MICROSCIENCE 2010 was held at the ExCeL International Exhibition and Conference Centre, London, from June 29 to July 1. The conference attracted 519 delegates—the first time that the 500-barrier has been broken. Overall, 2139 visitors from 30 countries from across 5 continents passed through the doors during the three days.

The preparation of electron micrographs for 2″ x 2″ slide presentations is usually done by photographing EM prints with a 35 mm camera. However, for some of our better electron micrographs, many of us have enjoyed printing the negatives directly on 2″ x 2″ Kodak Projector Slide Plates (#s 140 6875 & 140 6867), which can yield projected images of particularly pleasing tonal quality.

A previous issue of Microscopy Today (issue 94-2, March 1994} contained a brief article my me describing a method for making 2″ x 2″ EM slides with Projector Slide Plates. Unfortunately, it now appears that Kodak has raised the price of these plates to a level that is well beyond what most of us can afford. My first inkling of this came after the article was in the hands of the editor. I telephoned Kodak and confirmed that the price was now about $560 per box of 36 plates, roughly 10 times the former price. However, it still seemed possible that this had been an oversight on the part of Kodak, and that it could be rectified.

Microparticles and exosomes are small vesicular fragments of cell membrane which are released from activated and apoptotic cells. Microparticles (MPs) range in size from 0.5-1.5 μm, and exosomes are 0.5 μm and under. For the purposes of this article we will refer to both categories as microparticles. They differ from apoptotic bodies based on their smaller size, intact structure, and lack of degraded nuclear material. MPs have been shown to be released from a variety of cell types including platelets, endothelium, vascular smooth muscle cells, dendritic cells, and tumor cells. Jimenez and others have shown that based on the stimulus and cell type the MPs released are both quantitatively and phenotypically distinct. More recent data have shown the proteomics of MPs released from human umbilical vein endothelial cells differ dependent on whether they are stimulated with PAI or TNF-α.

With the advent of the computer age and in particular, the Internet, information sources have multiplied. However, the need for information verification has never been greater. In a day when anyone can easily produce a website, blog, or tweet, you can't believe what you read or see just because it's “published.” Scientific data and analysis require peer review, and peer-reviewed data need a home. Equally important, for every piece of data in a peer-reviewed publication, there are usually many pieces that provided essential support for the conclusions of the study but could not be included due to space limitations. This is especially true of image data, which are necessarily gigabyte-hungry.

The performance metric of greatest interest to the user of a focused ion beam (FIB) system is generally its resolution. Because of the difficulty in defining and measuring the resolution of a FIB system directly, its performance is often assessed using a method related to the beam quality instead. This consists of the measurement of the rise distance of the beam current as the beam passes across an edge, which, for low currents where spherical aberration can be neglected, is closely related to the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the current density of the ion beam. The edge, also known as the “knife edge,” corresponds to a sharp discontinuity in a specimen, as can be practically found on the surface of a graphite specimen. Because the rise distance can be used to obtain an idea of the dimension of the waist of a beam, it is, perhaps, an indication of the quality of an instrument. Because the rise distance depends on the quality of an edge, it is sometimes called edge sharpness. This concept bears similarities with the image sharpness method developed to assess the performance of SEMs, usually on gold nanoparticles on carbon specimen. Rise distance is actually a convolution of the current density distribution with the properties of the knife edge and depends strongly on the spatial distribution of the secondary electron yield of the edge. By using the rise distance, different systems can be compared in a quantitative way. To compare instruments, the identical specimen must be used and the measurements must be done in an identical way. This article discusses the method and some pitfalls in its application.

Leica Microsystems is a world leader in microscopes and scientific instruments. Founded as a family business in the nineteenth century, the company's history was marked by unparalleled innovation on its way to becoming a global enterprise. Its historically close cooperation with the scientific community is the key to Leica Microsystems' tradition of innovation, which draws on users' ideas and creates solutions tailored to their requirements.

At last year's M&M meeting, the birth centennial of Otto Scherzer, one of the pioneers of electron optics and particularly the correction of electron-optical lenses, was remembered in a special symposium. His scientific achievements have been extensively described in an article by Marko and Rose (2010). Here we try to recollect some personal memories of Otto Scherzer from the time we spent at the “Institut für theoretische Physik” at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt (now Technische Universität Darmstadt).

Orientation Imaging Microscopy is currently the most rapidly growing combined metallographic and crystallographic technique today. The first OIM was recorded by Wright in 1991, and published soon after, Adams et al. (1993). The technique is based on the original works on Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) by Venables and Hariand (1973), and Dingiey (1984, 1987). By 1994 some number of papers on the subject had been published. At the time of writing the authors are aware of over 600 publications that have utilized the technique and there are in excess of 400 systems in use worldwide.

Though microscopes and telescopes had been invented in the late sixteenth century, various optical difficulties meant that the devices were more commonly considered novelties than useful scientific instruments for many years. Chief among these problems were aberrations in the images caused by optical errors from the lenses. Many scientists had attempted to rectify such difficulties, but the nineteenth-century amateur microscopist Joseph Jackson Lister is credited with making some of the most important advances toward correcting image aberrations and establishing the microscope as a powerful means of carrying out serious scientific investigations.

Project MICRO (Microscopy in Curriculum - Research Outreach) is an initiative by the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) to connect scientists with middle school teachers in an effort to introduce young students to the scientific method. Through a collaboration with the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley, a teacher's manual was produced as part of the LHS GEMS (Great Explorations in Math and Science) series. This manual, entitled “Microscopic Explorations”, can be used by scientists and middle school teachers alike to prepare a Project MICRO “Festival” to be presented in the classroom. Detailed information concerning Project MICRO in general, and the Microscopic Explorations manual can be obtained from the Project MICRO web page from MSA (http://www.msa.microscopy.com/ProjectMicro/PMHomePage.html).

Confocal microscopy has gained great popularity in biology and medical research because of the ability to image three-dimensional objects at greater resolution than conventional optical microscopes. In a typical Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope (LSCM), the specimen stage is stepped up or down to collect a series of two-dimensional images (or slices) at each focal plane. Conventional light microscopes create images with a depth of field, at high power, of 2 to 3 μm. The depth of field of confocal microscopes ranges from 0.5 to 1.5 μm, which allows information to be collected from a well defined optical section rather than from most of the specimen. Therefore, due to this “thin” focal plane, out of focus light is virtually eliminated which results in an increase in contrast, clarity and detection.

Steve Chapman's “An Old Man's Saga” in the May 2009 issue of Microscopy Today about the various methods he has used for determining when saturation is achieved in the common self-biased electron gun prompts me to share with Microscopy Today's readers my experience in lecturing to my students about the characteristics of this remarkable device.