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Focus: A snapshot of life at ANU
Even long-serving staff in the ANU Electron Microscope Unit (EMU) can experience something akin to seasickness or vertigo.
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The hairs on the head of a bee magnified to thousands of times their actual size.
Image: Geoff Hunter
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The sensation comes from viewing images that zoom from the whopping scale of centimetres down to just a few nanometres (one nanometre is equal to one millionth of a millimetre).
Based at the Research School of Biological Sciences at ANU, the EMU incorporates six staff, three transmission electron microscopes, five scanning electron microscopes, a dual-beam Focused Ion Beam/SEM microscope, a range of light microscopes including a confocal, and many other pieces of imaging equipment. Each year up to 300 researchers use the facility: some to look at the structure of animals and plants, others to understand inorganic materials including fabricated nanostructures.
“You need as much magnification as you can get,” explains EMU head Dr Sally Stowe. “Sometimes when you look at tiny structures, they turn out to be made of several levels of even smaller structures, all finely adapted for their function. It gives you a healthy respect for the detail and precision that can come out of evolution – with the added bonus that objects that are strictly speaking ‘invisible’ can often seem exquisite to our eyes.”
A powerful new field emission scanning electron microscope which will create more opportunities for researchers to view structures on the nanoscale has just been commissioned by the EMU. At this level of magnification, matter invisible to the naked eye appears crisp and detailed.
By revealing structures we can’t see, the equipment at the EMU is helping researchers to understand more about the things we can see, such as bees. Technical Officer Geoff Hunter is studying how some flying insects function by looking at their anatomy in fine detail.
“It’s amazing to see the way that things developed, how these insects are incredibly functional and beautiful at the same time,” Hunter says.
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ANU Reporter
Summer 2007
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