Net buiten ons normale zichtsbereik kom je niet zelden de mooiste structuren tegen. Hier zien we een gele wratspons, een exoot die in de Oosterschelde te vinden is. Mikkel Suijker fotografeerde dit dier(!) zowel onder water als in de microscoop. Het skelet van deze spons bestaat uit kunstig gevormde kiezelnaaldjes (spiculae). Qua samenstelling zijn de spiculae gelijk aan zandkorrels, maar…
Perception flips over....You may see one star engraved in the background while the other one is on top. Actually, the two images are one and the same, just rotated 180°. This is a detail of a 10 euro cent coin. Image was made with oblique lighting and 30x magnification, creating a shadow view. Apparently, our brains give different interpretations of…
All microscopes have their limits. Obtaining a good image at the highest resolution requires careful adjustment of microscope and sample material. But without contrast nothing would be visible. Here we pushed our tungsten cryo-SEM (Jeol 6490LA + Gatan Alto2500) to high magnifications by applying a shadowed sputtercoating of platinum, with nitrogen gas feed instead of the usual argon. These Lactobacillus…
Two days of intense learning and practicing ...... and a great atmosphere! We explored Light Microscopy, Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy, Cryo-Scanning Electron Microscopy, and discussed many more methodologies. Food Microstructures include emulsions, foams, powders, suspensions, films, etc, from dry to wet and from ambient to frozen. Analyzing food has many intellectual and creative challenges ....... but yields lots of fun.…
Customers at Consistence benefit from a rich combination of different imaging methodologies. And in most cases, we apply different methodologies, to reveal the various secrets of the microstructures. Here a face mask sheet, covering the filter material is shown with different light microscopic methodologies (left images) and with Scanning Electron Microscopy (right images). While one methodology proves crystallinity/order, the other…
Consistence and 3 partner companies (FrieslandCampina and 2 others) have started mapping the structure of CHEESE at all length scales, to compile the scattered knowledge of cheese microstructure. ELINE HOEDEMAKER and JANNES VAN DEN BAAR will study several cheeses with advanced imaging methods that complement each other (CLSM, SEM, cryofixed, chemfixed, etc). Combining their findings with existing knowledge from literature,…
This week we were happy to receive a group of students from VWO 5 Wartburg College, location Guido de Bres. They are orienting on further education and their future job. They visited our lab based on their interest in technology and research. In addition to a presentation by Consistence and its staff, they received a labtour. And, of course, they…
In an earlier post we visualised a planar view of a face mask filter at increasing magnification, showing a heterogeneous network of fibres. It is not trivial to obtain high resolution cross sections through fabric: sub-micron (less than 1/1000 millimetre) details cannot be obtained with light microscopy or x-ray imaging, while sections of embedded material lack the third dimension. Embedding…
Already in 1987 Isaac Heertje published a method to visualise the fat crystal network in margarines. We now have revisited this method, making it available for today’s research of crystal networks in foods and beyond. The images show fat crystal networks in a 39% fat spread and in a 79% fat margarine, revealing continuous networks of crystals, often along emulsion…
