MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

I found this article while looking for something else. Turns out its rather easy to raise your own tardigrades (water bears, moss piglets, or whatever else you want to call them), needing nothing more than clean water and a source of algae. Looks like a fun project! https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/f...

Looks like the control console for a 1970's era transmission electron microscope. The microscope part itself would be a (generally) cylindrical stainless steel column capable of holding a hard vacuum. Thanks, I thought it was something like that. It is unbelievable what one can find on the local cl...

Looks like the control console for a 1970's era transmission electron microscope. The microscope part itself would be a (generally) cylindrical stainless steel column capable of holding a hard vacuum.

I'm with Tom Jones on this. The proper coverglass is more resilient to damage and is easier to handle and clean due to it's size, but I don't think a 0.17mm coverglass would introduce any significant error in volume. I might have a pipette small enough to measure such small volumes; surely someone ...

He'll probably need to look into sputter-coated filters...which are not cheap. Chroma sells a broad range of these filters, but I'm not sure if they make them in a format compatible with your brothers setup: https://www.chroma.com/ (look under single bandpass filters) Edmund often has cheaper option...

SRRF can be run with any camera capable of fast acquisitions. We use a 12-year old Photometrics Evolve 512 Delta with good results. Some of the high-QD CMOS's also work. Andors implementation is simply on the camera itself, whereas we do ours in post. Andor also didn't acquire the team - SRRF is dev...

Very insightful post, thank you for sharing your expertise. Do you combine superresolution methods with deconvolution? I am interested in the optimum procedure to combine imaging with practical deconvolution, by utilising microspheres to obtain an experimental PSF. From what I have read, the optima...

Some good (and free) ID ebooks: https://www.wfoissner.at/publications.htm

The answer is "its complicated", as you've likely already realised from some of the above posts. Most microscope lenses intended to work with coverslips that are #1.5 in thickness. But this assumes that the sample is attached to the coverslip . If your sample is on the slide, or suspended in medium ...

You need to upload it to a video hosting service first, youtube being a good and free choice (if you only want to share here, set your video to "unlisted" on youtube - that way only people you share the link with can access it). To add the video here, you can simply post the link, or you can do a fu...

Werner Nachtigall in his book Exploring with the Microscope covers his use of micro-aquariums (page 117 in my copy). He uses very simple setups; small jars, no pumps nor filters. He keeps several of them. I went overboard and used about a gallon sized terrarium jar and lid. I put in some marbles, a...

Thanks Dennis and WWWW...may need to look into a physical copy!

https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ALuZq313PkW4xvM&cid=55153FC6AC252667&id=55153FC6AC252667%2110143&parId=55153FC6AC252667%219902&o=OneUp I saved this PDF off the web. It is a huge 800 plus MB file so takes like 4 minutes to load on my high speed internet. You can download it. If you want to vie...

Step 1: On the "post" page click the "youtube" button. This will create text that says [youtube][/youtube] Step 2: Go to the youtube video you want to embed and look at its web address (URL). It'll look something like www.youtube.com/watch?v=<video ID>&<additional information> . For example: https:...

Thanks for the ideas everyone. I've tried freezing the samples before, but still had issues with the section "shifting" in the microtome. Cheese becomes crumbly when frozen, so those shifts would cause large pieces to fall off. But I wonder if agar as an embedding medium (plus or minus freezing) may...

No, the title is not incorrect. Aside from amature microscopy, another one of my hobbies is home cheese making. I've been capturing micrographs of some of the organisms found in cheese with some luck, and have found a stain that can be used to give good colour to bacteria and fungi without staining ...

I disagree with the above idea that these are flagellates that have become trapped in roots. There are a number of plant diseases which are caused by flagellated protozoans, and some of these are invasive (e.g. the protozoan enters and lives inside of the plant cells or within structures such as the...

Not yet - I'm planning on using it to immobilize a yeast suspension, so that I can do a time-lapse of cell division without the cells floating away. I'd love to get one at 1,000x using phase-contrast!

I was wondering if anyone has experimented with "thickening" water-based samples with a thickener like xanthum gum (which doesn't require heating) to partially immobilize subjects? In the "professional" lab we use methylcellulose for this purpose, but at home I have quite a bit of xanthum gum (used ...

Just to add to Bram's excellent answer, because different techniques are needed to make permanent mounts of different types of organisms, it is easiest to start by making permanent mounts of one kind of organism, and mastering that technique before moving onto another kind of organism. It is much ea...

I have a bird bath in the back yard that supplies me with more organisms than you can shake a stick at. Turns out that birds use it to wash parasites off their bodies, poop in it, use it for mouthwash, you name it and a bird has done it in a bird bath. Add to that the sheer variety of birds, from h...

This is going to be a long-ish post, but the TLDR is I was hoping someone would have a good resource they'd be willing to share on how to maintain a small aquarium with a *diverse* range of freshwater algae and protists, or alternatively, if someone knows of a source where a similar "prepared" sampl...

I'm pretty sure that would be the same MD5. . Me too, but I was rather hoping it was not The Wikipedia page seems to say a lot of the things we don’t want to hear MichaelG. MD5, as a way to encrypt data, is crap. But it remains an excellent way to provide a hash that ensure a separate file has not ...

… but it appears that in most cases, sci-hub gains access via institutional (e.g. university) libraries where someone has donated to sci-hub access credentials. . Thus perhaps demonstrating that the donor is inherently untrustworthy ? … because they will, in so-doing, have breached the terms under ...

Given that the files are (largely) stored in a distributed manner, it would be pretty hard for someone to insert malicious code into the PDFs. Not impossible, but it would have to be done at the time scihub first accesses the PDF - once its sent to distributed storage, MD5 would prevent modification...

Is there a hacking concern with this? Not really; sci-hub self-catalogues the PDFs of scientific articles, so for most papers you're just accessing a PDF stored on a server and are not granting any sort of access (beyond a file download) to your computer. Some publishers have claimed that sci-hub g...

I say this as a biomedical researcher who frequently publishes and reads scientific papers.

Sci-hub is awesome. Use it.

EDIT: also, email authors for copies. More above-board than sci-hub, and if you get a scientist like me, they'll probably send you their entire back-catalogue of papers.

ImageJ is a free image processing software package that has this capability. You will need to know the pixels-per-micron scalining for your microscope, which can easily be determined using a micrometer. To add a scale bar: Load the image Under the "Analyze" menu select the "Set Scale...", then enter...

Go to: https://www.lwscientific.com/pages/camera-software Click the link for "BioVID 4K for PC - Version 4.11 (October 2021)". This will send you to dropbox where you can browse a zip file containing windows and linux drivers In the linux folder there are x64 and x86 drivers (you'll most likely nee...

It's a super cool invention, but still I'm not sure how exactly it self-aligns. Anyone cared to search for the paper? Now the limit of detection of single-molecule microscopes has been smashed again, and the details are published in the current issue of Science Advances. Its not really self-alignin...