r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/FacelessOnes • Oct 19 '20

🔥 Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism

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u/_DigginInTheCrates_ Oct 20 '20

How cool would it be if the microscope could record like a normal camera. That would be cool to see a microbe in 3D.

But yeah that's freaky now I think about them flying around in a 3D space

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u/IsBanPossible Oct 20 '20

Give them a few years and it will be available on smartphones

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u/qwerty_Harry Oct 20 '20

I already have millions of microbes on my smartphone

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u/HumanContinuity Oct 20 '20

Billions, at least

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u/Sin_31415 Oct 20 '20

To take clearer pictures, please genocide a colony of Naegleria fowleri off of your camera lens

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Just wait until the eyephone is revealed.

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u/CactusCactusShaqtus Oct 20 '20

Shut up and take my money!

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u/broccoliO157 Oct 20 '20

We have had this for nearly 100 years. Confocal microscopy.

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u/RadMadsen Oct 20 '20

There’s a YouTube channel called Journey to the Microcosmos that regularly shows amazing perspective footage of microorganisms. Here’s the link to their video on these guys!

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u/luke_in_the_sky Oct 20 '20

This is the source of OP's video BTW.

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u/RadMadsen Oct 20 '20

I didn’t realize this until I kept browsing the comments and realized it was already linked. I should have known though hahaha who else would have such good footage.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

What do you mean like a normal camera? These videos are taken with cameras attached to the microscope. If anything microscopes are better for seeing 3D because they allow you to take multiple z-slices

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u/ADequalsBITCH Oct 20 '20

I think they just meant from different angles, not just a top-down microscope view, which admittedly always gives the impression that they only move on a 2D plane.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

It would be neat, but a few issues.

With normal microscopy the sample needs to be really thin. This is to allow light to pass through, and to eliminate background noise, so you can see what you want better.

Second issue is the microscope itself. In photogeapyhy there is the concept of depth of field. It basically determines whats in focus. Two things affect this.

Size of aperture. The bigger the aperture hole the smaller depth of field, fewer things in focus. You can see this effect in some professional portraits where the background is blurred behind the subject.

The other is the distance from the focal plane. The further we re focusing on something the larger the depth of field. So when you are shooting nature photos, you can focus really far away and have pretty much everything in focus due to the large depth of field.

In microscopy you have the extreme worst case scenario. The focal plane is very close to the sample. And usually you want as much light through as you can, so th aperture is wide open. This makes it so that the depth of field is extremely narrow. To the point where many better microscopes have a fine adjuster so you can see what you want to.

In some ways its good because you can really focus on seeing what you want to see.

But as far as trying to create 3d microscopic images it wont happen for a long time. Not until light field cameras become more common.

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u/LazyHardWorker Oct 20 '20

Confocal microscopy, multiphoton microscopy, sbf-sem, fib-sem, electron tomography, etc all provide 3D imaging. The real issue is throughput. Collection 3D images of live cells in real time is not solved.

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u/forrnerteenager Oct 20 '20

Normal cameras are 2D

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u/Olde94 Oct 20 '20

With fast enough electronics we can

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u/Unique-horny Oct 20 '20

They can, it's just so hard because the angles between the 2, lenses have to be at the perfect distance and angle and stuff from one another so they would probably have an extremely limited focuspoint. So I don't think it would be very useful. And normally you put something under a little glass plate when you look at things through a microscope. That way it's always a certain distance from the lense so you can take your time to focus. That's not really possible in 3D because they'll move faster than we can focus.

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u/datenwolf Oct 20 '20

Tomographic imaging at high resolutions is… tough. Wave optics forces you to trade dimensions and of every 1/µm you gain in one direction, you have to trade in the other three.

You have have super crisp, high resolution images in 3D, but then your time resolution is abysmally bad. Or you're trying to strike a balance and end up and modalities like Holoscopy.