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.

Fried Plumbers and Crazyness

Those sparks are 12ft long! More like lightning, really, but either way those things could make an unlucky plumber very crispy. The tesla coils are seven feet tall which really puts the massiveness of this construction in to perspective. There are no speakers in this setup, and the sound is coming just from the electricity ripping through the air. Just like how thunder is the result of lightning, but on a much smaller scale. Pretty amazing if you ask me.  I am always awed at phenomena of sound from electronics, especially when it come to transistors and how when designing a computer the noise that the transistors make is taken into consideration. The conversion of electrical energy to mechanical sound energy is just fascinating.
On a crazy note, I can't wait until we can control the weather and are able to make every thunderstorm sound like a symphony orchestra of the gods. Or a hip-hop beat.