Nearly 100 years ago, a seemingly simple discovery revolutionized the microscope. The introduction of phase contrast, which ...

Fifteen years ago, physicists worked out a method to increase image contrast by hitting the electron imaging beam with an ultrabright laser. Back then, a laser so bright didn’t exist. Now it does, and ...

The invention that first enabled researchers to see clear images of living cells was the phase-contrast microscope, which won its inventor, Frits Zernike, a Nobel Prize in 1932. Prior to Zernike's ...