Connected on 2007-03-20 12:45:00
from San Anselmo, California , USA
- 12:11 pm
- Bugscope Teamhey guys
- Bugscope Teamhey alex
- Bugscope TeamAlright now. Just waiting for the vacuum.
- Bugscope Teamtwo more tenths
- Bugscope Teamit's taking its time
- 12:16 pm
- Bugscope Teamalmost ....
- Bugscope Teamnoo not the butterfly wing!
- Bugscope Teamwhat's wrong with it?
- Bugscope Teamoh... that
- Bugscope Teamits not happy
- 12:24 pm
- Bugscope Teamokay cHas wants the 'scope now for a sec
- Bugscope Teamthat's a pretty nasty looking beetle head
- 12:29 pm
- Bugscope Teamchas: one drawback to the new IE "video" mode is that the cursor constantly flashes the wait icon during each image download. we'll need to see if that can be avoided (maybe put the video in an iframe?)
Bugscope TeamI only saw that in IE6, not IE7
- 12:36 pm
- Bugscope TeamHi guys!
- Bugscope TeamHi students! We're still getting setup here
- Bugscope TeamHi Jill!
- Bugscope TeamHi Jill, we are still collecting some last few preset, we'
- Bugscope Teamwe'll be ready in a few minutes
- TeacherHi. We are logging on.
- Bugscope Teamhi guys!
- Bugscope TeamGreat. Your controls won't be active here until we're finished setting up the rest of the presets
- Bugscope Teamthe kids are welcome to ask as many questions as they like. we'll be able to start answering once we've finished setting up
- Bugscope Teamhey tack
- 12:41 pm
- Bugscope TeamCathy where is the house fly? Is it on this stub?
- Studenthi, alex & chas
- Studentthe kids are going to ask a question now
- Bugscope Teamno its not, it was kind of dirty
- Bugscope Teamsorry
- GuestWhat is the highest magnification of the EM?
- Bugscope Teamit all depends on the sample, and the way we setup the 'scope. for our session there probably sin't much to see above 20-40,000x
- Bugscope Teambut I've used the microscope at up to 800,000x magnification
- Bugscope Teamsession is ready for you jill!
- Bugscope TeamOkay you all should be able to drive the 'scope now.
- Bugscope TeamWe have the presets done.
- Bugscope TeamOne person at a time, though...
- TeacherThanks. We'll start.
- Bugscope TeamBe sure and let us know whenever you have questions.
- Bugscope Teamwe can also transfer the controls to one of the student's computers too, instead of rotating kids up to the one machine with control
- Bugscope TeamThis is one of the mondo bigboy legs of the Jerusalem cricket.
- Bugscope TeamThis is one of the joints.
- 12:46 pm
- Bugscope Teamthere's some dirty stuck inbetween those spines there
- Bugscope TeamThe spines probably serve as protection; keep the big ol' dude from getting eaten.
- Bugscope TeamAnd you can see a bunch of dirt here.
- Bugscope TeamThere could be some diatoms in there.
- Bugscope TeamThis is like being on another planet.
- Bugscope TeamImage is coming and going here -- is it for you guys?
- Bugscope Teamlooks ok to me.
- Bugscope TeamI am sitting at the microscope and have the original in front of me.
- Bugscope Teamsame
- Bugscope TeamMine just blinked on/off.
- GuestHow do you prep. the specimens for the EM
- Bugscope TeamWe take the deceased insects and lay them on their backs onto sticky tape
- Bugscope TeamThen they get coated with a thin layer of metal to make them conductive, a prerequisite for using them in the SEM
- Bugscope TeamThese samples we need only to dry, then stick on carbon tape, then use some silver paint to enhance conductivity, then sputter coat with gold/palladium.
- 12:51 pm
- Bugscope TeamWe have a video on one of our websites that shows you how we prep the sample for bugscope: http://virtual.itg.uiuc.edu/training/
- Bugscope Teamif you scroll down to "Preparing a sample for the SEM"
- Bugscope TeamThe sputter coating is the cool part -- you have a current going through argon, making it glow. The argon becomes a plasma that attacks a target of gold/palladium and knocks loose atoms of Au/Pd that then coat the sample.
- Bugscope TeamAdjust could work here.
- Bugscope TeamThe sputter coater glows for the same reason neon signs glow.... but has a much different purpose
- Bugscope Teamah, cool this is a great preset
- Bugscope TeamThe image is dark. Here we go -- mosquito eye facets, called ommatidia.
- Bugscope TeamWe have looked at bugs that are almost the size of mites, and we have looked at mites, and of course we have looked at bacteria.
- Bugscope Teamyou guys know whats going on with the image?
- Bugscope Teamno clue cathy
- Bugscope Teamaxis box might be having trouble keeping up
- Bugscope TeamThe mites are a couple of hundred microns across.
