Wow, you have a pretty full set of interests and activities there. What would you say that you're particularly into at the moment, specifically?
Wow, you have a pretty full set of interests and activities there. What would you say that you're particularly into at the moment, specifically?
Well right now, since I'm graduating this semester (fingers crossed) , I'm focusing on my thesis. It involves tomographic imaging using electricity. So yeah, I'm building circuits and doing some pretty simple programming. But it's fun! And it's all I could think about lately. 😃
I recently watched a TED talk where the speaker was discussing Eric Betzig and Super Resolution Microscopy. I'm not sure if that's related to your field or not, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about such things. Anyway, the speaker was saying that this is going to be such a revolutionary technology that the application of this could be the biggest breakthrough of our generation.
It's been my experience that TED talk speakers tend to exaggerate a bit. Do you know anything about this? Is it really that big of a deal?
My lab actually does optics, though I myself belong to a different sub-group. Anyways, I read about it and as I have come to understand, super resolution microscopy is geared towards having a higher resolution of images than what the diffraction limit offers.
Standard microscopy techniques require light to operate. However, due to the wave-like property of light, we get what we call diffraction effects that ultimately limits the amount of information we can resolve in the micro scale. This is the diffraction limit.
Super resolution microscopy, however, allows one to take images with higher resolution than that, it goes beyond that limit. I am not too familiar with the theory and the techniques behind it but it could be big. It would mean being able to see the details of very, very small objects that we had no access to before.
Thinking of its possible applications, the most obvious would be in the field of medicine. It would aid us in studying pathogens, cancer cells among others on a much smaller scale. And we might find some things there that we haven't found before.
Fascinating stuff. Things like this really help to offset my otherwise bleak view of the future, lol.
You seem like you have a lot of interesting things going on. I'm going to follow you. Looking forward to seeing your future posts.
Thanks man! I'm hoping to hear more from you too. 😃