A flea photographed under a scanning electron microscopeWIKIPEDIA, CDC/JANICE HANEY CARRA team of Japanese scientists have found a way of endowing insects and other small animals with a suit of armor that lets them withstand an air-free environment. This “nano-suit,” created from detergent and plasma, allows living creatures to be photographed under a scanning electron microscope (SEM)—a treatment that would normally kill them.
SEMs have captured breathtakingly detailed images of small animals by placing them in a vacuum chamber and bombarding them with beams of electrons. The vacuum is necessary because gas molecules would scatter the electrons and lower the resolution of the images. But it also kills and deforms living animals by rapidly dehydrating them—water quickly evaporates across their surface and their bodies collapse. This is why SEM only works on dead specimens that have been preserved.
“Observation of living specimens with a high-resolution SEM would be a significant breakthrough,” wrote the authors in their paper, published today (15 August) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It would allow zoologists to study the movements and behavior of their subjects in much greater detail, for ...