- Bugscope TeamThese ommatidia are dried, quite a bit.
- Bugscope TeamUsually they are all swollen together.
- 12:56 pm
- GuestWhat is the most interesting bug you have looked at?
- Bugscope TeamIf you take the mag down you will be able to see (to the NE) the antenna bases.
- Bugscope TeamI like ticks, escpecially.
- Bugscope TeamAnd we looked at a lacebug last week that had a cool body shape and detail.
- Bugscope Teamespecially, I should've said
- Bugscope TeamEarwigs are almost always interesting because they have mites that live on them.
- Guest\
- Bugscope TeamOOF.
- Bugscope TeamOOF= out of focus
- Bugscope Teamtry adjusting the focus here
- Guestcan you see atoms with the em?
- Bugscope TeamWith a TEM you can now see atoms. With an SEM you cannot.
- Bugscope TeamYou can with a very special Tranmission EM (TEM)
- Bugscope Teamour TEM here has 2x the resolution of our SEM
- Bugscope Teamwhich is typically how it goes. but your samples have to be cut very thin for TEM so you can't put whole bugs in like we have here
- Bugscope TeamAnd only a few TEMs in the world will let you see atoms. We have a TEM (transmission electron microscope); when we want to see atoms we use an atomic force microscope (AFM). But that works much better at ultrahig vacuum.
- Bugscope Teamultrahigh, that is..
- 1:01 pm
- Bugscope Teamthe claw!
- GuestHow long has the "Bugscope" project been going?
Bugscope TeamI started working on it near when it started in 1997
- Bugscope Team8 years at least.
- Bugscope TeamYeah as Chas says for TEM you image very thin samples, and the electron beam goes through them, analogous to the way a light microscope works.
- Bugscope Teamscott has been on it from the beginning
- Bugscope Team8 years this month. Chas was a lot shorter then and very competitive. He is still the latter but taller than me now.
- Bugscope TeamChas started when he was like 14 or 15.
- Bugscope TeamI was a soph. in highschool
- Bugscope TeamWe have done a few hundred sessions.
- Bugscope Teamall over the US and in some other countries
- Bugscope TeamThis interface is very new, though, and written mostly by Chas, with the benefit of his experience doing this.
- Bugscope Teamjill, do you have any questions about driving the scope? how's it going?
- Bugscope Teamthat's a neat "fan" of setae on the left there
- GuestWhy can you see smaller things with electrons than with light?
Bugscope TeamThe reason is that visible light has a property of wavelength. That wavelength is around 400-700nm wide
- Studentthings are going fine
- 1:06 pm
- Studentthe updates are a little slow, of course
- Studentwith 16 computers!
- Studentthere are four of us acting as teachers
- Bugscope TeamElectrons are smaller than light -- the wavelengths of visible light are 400 to 700 nm, and the electron beam can be 4 angstroms acorss.
- Bugscope Teamacross
- Bugscope Teameven with fairly advanced techniques, you simply cannot probe objects much smaller than the wavelength
- Bugscope Teamelectrons are absolutely miniscule compared to the wavelength of light, but they themselves have a pseudo-wavelegth due to quantum mechanics
- Bugscope Teamhowever their "wavelength" is about 1000 smaller than that of visible light, so we can probe things much much smaller
- Bugscope TeamSo we are scanning a narrow beam of electrons across the sample repeatedly, and we get secondary electrons back from the conductive coat on the surface of the sample that give us our image.
- Bugscope TeamIf we scan the beam across a large area we get a low mag image, and if we scan across a very small area we get a high mag image of that area.
- GuestIf you put your finger under an EM by mistake, what would you see?
Bugscope Teamcan't possibley happen because this all occurs inside a ~1-foot diameter steel box inside of which all the air has been pumped out
- Bugscope TeamThis is all done in a vacuum.
- Bugscope TeamSo the electron beam doesn't bump into anything, like molecules of air.
- Bugscope TeamBe sure to drive as much as you want -- that will add images to your database for later.
- Bugscope Teamwell i guess you could always cut off your finger first, but I wouldn't want to do that
- Bugscope TeamAh ha.
- Bugscope Teami'm up for it
- Bugscope TeamIt would outgas for awhile
- Bugscope Teambut if the safety interlocks weren't there, still probably not much. if you know what a van de graaff generater looks like, it should be doing about the same thing, sending a lot of spare electrons to you
- Bugscope Teamyou'd have to dry your finger in a desiccator to get it ready to image.
- 1:12 pm
- Bugscope Teamyou can see those big club-shaped antennae on the beetle's head
- Bugscope Teamsorry if you guys are occasionally getting "broken" images there. we're running up against a limitation in our video server here. not a big deal as it seems to be fairly intermittent
- Bugscope Teamthis is the distal side -- the bottom -- of the head
- TeacherAre the large objects on the ends of the antennae?
