Question: What chemical reactions/particle activity do you usually see down the microscope? What's the most fascinating thing you ever saw down the microscope? :)

Nicola Rogers answered on 14 Mar 2014:

When using light for microscopy, we can only see things as small as a few hundred nanometers – so we can just detect the large nanoparticles I work with when they are coated in fluoresecent molecules, and they dance around very fast in solution becauase they are constantly being bumped around by water molecules in Brownian motion. However, when looking at biological cells, we can see a lot of detail – we can see the cell nucleus – which we tend to stain blue so it is easy to see, and then we can see the red nanoparticles inside the cell. If we use an electron microscope, however, we can see things down to 1 nm in size – and then we see a lot of details within cells and can see our nanoparticles really easily. So in general we tend to look at cancer cells that have been dosed with nanoparticles, to see if the nanoparticles go into the cells, and where abouts in the cell that they actually go