Azurite to malachite

This is a photo from an azurite, or at least of what it is left from it. The blue mineral surviving mayhem of green invaders is our protagonist today. It is one of the two copper carbonate hydroxides, but as it can be seen on the photo, it is not the most stable.

You can find it on rotting fruit

Rhizopus is a genus of common saprobic fungi on plants and specialized parasites on animals. They are found on a wide variety of organic substrates, including "mature fruits and vegetables", faeces, jellies, syrups, leather, bread, peanuts and

Magnification on screen

One of the most frequently asked questions about digital imaging is:

what is the total magnification showed on the screen?

To answer this question, we need to know four things:

Xanthidium armatum ‘inverted’

The use of an inverted microscope for observation of phytoplankton, actually belongs to the standard. The image which is shown here, has been taken with the Motic Inverted Microscope AE31E. A 35 mm cell culture petri dish with a high precision glass bottom was used. This combination has some advantages over the use of an upright microscope:

MITOSIS: Multiplication by Division

Our body contains trillions of cells (thousands of millions) but everything started from a single cell. This unit cell has the amazing ability of dividing into two, and then four, and then eight and so on, in time becoming a complete organism. The process through which cells divide and divide as to multiply in number and become a complete organism, is known as Mitosis.

During Mitosis, the parent cell divides to form two genetically identical daughter cells. In order to assure a perfect copy of the genetic material in the daughter cells, the parent cell has to duplicate the chromosomes first; this step is called the

Feulgen stain, still indispensable for microscopic research

Robert Feulgen (1884–1955) was a German physician and chemist who, in 1914, developed a method for staining DNA (now known as the Feulgen stain) and who discovered that DNA is located in the chromosomes and also discovered plant and animal nuclear DNA ("thymonucleic acid") congeniality. 

Painting with crystals

Preparing a normal or time lapse video of a crystallization process under the microscope is not easy. Focusing problems, formation of too big crystals and getting the interesting part right under the objective, often gives you a headache.

With the technique described below, most of these headaches can be overcome:

Finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

This is a photo of a chalcedony interacting with white Tungsten light. It is special because it almost shows all the colours of a rainbow. To do so, the crystal needs to have the exact geometry and to be placed at the exact position to interfere with each of the colours separately.

Ants, the world’s barely visible largest biomass

Ants are a group of colony-forming social insects, which belong to the order of Hymenoptera. Ants have been able to adapt to very different habitats; where they occur, ants are the dominant life form on the bottom. It is estimated that the total biomass of ants is greater than that of any other animal species on earth.

Just stones?

Tumbled stones are small pieces of rocks and minerals (usually about one to five centimeters in diameter) that have been processed in a rock tumbler to produce smooth, rounded and highly polished pebbles. Most stones that a person can find will not tumble with good results. The rocks and minerals used to make tumbled stones are specially selected for their color, translucence, appearance and ability to