- Bugscope TeamYou can check them out if you want to take the mag up on them.
- Bugscope Teamyeah, the "onion" looking things are the ends of the antennae that are much larger than the flexible part connecting to the head
- Student/
- Bugscope TeamThey have lots of chemoreceptors in them that allow the beetle to taste the air.
- Bugscope Teamcheck out the very middle of those big structures, I think they may have tons of cool patterns inside
- Bugscope Teaminsects have hundreds of tiny hair-like structures called setae that are mechano- or chemoreceptors.
- Bugscope TeamAnd some of the setae are not sensory, as well.
- Bugscope TeamSome of the setae seem to be there to form patterns or add surface area.
- Guesto
- Bugscope TeamThis is the area of the mouth.
- Bugscope Teamtry using click to center to move to the lower left or lower right to see one of those antennae
- GuestCan you see colors with an EM?
- 1:17 pm
- Bugscope TeamNo because we are thinner than color we cannot see it.
- Bugscope Teamno, the detectors we use in the SEM don't sense the "wavelength" of the electrons, only how many of them hit it
- Bugscope Teamwith light, it's the different wavelengths that get reflected or absorbed that produces colors
- Bugscope TeamIf you see colored electron micrographs they have been artificially colored.
- Bugscope TeamWe do that sometimes.
- Bugscope Teambut we can color the image afterwrods, based on elemental analysis, you may have seen some colored images on the bugscope site.
- Guest]
- Bugscope TeamYeah that's right -- when we do elemental analysis we can color different elements different colors.
- Bugscope Team"artificially colored" usually means someone painted on the image in photoshop, similar to painting a B&W photograph
- Guest)
- Bugscope Team/.
- Bugscope Teamwe're seeing a lot of mostly blank text from you guys... are you having any trouble w/ the chat there?
- Bugscope TeamNow you can take the mag up if you want.
- Guestsorry
- Bugscope Teamzoom in!
- Guest/
- Bugscope Teamyeah this is cool
- Bugscope Teamnow you might want to try focus, and then zoom in some more
- Guesthow would you prepare a specimen for a transmission EM?
- 1:22 pm
- Bugscope Teamthere are lots of receptors here
- GuestSorry about all of the blanks chas
Bugscope TeamI just wanted to make sure there wasn't a problem! no big deal
- Guestsorry
- Bugscope TeamFor TEM we have to fix the sample using a combination of glutaraldehyde/paraformaldehye, in an isotonic buffer -- it's a long sequence -- and the sample eventually gets embedded in epoxy.
- Guest]
- Bugscope TeamVery small samples embedded in epoxy that are cut using a diamond knife in an ultramicrotome to about 90 nm thick.
- Bugscope TeamWhen they are cut that thin they float out onto water, where we can pick them up on a TEM grid that is 3.05 mm across.
- GuestHow many schools have used bugscope??
Bugscope Teama couple hundred at least
- Bugscope Teamfrom all around the world too!
- Bugscope TeamThen they get stained using heavy metal stains like lead and uranium, and when that is all dry the grid goes into the 'scope...
- Bugscope TeamThis is the eye -- the compound eye.
- GuestHow many fith graders have used bugscope?
- Bugscope Team586
- 1:27 pm
- Bugscope Teamyou could probably search on our bugscope website and find out. I believe there is an option to search or sort by grade level
- Bugscope TeamWe could try to figure that out from our logs; not really sure.
- Bugscope Teamhttp://bugscope.itg.uiuc.edu/
- Bugscope Teamwe can also let a student try driving the 'scope too if you want, right scot?
- Guestdo you have any research projects using the E.M.?
Bugscope Teamresearch is the vast majority of what we do here. bugscope is a side-project. we're part of the University of Illinois and we have geology, nanotechnology, entomology, mechanical engineering, the list goes on
- Bugscope Teamwe get a lot of people wanting to use the SEM and TEM for their research projects
- Guestso cool
- Bugscope TeamWe train boatloads of grad students to do their own projects using the microscope. Cathy does all of the TEM and SEM trainings.
- Bugscope Teamthe beckman institute is a world class facility in science and technology.
- Bugscope Teamscot helps me out when he can of course ^.^
- Bugscope Teamlots of nano-tech, nano-fabrication though
- Bugscope TeamThe grad students are in research groups we work with for years and years -- we see generations of students go through the lab.
- Guest)
- Studenthow much does it cost to run the EM for an hour
- Bugscope Teamyou should try to focus here
- Bugscope Team$50/hour for people in the University. Industry is about $100, and with our help the industry rate is around $180.
- 1:33 pm
- Bugscope TeamThe service contract with the manufacturer of this 'scope is about $35,000 per year.
- Bugscope TeamCathy and I need to know when we can fix the 'scope and when we must call for service.
- Bugscope TeamWe do as much as we can here.
