Welcome to Bloggers: Meet the Mesolens Team
We are: Brad Amos (biologist and microscope designer), Es Reid (lens and telescope designer) and Stefanie Reichelt (biologist and artist). We will try to answer your questions about the novel giant lens which we have called Mesolens to convey its intermediate position between a microscope objective and a photographic macro lens. Do check our external website http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/va/newgiantlens/ which has a lot of extra information, including copies of the leaflets that will be distributed at the exhibition. These are in three versions, for general visitors (with technical details), schoolteachers (with some guidance on acquiring microscopes and cameras for showing microscopy to classes and for schoolchildren , with information on , for example, making a plankton net from your mum's stocking.
Mesloens - was hard to find NA is 0.47
Hi Brad and rest of Mesolens team,
Your web pages are lame. I finally found the NA is 0.47 at
http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/va/newgiantlens/imagesfrom5.html
Your web links on this blog site are all dead - for example http://TR.IM/NEWGIANTLENS
Would also help if you included scale bars. Full resolution images of the flea, "brain slice", etc, would also be useful. Not hard to get entire images onto the Internet - see for example http://home.earthlink.net/~tiki_goddess/
(ok, no scale bar, but the height of the original is ~40 mm).
Congratulations on getting featured in a recent Science article (Saini 2012 Science (30 MARCH 2012) 335: 1562-1563.
George
p.s. too bad Science (magazine) is clueless about letting the scientists proofread the articles - the following silly statement is from Saini's article:
"One of the novelties of a confocal microscope is that it can view up to 0.22 micrometers below the surface of a specimen, provided it is translucent enough."
This would be true of TIRF, but confocal can of course image a lot further from the surface than 0.22 um.
Mesolens Microscope
Dear Brad,
What the hell has hair got to do with this!
I have read with interest and fascination about the new lens you have pioneered. And would be intrigued to know what plans are afoot for it's commercialisation!
I, for one, would be very interested, in a job that is! You can contact me off-line any time, it's been a while since I visited Cambridge ;)
All the best and I hope everyone is keeping well.
Dino
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Reply to Anonymous Post of 21/2/2010
This reply is from Brad Amos.
Thank you for your comments on the exhibit. I will try to respond to each in order.
1. Main features not obvious. This is perhaps because the main feature is an unprecedented ratio of N.A. to magnification. This is hard to explain to a non-optical audience. See the website and the extra image at www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/va/flea_test/Flea 5.1.html
2. Focussing on different layers not shown. There was a continually-repeated demonstration of focusing on the different layers of the live water flea. Further detail is on the website.
3. Compatibility of the lens with different camera formats etc.not stated. The lens is a prototype, designed to suit a specific full-frame camera. Other camera formats will require substantial modification of the lens. The development of the prototype into confocal and other forms was discussed with any experts who asked and there were three demonstrators on hand at all times to explain these aspects. Several different applications are mentioned on the website including confocal and multiphoton scanned imaging (work in progress) and bioluminescence (work completed but so far unpublished).
4. No list with large print showing key features. My answer is as for point 1 (above). I have partipated in 8 Royal Society events of this kind and have found that if demonstrators are available, text is invariably ignored and is therefore, a waste of image space. The features were clear on the leaflets provided and also on the website. If the given web address does not work, try http://TR.IM/NEWGIANTLENS
Feedback About Stand In RFH
The main features of the new lens should have been more obviously shown.
I thought that the change in focusing depth should have been more clearly shown,
such as by having a video,
which showed different layers of the specimen being sequentially focused on.
Other features of the lens could also have been highlighted in the video,
and the various options possible with the lens,
such as different camera types, different filter types,
different light sources, con-focal additions,
automated stages, different specimen types possible, etc.
Another thing that I thought should have been on the stand
was a clear large poster with large print,
listing the basic features and advantages of the new lens.