Electron Microscope Images

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Best microscope photographs of 2012

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Pollen, seeds and fruit under the microscope

If you’re a photographer and you like to get really, really close to things we may have found you someone new to aspire to. British professor and photographer Rob Kesseler is taking macro to a whole new level with his latest series of photographs that look at nature under a microscope.

Beyond their pretty remarkable ability to “think” and problem-solve, slime molds are just plain beautiful.

John Bonner, a professor emeritus at Princeton, has been studying them for seventy years. He’s been fascinated by the ability of this “bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath” to operate like a simple brain, despite its biological simplicity. He’s used the gooey little guys to further the study of evolution and development for over half a century, and some of the images he’s collected are stunning.

The GIFs above are from this collection of half-century-old film clips captured by a young Bonner, showing the life cycle of a slime mold. Lastly, you absolutely do not want to miss this gorgeous new collection of close-up slime mold photos SciAm’s Alex Wild.

Old and new, these little creatures are as beautiful in form as they are amazing in biology.

Various alcohols under an electron microscope. This has certainly reinforced my love of beer.

“What you can see in the magnified pictures are the crystalised carbohydrates that have become sugars and glucose. Each image was created by using a pipette of each particular drink and squeezing a drop onto a slide. Then the droplets are allowed to dry out and the slide is placed under the microscope and a picture taken.” -Lester Hutt, founder of Bevshots, who created these beauties.

NASA Innovator of Year Hunts for Extraterrestrial Amino Acids |

The hunt for the organic molecules that create proteins and enzymes critical for life here on Earth has largely happened in sophisticated terrestrial laboratories equipped with high-tech gadgetry needed to tease out their presence in space rocks and other extraterrestrial samples.

A technologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now wants to take that search to the sources themselves.

Stephanie Getty, who recently was selected as Goddard’s Innovator of the Year for her trailblazing work in the area of advanced instrumentation, has won $1.2 million from NASA’s Astrobiology Science and Technology Instrument Development (ASTID) program to advance the Organics Analyzer for Sampling Icy Surfaces (OASIS). This miniaturized liquid chromatograph-mass spectrometer leverages technologies developed under previous Goddard-sponsored research and development efforts to study the chirality, or “handedness,” of amino acids on the icy moons of the outer planets, asteroids, and Kuiper Belt Objects.

“It’s like we’re packing up a well-equipped Earth lab and flying it to an asteroid or another solar system body, where we can get access to a pristine supply of these organic molecules to study,” Getty said, adding that by going to the source, scientists reduce the risk of contaminating samples with Earth-borne compounds. “With an instrument like OASIS, we could get that much closer to understanding how organic chemicals formed in the solar system, whether the potential for life exists elsewhere, and what may have seeded life here on Earth.”