MicroscopesBlog: Expert's reviews, news, notes on Microscopes, Centrifuges, Lab Coats, Pipettes, Lab Safety, & more Lab Products!

I'm not talking about pirates; however I am going to talk a little bit about Plankton, that can be found in the Ocean. Plankton is carried through the ocean through the current. Plankton consists of various microscopic creatures. Did you know that Plankton is the most prevalent life and food source in the ocean? Phytoplankton, which carries on photosynthesis near the ocean surface, serves as food for the zooplankton and fish. Plankton are microscopic animals (zooplankton) and algae (phytoplankton) that live in the ocean. They drift on currents and provide food for many ocean residents. Get this, A mouthful of seawater may contain millions of bacterial cells, hundreds of thousands of phytoplankton and tens of thousands of zooplankton. Yuk! Don't want to swallow ocean water; however you may want to explore just a drop of it under a microscope. What you will find are amazing, super small, microscopic living sea plants and creatures. Magnify your sample of ocean water by 25X and you will be amazed of the living plants and animals, residents of the ocean that you will be able to see. You will need a compound microscope, some microscope slides and microscope cover slips to view your sample properly. If you want to work in the field, right by the ocean, you could use a Nikon Mini Field Microscope, perfect for on the go field work! It's water resistant and has a 20X magnification, it's compact and lightweight. A perfect microscope for the vacationer. For the beginner, I would suggest the Unico brand microscope. Unico offers an M16 a perfect microscope for the youngster interested in a hobby using microscopes to view parts of the world they cannot begin to imagine exist through the naked eye alone! Good Luck Beginners! Have a wonderful time learning new things about our oceans and the species within.

Ok, this topic interests me a lot. Did you know that in the history of Forensic Science dates back thousands of years? Fingerprinting was one of it's first applications. n 1835, Scotland Yard's Henry Goddard became the first person to use physical analysis to connect a bullet to the murder weapon. n 1836, a Scottish chemist named James Marsh developed a chemical test to detect arsenic. Nearly a century later, in 1930, scientist Karl Landsteiner won the Nobel Prize for classifying human blood into its various groups. Other tests were developed in the mid-1900s to analyze saliva, semen and other body fluids as well as to make blood tests more precise. So what types of laboratory products do Forensic labs use? While much of the supplies are consumables; for instance swabs, for evidence collection, sterile petri dishes for sample collection, disposable exam gloves, evidence collection jars, sterile sample containers, forceps, and lab coats. The list could go on and on. The list above consists of consumable Forensic laboratory products. While the Forensic lab uses many consumable products, we also have to look at other products the Forensic Scientist might use such as durable laboratory products, centrifuges for spinning samples, pipettes for drawing the samples and placing into centrifuge tubes that are then placed in the centrifuge, and last but not least microscopes.

What is a fat cell? Adipocytes, which is a connective tissue that has also known as lipocytes and fat cells, are the cells that primarily compose adipose tissue, specialized in the manufacturing and storing of fat. There are two types of adipose tissue, white tissue and brown adipose tissue, which are also known as white fat and brown fat, respectively, and comprise two types of fat cells. The adipocyte is essential for the body to maintain energy in balance, storing calories in the form of lipids. Under the microscope the adipocyte appears swollen with triglycerides. The nucleus is shifted to one side by the fat. The cytoplasm of the cell looks like a thin line surrounding the pool of fat. Cytoplasm is the substance that fills the cell. It is a jelly like material. You can view fat cells under several types of microscopes using several different kinds of applications. Brightfield and Phase Contrast are two ways you can view live cells under the microscope. Using a fluorescent microscope you can stain your fat cell. The dye or stain that you use will bind to specific molecules and will reveal their location when viewed under a fluorescence microscope.

One of the most common items in the lab is the ever-present cellulose filter paper. Filter papers are depth filters - they retain particles within the filter matrix not just on the surface like membrane filters. Not all filter paper is the same. There are great differences depending on the application. What is important, the filtrate or the residue? If the fluid coming through the filter paper is more important a qualitative filter paper would be sufficient. If the sample retained by the filter paper must be quantified, a quantitative filter paper must be used. The paper may be dried and burned in a crucible as for heavy metals testing. In this case a low ash or ashless filter would be needed. Some filtration requires retaining particles larger than say 2um and allowing the rest to go with the filtrate. Filter paper grade is determined by the size of particle retention. Filter paper is also graded by the speed at which an aqueous solution will pass through. The smaller the particle retention the slower the speed.

