Pretreatment of epoxy thin sections with strong oxidizing agents such as hydrogen peroxide, sodium methoxide, and sodium m-metaperiodate facilities the location of antigens with immunostaining procedures. Etching, or pretreatment, of sections unmasks antigenic sites on glutaraldehyde fixed and postosmicated tissue, partially removes osmium bonds, temporarily decreases the hydrophobicity of the epoxy surface layer of the section, reduces the electron density of the tissue and increases resistance to heavy rnetai poststaining.

Microwave slide drying can be an extremely useful tool in the laboratory as it can cut the time it takes to dry slides without compromising the morphology or staining quality.

One important factor is to always use some type of Plus slide. We have found in trials that when using these slides we have not had tissue fall off the slide and we specialize in eye tissue which is notorious for (ailing off the slide.

The most unusual use I've seen for an SEM was as a special-effects generator for the fifth Star Trek movie, “The Final Frontier”, William Shatner directed the film as well as starring in it. He chose Bran Ferren of Associates and Ferren, now part of Disney Imagineering, to do the special effects. Ferren had the idea of using SEM imagery for the “eerie planet in the center of the galaxy”, because the large in-focus depth of field gave an unearthly feel to the scene. Shatner was fascinated by the technology and the resulting images.

When you hear that a film cost $50 million to make, here's how it happens. They bought a Zeiss 960 SEM and a PGT IMIX system just for that one sequence in the movie! A mainstay of movie effects is model animation, in which miniatures are dragged along suspended wires while one or more cameras (mounted on articulated robotic booms) also move to produce She complex and realistic action you see on the screen.

Grain size characterization in Aluminum alloys can be correlated with thermo-mechanical processing properties. In order to predict the processing characteristics of these alloys under certain combinations of strain, deformation and temperature, the metallographic measure of the grain size can be used. Most of the technigues that have been proposed so far do not provide reliable and reproducible quantitative metallographic measurements of the grain size due to human error. Considering that this manual task is also tedious to perform, a general color image analysis algorithm is proposed to automate the characterization process using an optical microscope with polarized light. This algorithm was tested on several ingots and on rolled aluminum samples. The results show robustness in several conditions, even when the grains can barely be seen by a human operator Other image analysis techniques have been proposed but where judged too slow or too complex, particularly when gathering data over several fields. Time constraints specific to industrial seffings were taken into account when implementing a new algorithm.

Individual BHK-21 (Baby Hamster Kidney-21} cells growing on 25 mm photo-etched alpha-numeric glass coverslips (Belico Co.) are identified by phase contrast microscopy and photographed. (Saredi, Howard and Compton, 1995), This method should work for other cell lines, but likely will require some empirical adjustment of the times, concentrations, and pH.

Manfred von Ardenne was an EM pioneer and the first to publish a complete concept of a scanning electron microscope. A German overseas newscast reported the death of Manfred von Ardenne on 28 May. During the 1930s he was involved in cathode ray work and later lived In East Germany and did significant cancer research. Not mentioned in the newscast was his conceptual development of the SEM in the late 1930s.

He outlined the underlying principles of SEM operation: an electron probe scanning a small region of [fie specimen, the emitled electrons are captured, amplified and time-sequentially displayed on a cathode ray tube. Magnification is the ratio between the areas scanned and displayed His was the fantastic notion of a microscope without a magnifying lens.