Social

Home page

Social

New optical microscope invented in Britain

02 March 2011 04:32 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. A new kind of optical microscope has been invented in Britain, which has broken the record for discerning the smallest object the eye can see through an optical microscope, APA reports quoting Xinhua News Agency.

As published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, University of Manchester scientists and their colleagues in Singapore introduced the new optical microscope, which could help study the cause of many viruses and diseases.

"This is the first optical microscope in the world that can see 50-nanometer objects under a normal white light. It is a new world record," Wang Zengbo, the lead author of the paper, told Xinhua.

Previously, the power of optical microscopes was hindered by the diffraction of light when observing very small objects. To beat the limitation, scientists combined the optical microscope with a transparent microsphere, dubbed the "microsphere nanoscope."

With greater power the new invention could be used to examine the inside of human cells and live viruses for the first time.