This is such a simple and powerful trick, I don’t know why I hardly ever see it used. When giving an equation during a talk or in a paper, typically that equation is best understood as a series of terms. Those in your audience who are familiar with the terms, like yourself, will instantly recognize…
Thursday through Saturday this week, there is an Open Science Summit in Berkeley. The schedule includes Josh Perfetto from the OpenPCR group I’ve mentioned before, Martha Bagnell from The Third Reviewer (a…
Physicists have a very unsentimental way of manhandling mathematics. In addition to setting up dimensionally inconsistent equations for order-of-magnitude estimations, they like to take lots of short cuts that make computations fast and easy. For…
Micro Waterjet has an abrasive-based technique that enables laser-like precision for machinging small parts. The benefits are: no heat damage/distortion, and materials that are toxic when burned can be machined to laser…
About 10 years ago, as high power LEDs became available, many quantitative microscopists started changing over from arc lamps to LEDs for illumination because of their rock solid intensity. Philips Lumileds have…
I’m revising figures for a paper right now and the editors suggested I avoid red-green color schemes. In the US, 7% of men are colorblind, usually red-green colorblind. The editors suggested …
Microscope objectives, in particular, the water-dipping variety so common in physiology and imaging labs, get dirty. Salts build up on them, traces of drugs stick to them, and biological membranes accumulate. It’s best…
Look at this transmission spectrum from Semrock. It’s a nearly perfect step function. You want to know about the optical density outside of the transmission band? Over 7 outside of the 500-550nm…
I recently covered some alternative optomechanics sources beyond the usual suspects like ThorLabs and Newport. Here are a couple of less well known optomechanics shops.
The unfortunately named Eksma Optics has…
Does the length of a cap screw include the head? How many threads per inch for the fine version of a 1/4″ bolt? Bolt Depot has all of this information neatly collected in…
Switching wall outlets remotely, via the parallel port of a computer, a microcontroller (e.g., Arduino), or other simple switches, is desirable in many rigs. For example, timing/triggering lights in a behavioral environment, switching equipment on and off remotely, or coordinating the…
Intrinsic signal optical imaging is a functional imaging modality where the reflectance of red light indicates active portions of cortex. It is used for many applications, including imaging individual barrels in rodent…
Many manufacturers distribute catalogs that include extensive tutorial sections. You could really teach a pretty extensive engineering course on optics using nothing more than the front pages of the CVI Melles Griot catalog. In this post I’ll point you to some of…
Lickometers detect when an animal, usually a rodent, licks a water port. They’re useful in all sorts of behavioral tasks, ranging from addiction experiments (spike the water and see how much they consume),…
Low magnification, high numeric aperture (NA) microscope objectives are popular choices for multiphoton imaging. They offer excellent light collection properties, a wide field of view, and still permit high resolution imaging. However, they…
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