Grant from NIH to Develop AFM Probes

Carbon Design Innovations has announced that it has grant in the amount of $390,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program. The grant will fund the development and commercialization of Carbon Nanotube (CNT) Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) probes for bioimaging and investigations in cellular biology. Carbon Design Innovations will collaborate with the University of California at Davis, US on the development of the probes.
www.carbondesigninnovations.com

Canada Gains New Centre for Nanotechnology

Alberta, Canada will soon be home to a new research and product development centre for nanotechnology called Hitachi Electron Microscopy Products Development Centre (HEMiC) at the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) in Edmonton. The centre will house three new electron microscopes valued at $7 million. The $14 million project is supported by the Western Economic Partnership Agreement between the Governments of Canada and Alberta and to contributions from Hitachi High-Technologies. The HEMiC is made possible by a wider collaboration of the Alberta Ingenuity Fund’s nanoWorks program, the National Institute for Nanotechnology of the National Research Council, the University of Alberta and Hitachi High Technologies Canada Inc. One of the centre’s first projects will evaluate and test the world’s sharpest electron emitter, developed by the Molecular Scale Devices group at NINT for use as an electron source in electron microscopes.
www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

State-of-the-Art Geosciences Laboratory Opened

An advanced science laboratory has officially been launched on June 26, 2009 at the University of Monash, Victoria, Australia by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr. The $1 million Earth Sciences teaching laboratory will provide students with the latest in high-tech learning, giving them access to next-generation computer modelling and microscope technology. Head of Geosciences School Professor Ray Cas said the laboratory had the capacity to teach at a microscopic scale via the linking of microscopes with the smart screens. „The laboratory is the most advanced facility of its kind in Australia and the technology it employs is at the cutting-edge internationally,“ Professor Cas said.
www.monash.edu.au

From Tweezers and Microscopes

The registration for the eighth annual symposium on the applications of scanning probe microscopy (SPM) actually opened. Along with the meeting goes the second annual symposium on optical tweezers. The symposia will be held on the October 14-15, 2009 in Berlin and will focus on applications developments in life sciences. These meetings have become highly regarded on the international SPM meetings calendar. JPK again expects more than 100 scientists from around the world to come to Berlin to discuss their results and share scientific knowledge. To learn more or to attend this meeting, visit:
www.nanobioviews.net
www.jpk.com

Eighth annual symposium on the applications of scanning probe microscopy (SPM)

New Cloaking Technology

Researchers of Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, US announced that they have created a new type of invisibility cloak which works for all colors of the visible spectrum. This new technology, based on a tapered optical waveguide, is simpler than previous designs and makes it possible to cloak objects of about 50 microns in diameter – roughly the width of a human hair. „All previous attempts at optical cloaking have involved very complicated nanofabrication of metamaterials containing many elements, which makes it very difficult to cloak large objects,“ said Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue University’s Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical Engineering. „Here, we showed that if a waveguide is tapered properly it acts like a sophisticated nanostructured material.” Previous experiments with metamaterials have been limited to cloaking regions only a few times larger than the wavelengths of visible light. This findings could lead to advances in e.g. cloaking; powerful “hyperlenses” resulting in microscopes 10 times more powerful than today’s; computers and consumer electronics that use light instead of electronic signals to process information; advanced sensors; and more efficient solar collectors. Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing May, 29 in Physical Review Letters.
www.purdue.edu

$2 Million Grant for Live Microscopy

A proposal by a team of UC Davis (University of California, US) scientists to develop the first electron microscope capable of filming live biological processes has been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The team’s plan is to extend the capabilities of a powerful new imaging tool called the dynamic transmission electron microscope or DTEM. These instruments can snap 10 to 100 images per millionth of a second, while capturing details as small as 10 nanometers. If they can be adapted to living, moving systems, DTEMs could achieve resolutions 100 times greater than currently attainable for live processes, enabling scientists to observe and record biological processes at the molecular level. Currently, there are only three DTEMs in use worldwide, none of which are designed for observing living systems. Rather, they are utilized to document such processes as inorganic chemical reactions and the dynamics of materials as they change from one state – solid, liquid or gas – to another.
www.ucdavis.edu

