Optical Microscopy’s 20X Improvement

A standard optical microscope can only resolve items around one micrometer across (0.001 millimeter) clearly. But now, by depositing a transparent microsphere (2 μm<diameter<9 μm) on the surface of an object and focusing a standard optical microscope on the microsphere, dubbed the ‘microsphere nanoscope’, Manchester School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering researchers can see features 20 times smaller – 50 nanometers (5 x 10^-8m) – under normal lights. This is beyond the optical resolution of microscopy.  This gizmo is called the “microsphere nanoscope”, and the inventors Professor Lin Li and Dr Zengbo Wang could potentially look inside live human cells, examine live viruses for the first time to potentially see how they function in vitro.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n3/full/ncomms1211.html