The Technion, Israel’s institute of technology, has once again advanced humanity a few steps further in the quest for knowledge, improving microscope resolution ten-fold:
Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has registered a patent for a new technique that improves tenfold the performance of any type of sophisticated microscope and imaging system without making hardware changes.
Their innovative method substantially improves the resolution – the ability to distinguish between details – of images seen through microscopes.The discovery, which has just been published in the Nature Materials journal, has aroused great interest in the scientific world and industry, being described as a “breakthrough with the potential to change” these fields.“When you look through an optical microscope at an object with features [optical information] smaller than one-half the wavelength of light, you necessarily see a blurred image,” explained Prof. Moti Segev of the Technion’s physics department. “The reason for this is that the information about the structure of very small features does not propagate through space and thus does not reach the eye or the microscope camera.”
Methods exist to achieve a resolution under one-half of the wavelength of light, he said, but they all require point-by-point scanning of the object, meaning that these approaches may be used only for a static object, which does not change during the scan.
Scientists have tried for many years to find algorithms to reconstruct the subwavelength information lost between the object and the microscope camera. But until now, all such attempts were largely unsuccessful. The main reason is that “noise” – random scattering of light, which is inevitable in optical systems – has thus far prevented algorithmic reconstruction of features smaller than one-half the wavelength of light from measurements of the blurred image.
Now the Technion team has presented a breakthrough algorithmic method for improving the resolution of microscopes to considerably under one-half the wavelength of light.
The project was successful due to interdisciplinary collaboration between several research groups from four different Technion faculties: those of Segev and Dr. Oren Cohen of the physics department; Prof. Yonina Eldar of the electrical engineering department; Prof. Irad Yavneh and Dr. Michael Zibulevsky of the computer science department; and Prof. Shy Shoham of the biomedical engineering department.
Just a few months ago, the Technion, together with Cornell University, won the applied sciences campus tender in New York City. However, as with any Israel-related project, the irrational tendencies of people of the Left went into overdrive, in line with their zero-sum mentality. As far as I can tell, the main claim by these objectors has to do with the Technion developing technologies used by Israeli defence contractors, such as Elbit and Raphael.
Much has been written about the sheer hypocrisy of targeting Israeli technological academia for so called “technologies of death” when in fact, they are intended to make weapons smarter, smaller and more accurate, in order to reduce collateral damage. I’m willing to bet that “Technowashing” is right around the corner, and that this amazing multidisciplinary technological feat will be at the forefront.
