Category Archives: Technology

Eric Betzig goes deep, again: 3D movies of cellular activity

Eric Betzig‘s lab at the Janelia Research Campus has just released a jaw-dropping high-definition 3D movie of cellular machinery in motion.  Words are not sufficient to describe the beauty of the data and the impact of the method which will soon be made available to researchers interested in using or developing it.

I met the man a few times during my postdoctoral life at Bell Laboratories where he was a research scientist.  An acknowledged star in a building full of brilliant people, his Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscope was considered Nobel worthy.  The Labs went down the tubes a few years later when the MBA visigoths took over.  Betzig left, reinvented himself a couple of times, and came back with even more pathbreaking ideas in microscopy that overcame what he felt were insurmountable limitations of his first breakthrough.  He went to Stockholm in 2014 for the newer inventions and the doors they opened.  The Prize has not slowed him down.

The Janelia public release has details and links to several videos, including the one below.

The technical paper appears in the latest issue of Science Magazine.

Observing the cell in its native state: Imaging subcellular dynamics in multicellular organisms
T. Liu et.al.
Science 360, eaaq1392 (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaq1392
The Abstract is also available through PubMed

Youtube Channel: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Distillation: What goes on in those refineries?

Big tankers tie up offshore and disgorge their contents into brightly lit and mostly inscrutable refineries.   This sixty year old film by Shell Oil neatly explains the chemistry, chemical engineering, and physics of distillation that takes gives us our gasoline, diesel, oils, and waxes. In a different setting, it also gives us many different kinds of beverages.

 

The Deep Space Network – Helping Voyager phone home

The Voyager Spacecraft – Image courtesy NASA and JPL

It is now official, humankind has put its toe into interstellar space as Voyager 1 crossed into the heliopause nearly a year ago. This milestone has been hotly debated in the scientific literature as heavyweight teams presented evidence pro and con. It was only in the last few weeks, however, all parties have agreed on what the data from the probe mean. And they agree that it is now past the interface between the solar wind and the great beyond.
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