Live Cell Imaging at Double the Resolution

A team of researchers of the University of Georgia (UGA) and the University of California, San Francisco, US has developed a microscope that is capable of live imaging at double the resolution of fluorescence microscopy by using structured illumination. The research was published in Nature Methods on April 26, 2009. “What we’ve done is develop a much faster system that allows you to look at live cells expressing the green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is a very powerful tool for labeling inside the cell,” explained UGA engineer Peter Kner.
www.engineering.uga.edu

New Technique to Receive Sharper Images

A new imaging method that could help to build more powerful microscopes and other optical devices by producing sharper images and a wider field of view has been developed by Princeton researches. The research was led by Jason Fleischer, assistant professor of electrical engineering and co-written with two graduate students Christopher Barsi and Wenjie Wan. The new method takes advantage of the unusual properties of nonlinear optical materials in which light rays mix with each other in complex ways. Thanks to the mixing of rays, information that would otherwise be lost manages to reach the detector. Therefore this picture would be rich in detail but it would also be distorted. To capture this otherwise lost visual information, the researchers used a hologram. The hologram is a special type of photograph which records „phase“ – a light property which measures the time and location of a wave peak. They also combined data from a normal camera. Then they created a simplified flow of light through a nonlinear material and developed a computer algorithm that takes the distorted image and works backwards to calculate the visual information at every point in space between the image and the object.
www.princeton.edu

An object illuminated by light reflects rays in many different directions (gray arrows). Left: With a normal lens, some rays are captured and refract towards a camera while others are missed, resulting in a blurry image with a limited field of view. Right: The new method uses a nonlinear material. The original rays are altered and new rays (red) are generated. The resulting picture is scrambled, but a computer algorithm can undo the mixing and yield a sharp, wide-field image. (Image: Christopher Barsi)

The Smallest Periscope

A team of Vanderbilt scientists have invented the world’s smallest version of the periscope and are using it to look at cells and other microorganisms from several sides at once. The researchers have dubbed their devices „mirrored pyramidal wells.“ They consist of pyramidal-shaped cavities molded into silicon whose interior surfaces are coated with a reflective layer of gold or platinum. They are in dimension about the width of a human hair and can be made in a range of sizes to view different-sized objects. When a cell is placed in such a well and viewed with a regular optical microscope, the researcher can see not only the top of the cell, but several sides simultaneously. „This is something biologists almost never see,“ says team member Chris Janetopoulos, assistant professor of biological sciences.
The Vanderbilt group is not the first to make microscopic pyramidal wells, but it is the first to apply them to make 3D images of microorganisms. In 2006, a group of scientists in England created pyramidal micromirrors and applied them to trapping atoms. And last spring researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology used similar structures to track nanoparticles.
www.vanderbilt.edu

Sunflower pollen, taken by Kevin Seale, Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education

RMS Events 2009

The Royal Microscopical Society (RMS) announced a programme of events for imaging and microscopy taking place in the UK in 2009.

16 March:
NanoFIB Meeting, Oxford, UK

17-20 March:
Microscopy of Semi-Conducting Materials XVI, Oxford, UK

24-25 March:
Capturing Colloids Meeting, Manchester, UK

30-31 March:
Electron Backscatter Diffraction Meeting, Swansea, UK

27 May:
Flow Cytometry Immunophenotyping of Leukaemia & Lymphoma, London, UK

9-12 June:
European Light Microscopy Initiative (ELMI), Glasgow, UK

24-25 June:
UK SPM (Scanning Probe Microscopy Meeting), London, UK

15-17 July:
Flowcytometry UK 2009, Oxford, UK

www.rms.org.uk