WIKIMEDIA, SHARP PHOTOGRAPHY
It’s long been thought impossible for even the best optical microscopes to magnify objects any smaller than 200 nm for viewing, due to the natural diffraction of light. But scientists from Bangor University and Oxford University, both in the U.K., have cracked this so-called diffraction limit using a biological substance: spider silk. Nephila edulis silk acts like an extra lens that adds two to three times magnification to an image, according to a press release.
Unlike a typical lens, study coauthor Zengbo Wang explained in the statement that using this spider silk-enhanced “superlens” is like “looking through a cylindrical glass bottle . . . the single filament provides a one-dimensional viewing image along its length.”
Just weeks earlier, the team from Bangor University created the ...
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