Giant ‘Mesolens’ observes in incredible detail

“Once, microscopes were simple. If you wanted to examine something, you’d kill it, chop it into slices, then stick the slice that you’re interested in under the microscope. Today, however, microscopes are rather more complex — and don’t require the subject to be sliced open before they can be examined. Instead, you just focus the microscope on the exact depth that you’re interested in, using what’s called a Confocal microscope. The way it works is that focus the lens on one tiny spot, using extreme depth of field to blur out the layers you don’t need. You see clearly the layer that interests you, and other layers aren’t visible. This approach was pioneered in the mid-80s by the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, and is now widely in use across the world…” This article is no longer available from the source website: Wired UK 29 June 2010