The DIY design is the brainchild of Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. He did it all with some software he wrote and about $10 in off-the-shelf parts, reports the New York Times.

There's actually no lens to speak of, as the magnification is handled entirely by software, holograms and electronics. This, Ozcan says, is what's at the heart of the device's portability and affordability. Better still, this means that a future system based on this design could have the ability to diagnose and research even better than a traditional microscope in the field. Said Bahram Jalali, an applied physicist and professor of electrical engineering at U.C.L.A in an interview with the New York Times, the beauty of the design is in its lack of mechanical scanning.

"Instead you capture holograms of all the cells on the slide digitally at the same time," he said to the Times. This makes it possible to "immediately see pathogens among a vast population of healthy cells." [New York Times]

Nikon Rumors reviewed the Nikon-compatible Fabre Photo EX DSLR Stereoscopic Microscope, a $1,600 lens that pwns macro photography pretty hard.

Here's a video they captured of a millipede. So gross, but we can't look away.

Two points Nikon Rumors makes: integrated LEDs sound handy for illuminating the small subjects, but they tend to create a harsh reflection on surfaces. And, yes, the microscope lens is every bit as "fun" as you'd imagine.

Lots more test shots over at: [Nikon Rumors]

Now, the picture above is pretty unremarkable, right? Black and white (trivia: molecules have no color), grainy, shot in the kind of out-of-focus manner you expect from a guy like me, who can't seem to venture out beyond the Auto setting on his entry-level Nikon D40 DSLR. But wait a second. Doesn't the image kind of seem, well, familiar? Like high school chem class familiar? Balls and sticks familiar?

Here's another image; a computer generated image that's much more at home for anyone who studied atoms and molecules in the dead and gone days of 1997:

Make sense now? That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the "specimen"—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.

You can actually make out each of those atoms and their bonds, and it's thanks to this: An atomic force microscope.

Like the venerable electron microscope, but more powerful and with an eye for the third dimension, the AFM is able to make the nano world something we humans can appreciate visually. Using a silicon microscale cantilever coated in carbon dioxide (tiny, tiny needle), lasers, an "ultrahigh vacuum" and temperatures that hovered around 5 Kelvin, the AFM imaged the pentacene in nanometers. It did this while sitting a mere 0.5 nanometers above the surface and its previously invisible bonds for 20 long, unmoving hours. The length of time is noteworthy, said IBM scientist Leo Goss in statement from IBM, because any movement whatsoever would have disrupted the delicate atomic bonds and ruined the image.

And that's the real beauty of this image. For the first time ever we can see where each of those carbon and hydrogen atoms line up, and the overall symmetrical shape they create. In 3D.

Quirky, Quarky, Quantum Computing

That IBM, a hardware company, was the entity to accomplish this feat should be fairly obvious, given what we know (and don't yet know) about quantum computing. Said an IBM representative in an email to me this morning, "This pioneering achievement and the new insights gained from the experiments extend the ability of scientists to study matter with atomic resolution and open up exciting new possibilities for exploring electronic building blocks and devices at the ultimate atomic and molecular scale-devices that might be vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than today's processors and memory devices."

In a quarkshell, that means this discovery might help future engineers manipulate atoms and their bonds, as well as create powerful, energy-sipping quantum computers for their cryptography needs, space travel or maybe even large black and yellow rooms that make our fantasies come true (or at the very least allow androids to play Sherlock Holmes).

But not so fast, Einstein. I see that tabletop subspace communicator you've imagined on your desktop. It's a great idea, and while I understand your enthusiasm for such things, as Matt explained earlier this month quantum computing, entangled desktops and Star Trek holodecks are all decades away, if not more.

What this discovery does do however is advance our primitive understanding of the Way Things Are. It's a small, nanometer-sized piece in a puzzle that doesn't even have all the pieces on the table yet. Hell, we don't even know where all the pieces are yet. From the looks of these images though, we will someday soon. [Images: IBM]

As the sample moves through a metallic microfluidic channel, either by gravity or drawn by an electric field, it passes over a line of sub-micron diameter pinholes, blocking or transmitting light (sunlight works fine). The dynamic light level is then detected by a standard CCD device behind the holes. So it's lens-free, working more like a micro-sized scanner device, and yet it has comparable image quality to a top-rate glass-lensed traditional microscope.

And it's about the size of a quarter in its entirety: making it small enough to fit into a mobile-phone-sized device, with an LCD screen. It's cheap—around $10—and easy to make, and would be perfect for developing countries for easy detection of malaria in blood and such. [Physorg]

Six Position Color Filter Wheel
Compound (Biological) Microscope
USB Cable for Transferring Images to a PC
40 to 400 Power - up to 1600 Power with Digital Zoom
AC Adaptor to Power the Microscope
3.5" (88mm) LCD Screen with 4x Digital Zoom
Carrying Case Included
Built-in Digital Camera - 2 Megapixels
Weight - 51oz (1446g)
Top and Bottom LED Illumination
Two Year Limited Warranty
Mechanical Stage - 3.5" x 3.5" (88mm x 88mm)
128MB Internal Storage Memory
SD Card Slot
Five Prepared Slides
Objective Lens - 4x, 10x, and 40x

It should retail for $299, and is, says Celestron, suitable for coins, molds, yeasts, bacteria and animal parts. [Celestron via I4U]

JMAR Technologies' New Microscope-On-A-Boom Scans More Than Just Slides [PR Newswire]