I'm looking for the joke with a microscope.

September 17, 2010 8:48 AM

New Microscope Enables Real-Time 3-D Movies of Developing Embryos. "A European lab combines "light sheet" microscopy with an illumination process that subtracts the static caused by scattered photons to devise a way to clearly observe the inner workings of cells over a period of days. Using a revolutionary new microscope, scientists can now peer into embryos and watch, in one of the world's smallest 3-D movies, as brains, eyes and other organs form." Slide Show: New Microscope Enables Real-Time 3-D Movies of Developing Embryos. The video can be viewed at the bottom of the page.
posted by Fizz (9 comments total)

Fascinating! Thanks for posting this.
posted by zarq at 9:02 AM on September 17, 2010

wow, image a body mod to record your child's entire 9 months in the womb? bonkers...
posted by lslelel at 9:51 AM on September 17, 2010

This can only be done with small specimens. It wouldn't work for human embryos in the womb.

This technology has been developed for a couple of years now and there will probably be a commercial product in not too long. Although confocal microscopy has been around for a while, this technique looks like it gets higher quality images.
posted by demiurge at 10:01 AM on September 17, 2010

fascinating. and kudos for the Repo Man reference in the title.
posted by bagelche at 10:24 AM on September 17, 2010

Oh my god. This is excellent. This is the kind of technology that can really drive research forward. Thanks so much for the link!
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:55 AM on September 17, 2010

People in my lab can spend a whole day on the confocal scope. Even setting aside image quality, the gains in acquisition speed (and decreased bleaching) look to be AMAZING. We don't have anyone that could build one, but when they go commercial, I know some people who will want to go to there. Also, Leica have been real fuckwits to us recently, so this would give us an excuse to give Zeiss a shot.
posted by Humanzee at 12:02 PM on September 17, 2010

Zeiss is the bomb, Humanzee. Just don't expect your product rep to respond in less than a week, and you can pretty much figure that every addition to the scope will be almost exactly $1000. New filter cube? A grand. New software package? Yep, a thou. It's weird.

Also, the video makes me want to go back to the days when I was teaching developmental bio so I could show this and say to the students "DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INGRESSION AND INVOLUTION NOW, YOU FUCKERS?" but that would just be plan rude.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:41 PM on September 17, 2010

I can't wait til David Lynch gets ahold of this.
posted by cmoj at 3:16 PM on September 17, 2010

Oh my god. This is excellent. This is the kind of technology that can really drive research forward. Thanks so much for the link!

Yeah, but it's sad that my first thought was, what a wonderful tool for the anti-choice movement.
posted by whatzit at 4:16 AM on September 18, 2010