My dad dropped by for a nice visit yesterday evening on Jon’s eighth birthday. Since Jon had already had relatives (Grandma, Grandpa, Aunts Patti and Pam, Uncle David, Meghan, Austin and Jeff) in for a party, he was pretty wiped by the evening – though that still didn’t prevent him from getting out of bed and cackling to himself maniacally for quite some time….

During the conversation afterwards Dad enthused about an amazing new microscope that he now owns called the Richardson Real-Time Microscopy System (RTM): It’s a light microscope that, thanks to new technology, can magnify at levels previously only obtainable via a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The advantage in that is that microscopic specimens may now be seen live rather than frozen and coated with gold dust (to bounce the electrons off them).

See the difference between this typical SEM photo of a seemingly hard-shelled, tanklike dustmite and RTM video footage of live, moving, squishy dustmites. It changes perspective of the wee beasties mightily!

Apparently this microscope is causing great excitement and consternation among the scientific community, since the pictures of organisms don’t look remotely like what’s been previously accepted as reality. After one RTM demonstration, a scientist got up and stated that this instrument had just destroyed his life’s work. Ouch. On the other hand, this is opening up huge areas of study, as now people can observe and film microscopic organisms in situ, rather than by the microscopic equivalent of being stuffed and mounted.