In another article to which, personally, I am very fond of, we talked about human anatomy and how, from a service on a website, it was possible to have the 3D graphic detail of all the organs and not only, of the human body. The two online telescopes from Microsoft and Google have also been illustrated to look at the details of the sky and the stars.
In this article we go back to talking about simulated scientific tools like computer programs.
Precisely we speak of the electron microscope offered, not by a web application but by a program to be installed on the PC.
The virtual microscope is offered by a virtual laboratory funded by NASA for the development of scientific applications.
The virtual microscope is called Virtual Microscope is a Java application that can be downloaded and used for free that supports the high resolution and multi-dimensional interactive visualization of images photographed with very powerful electron microscopes.
The program interface simulates what would be seen with an electron microscope and it is therefore possible to change various typical values such as brightness, magnification (usually up to 1800x), navigation, focus, contrast and various adjustments .
Through the navigation keys it is therefore possible to move the area framed by the microscope on a specific image while with the zoom it is possible to enlarge any single detail and explore any point of interest on the sample image.
The thing that leaves you surprised and amazed in this microscope is the three-dimensional graphics that allow you to enlarge and focus on a detail and see how the other objects around you blur, because they are not framed, on different dimensional planes .
That the application has educational purposes is clear from the fact that the software provides a space for annotations, so for example a teacher can ask his students to write down, on the program itself, what they recognize and identify when they see a particular object magnified.
Annotations can be saved and reloaded as XML files.
So if the strength of this virtual electronic microscope is the variety of images it provides and a level of detail that allows the user to see an object from multiple focal planes, on the other the "problem" is that the dimensions in terms of megabytes, these images are very large and take up a lot of space on the pc.
The images that can be downloaded and viewed using the application are visible on this page which shows 90 sample images including many curiosities, from the cell to the pentium processor.
As you can see the size of the image files are huge and if you wanted to download them all together they would add more than 170GB of data so better to see them one at a time.
Download Virtual Microscope
The source of the reporting of the virtual microscope is the Italian blog Abtechno.
For an online microscope, however, the best web application is offered by the site //micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/virtual/virtual.html from which it is possible to choose between different types of electron microscopes and, through Java technology and directly from the internet browser, use a microscope to view some sample images.
Obviously the quality is much lower than the Virtual Microscope program however there is nothing to download and is therefore faster to use to satisfy your curiosity.
