Rayleigh Air Bearing

Air moving at high speeds can cause some neat effects. Jet engines, for example, basically just throw a lot of air really fast in one direction, which causes the plane to move in the opposite direction, because of Newton's second law of motion. Air can also be used as a cushion, like in a hovercraft. Air bearings put that air cushion to work to reduce the friction between two spinning shafts by inducing a levitation effect. The video below shows a demonstration of an old air bearing. Yay!

A Lesson in Microscopes

Microscopes are nuts. I got a lesson in microscopes today from a specialty microscope setup engineer from Olympus. He was setting up a IX71 inverted microscope in a lab, and showed me some of it's features. First of all, the optical cables that brought the light from the external light source were filled with a clear liquid, not the normal fiber optic cables. Cool, I never thought about doing that, but it makes sense. Second, it has two light sources, one regular white light, and the other is a UV light to use on fluorescing samples. Ahh, so that's how they do it. I always imagined a UV lamp was used externally. And then he showed me all the apertures, levers, a do-hickeys to get a image into focus. And then there's phase-contrast, which uses the shift in the phase of the light as it passes through an object to impart a higher contrast ratio to the image. Which makes cells look super crisp.

Microfluidics Foch Lab

Microfluidic devices are really cool because at the micrometer length scale forces like surface tension have a greater effect than forces body forces like gravity. This makes the flow in these channels have very low Reynolds numbers, so the flow is generally laminar, and thus mixing occurs very slowly. The Foch Lab likes to set colorful microfluidic displays to classical music. Enjoy!