Like our eyes, microscopes are limited in what they can see because of their resolution, or their ability to see detail. The detail, or information, from the object is there, but some of it gets lost as the light reflecting off of the object moves through the air.
“The whole premise of this is built on one single fact—the way light interacts with any matter is linear,” said Kamilov, assistant professor of electrical & systems engineering and computer science & engineering. “But the reality is that the interaction is actually not linear.”
For example, if you shine a flashlight through your hand, you can’t see the source of the light because it’s bending, and that is nonlinearity. With a single cell, the bending is so light that it is nearly transparent, which is linear.
When light interacts with a cell or an object, the light going out of the cell loses the information it gathers from that interaction. But because of that interaction, there are fluctuations in the vicinity of that cell that work with such matter and get retransformed and remitted. Those fluctuations are encoded into the nonlinearity of the interaction, but today’s microscopes are unable see this, Kamilov said.
“We want to take into account this nonlinear interaction of light, objects and premises, and if we do it correctly, we can extract that information, which normally disappears in a current microscope and is treated as ‘noise,'” Kamilov said. “We want to decode the information from the noise and add it back into the resolution, and that should give us features that are smaller than the resolution limit.”
Kamilov said there are two types of noise: imperfections and mathematical noise that is the result of science’s current limitations. It is the mathematical noise that he wants to capture.
Image Credit: Washington University in St. Louis
News This Week
The CDC buried a measles forecast that stressed the need for vaccinations
This story was originally published on ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. ProPublica — Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [...]
Light-Driven Plasmonic Microrobots for Nanoparticle Manipulation
A recent study published in Nature Communications presents a new microrobotic platform designed to improve the precision and versatility of nanoparticle manipulation using light. Led by Jin Qin and colleagues, the research addresses limitations in traditional [...]
Cancer’s “Master Switch” Blocked for Good in Landmark Study
Researchers discovered peptides that permanently block a key cancer protein once thought untreatable, using a new screening method to test their effectiveness inside cells. For the first time, scientists have identified promising drug candidates [...]
AI self-cloning claims: A new frontier or a looming threat?
Chinese scientists claim that some AI models can replicate themselves and protect against shutdown. Has artificial intelligence crossed the so-called red line? Chinese researchers have published two reports on arXiv claiming that some artificial [...]
New Drug Turns Human Blood Into Mosquito-Killing Weapon
Nitisinone, a drug for rare diseases, kills mosquitoes when present in human blood and may become a new tool to fight malaria, offering longer-lasting, environmentally safer effects than ivermectin. Controlling mosquito populations is a [...]
DNA Microscopy Creates 3D Maps of Life From the Inside Out
What if you could take a picture of every gene inside a living organism—not with light, but with DNA itself? Scientists at the University of Chicago have pioneered a revolutionary imaging technique called volumetric DNA microscopy. It builds [...]
Scientists Just Captured the Stunning Process That Shapes Chromosomes
Scientists at EMBL have captured how human chromosomes fold into their signature rod shape during cell division, using a groundbreaking method called LoopTrace. By observing overlapping DNA loops forming in high resolution, they revealed that large [...]
Bird Flu Virus Is Mutating Fast – Scientists Say Our Vaccines May Not Be Enough
H5N1 influenza is evolving rapidly, weakening the effectiveness of existing antibodies and increasing its potential threat to humans. Scientists at UNC Charlotte and MIT used high-performance computational modeling to analyze thousands of viral protein-antibody interactions, revealing [...]
Leave A Comment