to emit light of longer wavelength. Fluorescence is an intrinsic property of substances where it becomes luminescent when excited by a radiation. Simply put, a fluorescent microscope is a light microscope with extended capabilities and added features. A more intense light is used in microscopy that excites fluorescence in the specimen which then emits a longer light wave length. Scientists use markers to distinguish emitted wavelengths by different colors. This technology shows digitally clear color images of microscopic organisms under probe. This technique of using transmitted light through a specimen is known as Kohler illumination, after the brilliant mind who sought to overcome the limitations of previous technologies, August Kohler.
Fluorescent Microscope in Life Sciences
Unlike metallurgical microscopes used for inspecting ceramics, metals and other inorganic materials, the fluorescence microscope finds its best uses in biology and life sciences. Rapidly expanding observation technique in medicine and biology, a range of more sophisticated techniques has evolved from it. More advanced technologies such as the multiphoton and canfocal microscopies are now combined with chromophore and flourophore advances now make intracellular observations even in unicellular molecules possible. Where the cell was acknowledged to be the smallest biological unit a few decades past, components of the human DNA are no distinguishable observations under these powerful tools.
Some have an inverted frame most suitable for viewing tissue cultures and similar applications. These designs provide illumination using an episcopic optical pathway.
Examples of Fluorescence Microscopes
Olympus BX51 Upright Microscope is a modern design of an epi-flourescent microscope with a vertical illuminator. The illuminator houses a xenon or mercury arc lamp and a turret of filter cubes. Source light travels through the lamp house through two diaphragms and into the cube holding the excitation and emission filters, as well as a dichroic mirror
Olympus IX70 Inverted Microscope. This inverted frame uses epi-illumination from an internal lamphouse. Light travels from the lamphouse via a collector lens into a cube holding the filters and a dichroic mirror
Both these examples are professional or research grade equipment. These both show the full range of capabilities a basic illuminating microscope is capable of. There are even more powerful microscopes with far more advanced features using highly advanced techniques. One of the more popular ones, confocal microscopy, now offers point-scanning capabilities with the latest from Olympus, the FluoView Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy.
Other highly advanced techniques like Multiphoton Excitation Microscopy combine multiple techniques to capture high-definition, three-dimensional, and full color images of specimens. These are the best there is in research equipment, and these will change your life from the very first instant that you use them.
CanScope – complete solution for all your microscopy needs.
Contact: 1-877-56SCOPE(72673) or info@CanScope.ca
Yes, you can see the invisible with a fluorescent microscope in toronto. Get started using one – or a metallurgical microscope – and learn more about Kohler illumination! Visit CanScope.ca today.
Tags: 
Things You Learn Through Educational Microscopes
The world is awesome. From its littlest creatures to its highest peaks, you cannot help but be awed, amazed and enthralled with the spectacle that nature can be. And that’s only through your naked eye, to boot!
When you look through the eyepieces and lenses of educational microscopes, you learn a few more things on a microscopic level that you would have not learned otherwise. Here are just a few of them.
Small is Beautiful
Our society seems to revel in the big – big boobs, big buildings, big movies, big houses, big hits, nig jewelry – that it seems small is, well, small in our eyes. Unless, of course, it’s thin bodies littering the beach in summer but that’s another story.
Anyhow, when you look through educational microscopes, you realize that small is beautiful. Just try looking at the pollen on a flower and you will see just how beautiful small can be!
Inner Space and Outer Space, Both Spectacular
Why look up to the heavens to witness spectacular shows? You can see equally amazing things on the microscopic level, say, a small insect with its colorful wings. And you won’t have to suffer through stiff necks from looking up to the sky and you don’t have to wait for night to set in either!
Seriously speaking, there are a great many things we have yet to learn about our planet Earth. Why don’t we start leaning more about the ground below us before setting our sights on aliens? Just saying though as everybody is entitled to his own opinion.
Looks are Deceptive, Definitely
Often, we turn an indifferent eye to ordinary things thinking that there is nothing spectacular about them. With targets under our educational microscopes, the lesson about beauty lurking beneath everything is homed in on us.
For example, who would have thought that a common rock will yield treasures of exciting patterns? Or that a common leaf will boast of networks so complex it rivals a labyrinth? Or that a strand of hair can be so interesting?
Indeed, with educational microscopes, you start to look for the beauty within each rock, each leaf, each creature, and hopefully, within each human being. Just don’t dissect them though!
Life is Fragile and Fleeting
Invincibility and immortality are things that humanity has aspired for centuries. This is all well and good for, indeed, who does not want to live forever and a day? Still, when you see vestiges of life under educational microscopes, you start to think of your own mortality. After all, when you see living matter breaking down before your very eyes, and at microscopic level at that, you realize that indeed life is fragile and fleeting.
And herein lies the greatest lesson that you may ever learn from educational microscopes – that as much as life is fleeting and fragile, life in all its forms must be valued and respected. Even the tiniest of God’s creatures have a right to live in this planet we call home. Hopefully, we can all have a greater appreciation for what it means to be human and humane.
CanScope – complete solution for all your microscopy needs.
Contact: 1-877-56SCOPE(72673) or info@CanScope.ca
Visit http://www.canscope.ca for your microscope needs from veterinary microscopes and fluorescent filters cube to educational microscopes in Toronto.