- Bugscope Teamhey jill, try focus here
- Bugscope Teamthat's looking better! keep going
- Bugscope TeamGetting better -- that's the right direction.
- GuestCould we do it again next year?
Bugscope Teamsure, just fill out another application
- Bugscope TeamOh yeah.
- Bugscope TeamYou bet -- we will be glad to have you back next year.
- Bugscope Teambetter better better
- Guest0
- Bugscope Teameyeball
- Bugscope Teamof the jerusalem cricket you sent us
- Bugscope Teamwe're seeing all the facets of the compound eye as that repeating pattern
- Bugscope Teamthis is the eye of the Jerusalem cricket -- a superlarge dude for the microscope.
- Bugscope Teamflies are more fun to look at because their eyes are much more complex since they rely on them more
- 1:38 pm
- GuestHow many lenses would be on this eye?
Bugscope Teamit varies widely from insect to insect. ants live most of their lives underground and often have fewer than a hundred. flying insects rely on their eyes much more and often have what looks like thousands
- Bugscope Teamcheck out the other scales -- the other preset
- Bugscope Teamthere are at least a thousand, I bet, between both eyes.
- Bugscope Teami'd feel bad for the guy that went and counted them
- Bugscope TeamThat's for some poor grad student to do -- really it's been done.
- Bugscope Teamthe real quesion is does the bug know how many it has
- Bugscope TeamThis is cool.
- Bugscope Teami see in the upper right i think what scott likes
- Bugscope Team96 tears from 96 eyes
- Bugscope Teamor 96 winks
- Bugscope Teamthe scales are analogous to feathers, and they are hard to prepare because they charge up with electrons.
- Bugscope Teamimages of scales are interesting because of the absolutely tiny size of the features. the scale itself is so small that it looks like dust, but it's composed of these amazingly features
- Guestwhats the biggest bug that you ever looked at???
- Bugscope Teamamazingly intricuit and tiny features, rather
- Bugscope Teamwe're at 23,000x right now, btw
- Bugscope TeamI think the patterns we see are at least in part responsible for the colors we see.
- Guest cvg
- Bugscope Teamintricate
- Bugscope Teamthe scale bar in the lower left of the image is showing 2 microns, or about 40x smaller than the width of a human hair
- TeacherThis is going very well...the kids love it.what was the name of the website that shows the prep of the specimens?
- Bugscope Team2 microns is the length of a bacterium
- Bugscope Teamone of the rod-shaped bacteria
- Bugscope Teamhttp://virtual.itg.uiuc.edu/training/
- Bugscope Teamscroll down a ways
- Bugscope Teamlots of videos
- Bugscope Teamhttp://virtual.itg.uiuc.edu/training/esem-prep.mov is the precise link to that movie
- Guestbye bye all you admins. :-(
- 1:43 pm
- Bugscope Teamcya!
- Guestbye nice talkin to ya. peace
- Bugscope Teamalso check out the virtual microscope if you like.
- Bugscope Teamlaterz
- Bugscope Teambye i hope you guys had fun
- Guestthax so much! bye.
- Guestbyebye see you
- Bugscope Teamglad to have you on
- TeacherOur time is up. Thank you for a great experience. Let me know about the feedback you will need.
- Guestbi
- Bugscope TeamSure thing, we'll send an email
- Bugscope Teamthanks jill, great job!
- Bugscope Teamben, is that you controllin'?
- Bugscope Teamthats me
- Bugscope Teamill stop
- Bugscope Teamno prob
- Bugscope Teamben, do you want to try controlling w/ the javascript video?
- Bugscope Teamyes. my beta IE on my PC doesn't work though...i get the video but can't control. i'll go find another PC...hold on
- Bugscope Teami'll boot windoze down here to try too
- 1:49 pm
- Bugscope Teamoh, it's not your fault. it's my side. let me check quick
- Bugscope Teamanyone there?
- Bugscope Teami see no chat, nothing
- Bugscope Teamwe are here
- Bugscope Teamyou don't see this?
- Bugscope Teami see that, but see no other chat
- Bugscope Teamand it took forever for the left stuff to show up
- Bugscope Teamthis is my 3rd pc...bugscope crashed the others
- Bugscope Team(crashed IE on the others)
- Bugscope Teamhmm, takes a copule refreshes down here
- Bugscope Teamdrive and c2c don't work here
- Bugscope Teamso, I think there's a z-index issue with the controls using the javascript video
- Bugscope TeamI need to check my CSS later and figure it out
- Bugscope Teamok
- Bugscope Teami'm going to stop typing on umair's totally disgusting sticky keyboard and go wash my hands
- Bugscope Teamoh wait
- Bugscope Teamlol
- Bugscope Teamehh
- Bugscope Teamhe uses hair prioduct
- Bugscope TeamOK, I'm loggin' off
- 9:50 am