Microscope optical systems suffer from the same defects as all other lens systems. Among these are various forms of chromatic aberration and spherical aberration. Chromatic aberration is the failure of a lens or a lens system to focus all colors at the same focal point. All modern microscope designs go to great lengths to to minimize or eliminate this defect. It is commonly accomplished by designing lenses that are defined as being achromatic. Achromatic means "without color" and is usually meant to imply without color distortion. This means that the objectives bring images into focus without dispersing their colored components. In simple achromatic microscope objectives the correction is made so that the red and blue wavelengths are brought to a single point of focus. This correction helps to eliminate chromatic defects for most of the visible spectrum in a very effective and cost efficient manner. Manufacturers who work very hard to achieve this include NIKON, UNICO and MOTIC. When searching for a quality microscope, achromatic optics should be high on the list of requirements.

Is there a secret to enjoying amateur astronomy?

Is it all about buying the right telescope or maybe a buying astronomical binoculars? Is it all about getting the right telescope accessories? Maybe it’s getting the right astronomy book or the latest astronomy software. Maybe …

All those things do help, no doubt about it, but the secret of enjoying amateur astronomy is not about telescopes, binocular or telescope accessories; it’s all about perspective. Think of it this way. How many people, even in our high tech ultramodern society, have ever seen Saturn and its rings? No, I’m not talking about seeing a picture of Saturn in a magazine or a book or seeing Saturn on TV or an astronomy video. I’m talking about seeing Saturn, firsthand and personally, with their own eye, through a telescope. The answer? Only a very small percentage of our population can claim they actually saw Saturn and its rings, rather than a picture of Saturn and its rings. To be sure, when we amateurs look at Saturn through a telescope, it does not match up with the splendor of those pictures, but bragging rights go to those who actually saw Saturn for themselves. When you simply look at a picture, you never go beyond spectator status; when you search with your telescope and find Saturn and then see it in the eyepiece of your telescope, you cross the line from spectator to explorer. Now, that’s perspective.

Perspective? Nothing exemplifies perspective like seeing galaxies through a telescope. Most galaxies in a telescope appear as fairly dim glows or grey smudges – not much detail can be seen in even a large amateur telescope. Visually, they lag far, far behind pictures you see in a book or magazine. So why do so many amateur astronomers love to look at galaxies? You guessed it – perspective. When you realize that the smudge in your eyepiece is really its own universe, containing many billions of stars, your imagination soars. Is there intelligent life in that galaxy? Is their some intelligent being look back at out galaxy, as we are looking at theirs? Even more incredible is the fact that those galaxies are immensely distant. Even at the speed of light, it takes light many millions of years to deliver that image to the eyepiece in our telescope. What you see in the eyepiece is the galaxy as it was many millions of years, ago. Yes, your telescope is your own personal time machine for looking back into the past.

It' all about perspective.

Im not talking about your witt or mind! I'm talking about knives for the laboratory; laboratory knife sets If you are looking for the perfect knife set for general cutting of tubing, corks, plant samples, or paraffin then here is the set to get. It is made by Control Company. The set includes anything from ultra-micro to heavy duty cutting edges! The blades are manufactured with high standard grade steel and ground to razor sharpness for superior accuracy in cutting. You have probably heard of the manufacturer X-ACTO, they have been a household and industrial name for years. They also have a knife set available for lighter cutting applications, such as paper, wood, plastic, cloth, and foam board. This would be a great set for the hobbiest in your life!

Magnification can mean a lot of things. In the case of an optical microscope it means magnification of the optics image. We all have seen magnified images that don't tell us anything new about the image. The object is bigger but either blurry or pixelated. The key here is resolving power. A good light microscope will magnify the image and reveal new sharp details which are not visible at lower magnifications. Optical magnification up to approximately 400X showing a resolved image with good edge definition can be achieved with a reasonably priced microscope (~$500). Higher magnifications require very good optics, very good illumination, good light control (condenser) and perhaps an oil objective.