A new microscope? Really?

[El_Machinae]

I've literally spent hundreds of hours looking into microscopes, struggling to make out tiny details that people thought were significant. And for decades, we've been assured that benchtop microscopes couldn't get significantly better and could only be tweaked with little gadgets.

And then BAM!, the paradigm changes. 4x the resolution, apparently, and it might be mass-producable. This means that (if it works) a whole new generation of laboratory students will be having a much easier time seeing our 'significant details' and have to struggle to make out a whole new class.

Optical lenses can only resolve details down to those that are half the wavelength of light in size – a few hundred nanometres. Light waves carrying information about these tiny features do not travel more than a few hundred nanometres because of interference and diffraction.
...
A "superlens" that refracts light in unconventional ways to let an optical microscope see beyond the normal limit of its vision has been created by US researchers. They hope to develop a cheaper, mass-produced version that could upgrade the microscopes used in research laboratories worldwide.
...
Using [their] method Smolyaninov and colleagues achieved a resolution of 70nm, or one-seventh the wavelength of the light used. This is four times better than would be possible with light alone.

http://www.newscientisttech.com/art...erlens-gives-microscope-nanoscale-vision.html

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Would this make better microscopes for, say, high school students, or is it only for higher end microscopes?

And as always, yay science.

 

[El_Machinae]

Would this make better microscopes for, say, high school students, or is it only for higher end microscopes?

And as always, yay science.

That would depend on price; I suspect that we'd save the superior microscopes for university labs ... but only because high schools tend to get lower quality equipment.

 

[Perfection]

Wow, that's crazy cool. I hope it pans out.

 

[Che Guava]

Seconded. I spent most of my M.Sc. looking through a microscope too (one of the best on the market today, for looking at microscopic animals), and even then I could have used better resolution for identification....

 

[Phlegmak]

GO USA! Woo woo!

 

[Abaddon]

Thats amazing.. shame im just about to finish my degree and presumably any interaction with 'scopes..