No more talk about God this morning folks. Instead a very quick post about a video series that I just discovered from Cambridge University. 'Under the Microscope' is a collection of images taken, you guessed it, under a microscope, and then accompanied by explanatory narration. I found them fascinating. They're all very short, so you can run through the entire series (below) rather quickly.
It's been 3 months since they last posted a video, so I hope the series isn't over, but you can subscribe to the Vimeo channel by going here. More info on each video below.
Enjoy!
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VIDEO 1
In the first of this microscopic video series, Dr Chris Forman shows us the eye of a beetle and the eye of a fruit fly and explains how they have inspired technology.
Dr Forman:
“Nature has found remarkable ways of using small amounts of energy to combine common elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen into fascinating and complex assemblies like these insects shown here. If we could do the same in our manufacturing processes then perhaps we could recycle our products more easily and we wouldn't use as much energy processing large lumps of aluminium, concrete and plastic. My research into biomaterials tries to learn from nature how to combine the same basic materials into a wide range of structures that perhaps, one day, may be used in all kinds of products from food to factories!”
Size of these images:
μm = micron (one thousandth of a millimetre)
Beetle eye: each individual lens is 12 μm (the thickness of cling film), the entire eye is about 750 μm across (thickness of 5 sheets of paper) and the entire image is about 240 μm across (really thick bit of human hair).
Fruit fly eye: Again each lens is about 10 μm (thickness of cling film), and the entire eye is about 200-300 μm (3 sheets of paper). The total distance across the image is about 115 μm across (thickness of a human hair).
More info:
More images:
Dr Forman’s profile:
Thanks to Dr Bill O’Neill and Dr Paul Barker.
Department of Engineering:
Music by Joe Snape:
VIDEO 2
In this video Dr Chris Forman shows us his incredible images of a fruit fly foot and beetle antenna.
Dr Forman:
“Nature has found remarkable ways of using small amounts of energy to combine common elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen into fascinating and complex assemblies like these insects shown here. If we could do the same in our manufacturing processes then perhaps we could recycle our products more easily and we wouldn't use as much energy processing large lumps of aluminium, concrete and plastic. My research into biomaterials tries to learn from nature how to combine the same basic materials into a wide range of structures that perhaps, one day, may be used in all kinds of products from food to factories!”
Size of these images:
μm = micron (one thousandth of a millimetre)
Fruit fly foot: 50 μm across (thin strand of human hair).
Antenna: 60-70 μm across (strand of human hair)
More info:
More images:
Dr Chris Forman’s profile:
Thanks to Dr Bill O’Neill and Dr Paul Barker.
Department of Engineering:
Music by Joe Snape:
Find more Cambridge research here:
VIDEO 3
In this video, we see a mouse embryo developing. Erica Watson tells us that studying this process helps us better understand human pregnancy.
Erica Watson:
“The development of a fetus is elegant yet complex. Amazingly, most fetuses undergo a highly orchestrated sequence of events during development to produce a healthy baby. This suggests that a baby can adapt to changes in the womb, such as to the availability of nutrients from its mother. But how do these environmental changes affect the baby’s health in later life? And is it possible that these adverse changes will alter the development of generations to follow? In other words, does the environment that a baby develops in affect its grandchildren’s growth and development? Our research aims to understand these questions using a mouse model with a genetic mutation that prevents the normal breakdown folic acid (a vitamin). This mutation alters the metabolism of a mouse and causes long-lasting effects on the generations to come. Our hope is to find out how environmental changes caused by a genetic mutation are perpetuated into subsequent generations, even when these generations do not carry the mutation.
Since humans and mice use similar genes during development, we can get valuable information from a mouse model about how an embryo and its placenta develop over time. Compared to a human pregnancy that lasts nine months, a mouse fetus develops quickly, taking only three weeks to get from a one-cell embryo to a fully-grown mouse pup. Using a light microscope, we generated this image showing the growth and development of a mouse embryo during the second week of pregnancy. The first embryo is nine days old and has few recognizable features whereas the last embryos is fourteen days old and more closely resembles a mouse pup as birth. Understanding the progression of normal developmental processes will ultimately help us explain the events that cause fetal development to go awry resulting in miscarriage or stillbirth.”
The smallest fetus in the video is the thickness of a penny and the largest one is the size of a blueberry.
More information:
Department of Physiology, Development and Neurosciences:
School of Biological Sciences:
Graduate School of Life Sciences:
Music by Peter Nickalls:
VIDEO 4
Dr Tim Wilkinson is combining liquid crystals with nanotechnology to try and create 3D displays which would look like real life.
Dr Wilkinson:
“Liquid crystal displays are now a commonplace technology from mobile phone displays to wide screen televisions. They are, however, still limited by the shape, size and speed of their pixels when they are used to display video images. This video shows microscope sequences of a new nanotechnology based liquid crystal pixel structure that will allow much higher resolution displays and even true 3D holographic displays to be fabricated in the future.”
The videos are all in real time. The scale varies from video to video, but the little dots which form a grid in most of them are all 10 μm apart (10th of diameter of a hair).
More info:
Department of Engineering:
Music by Intercontinental Music Lab
Find more Cambridge research here:
VIDEO 5
In this video Dr Beverley Glover explains how a daisy is a collection of tiny flowers grouped together to look like a single big flower.
Dr Glover:
“The flowering plants (Angiosperms) form the dominant vegetation over most of the Earth’s land surface. They are found in all habitats except the Antarctic, and can tolerate an extraordinarily wide range of environmental conditions. All major human food crops are Angiosperms. We are interested in the evolution and development of the flower, one of the defining features of Angiosperms. The evolution of flowers changed the way in which plants reproduced, allowing them to use animals to carry their pollen around. Our research is particularly focussed on understanding how the features that make flowers attractive to insects evolved, and what the genetic control of their development is. We hope to be able to use this knowledge to improve pollination and yield of important crop plants and to help protect the great diversity of flowers and insect pollinators in the wild.
This image of a developing daisy flower head is part of our work on understanding different ways of attracting pollinators. All the plants in the daisy family use the same trick – by clustering together many tiny flowers they produce a structure that looks just like a single big flower. The daisies that grow in our lawns contain two different types of flowers – central radially symmetrical yellow ones, and an outer ring of bilaterally symmetrical white ones with a massively elongated petal structure. In this Scanning Electron Micrograph you can see the central yellow flowers at a very early stage of development, with the petals still folded over the centre of each little flower.”
More info:
(research horizons story which will be release at a similar time)
Dr Glover’s profile:
Department of Plant Sciences:
Music by Peter Nickalls:
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BradBlogspeed/~3/b9NuVERuVYo/under-the-microscope
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