Summary: Human vision has always been limited, but through centuries of innovation—from early lenses to today’s most advanced microscopes and telescopes—we’ve extended our sight to both the atomic level and to distant galaxies. Instruments like cryo-electron microscopes and space telescopes have amplified our ability to explore the microscopic and cosmic, transformed our capacity for discovery.

Limitations in our sense of vision have driven us to invent and share new instruments of knowledge discovery. The unaided human eye can see a 100 micrometer (μm) object, about half the diameter of a human hair. Naked-eye stargazers can see a sufficiently bright celestial object up to 2.5 million light-years away. This was the extent of our vision until around 1600, when glassmakers in the Netherlands started to experiment with shaping lenses. The results of their experiments have given us the astonishing power to see millions and even billions of times more.

Microscopes

Zacharias Janssen developed the first microscope in 1595. It could magnify objects 3 to 10 times their size. By the 1800s, magnification had improved to 1,000 times. A significant advancement occurred in 1931 with the use of the transmission electron microscope (TEM), which could magnify up to 1 million times. TEMs range in cost from $100,000 to $10 million or more, depending on their features. The most advanced TEM, located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, costs $27 million. This microscope can achieve a resolution of half the width of a hydrogen atom, making it the most powerful microscope in existence.

The scanning electron microscope (SEM), developed in 1937, had lower magnification (approximately 100,000 times) but could produce three-dimensional images. From the 1980s to the present, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has increased magnification up to 5 million times; scanning probe microscopes—using methods such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)—have increased magnification up to about 100 million times.

However, magnification is only marginally meaningful unless paired with resolution, since empty magnification yields no useful details. For true improvement, resolution is critical.

The light microscopes of the 1800s could see 500 times more, at 0.2 μm. In the 1930s, electron microscopes improved resolution to 0.05 nanometers (nm), an increase to 2 million times magnification. Today’s cryo-EM/atomic microscopes have a resolution of 0.001 nm, which is 100 million times that of the unaided human eye.

Telescopes

Hans Lippershey is credited as the inventor of the first telescope, created in 1608. His instrument could magnify 3 times. After learning of the innovation the following year, Galileo built his own version and increased magnification to 30 times, yielding a 10 times improvement in one year. Telescopes have continued to improve in light-gathering power and resolution. In the 1700s and 1800s, innovations by Isaac Newton and others improved both of these factors. The Herschel reflecting telescope, produced in 1789, had 20 times better resolution and over 1,000 times better light-gathering power than the Galileo design. The Great Dorpat Refractor, built by Joseph Fraunhofer and completed in 1824, was the first modern, achromatic, refracting telescope. While the Herschel had a larger aperture, the Dorpat had much higher-quality lenses, yielding sharper and more measurable images.

The Hooker telescope was built in 1917 and offered 3 times resolution and 105 times improvement in light-gathering power over the Dorpat. The next major advancement was the creation of the Hubble telescope in 1990. As a space-based telescope 340 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, it was 10 times sharper and more stable than its Earth-based counterparts. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021, has a much larger mirror (6.5 meter vs. 2.4 meter), giving it vastly greater light-gathering power, and it is optimized for the infrared spectrum.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is scheduled to go online in 2030. Compared to the JWST, the ELT is 6 times larger, giving it dramatically higher light-gathering power for ground-based observations. The ELT will achieve 14 times sharper resolution (0.005 arcsec vs. JWST’s 0.07 arcsec), especially when using adaptive optics. The JWST retains the edge in overall precision due to its space-based stability and optimized infrared systems, but the ELT will surpass it in spectroscopy, exoplanet imaging, and capturing the detailed structures of distant galaxies.

From the unaided human eye to the ELT, angular resolution will be 12,000 times better and light-gathering power will be 31 million times better. This gives the ELT a combined observational capability approximately 372.5 billion times greater than the unaided human eye. This staggering difference reflects advances in both resolution and light-gathering power, enabling us to study the universe in ways that were unimaginable just a few centuries ago.

Microscopes and telescopes are instruments of knowledge discovery. There has never been a better time to be alive if you want to zoom in and look at an individual 0.05 nm atom or zoom out and look at the edge of the universe, some 46.5 billion light-years away from Earth.

“Genetic engineering startup Colossal Biosciences has added the South Island giant moa — a powerful, long-necked species that stood 10 feet (3 meters) tall and may have kicked in self-defense — to a fast-expanding list of animals it wants to resurrect by genetically modifying their closest living relatives.

The company stirred widespread excitement, as well as controversy, when it announced the birth of what it described as three dire wolf pups in April. Colossal scientists said they had resurrected the canine predator last seen 10,000 years ago by using ancient DNA, cloning and gene-editing technology to alter the genetic make-up of the gray wolf, in a process the company calls de-extinction. Similar efforts to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, are also underway. 

To restore the moa, Colossal Biosciences announced Tuesday it would collaborate with New Zealand’s Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, an institution based at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, that was founded to support the Ngāi Tahu, the main Māori tribe of the southern region of New Zealand.

The project would initially involve recovering and analyzing ancient DNA from nine moa species to understand how the giant moa (Dinornis robustus) differed from living and extinct relatives in order to decode its unique genetic makeup, according to a company statement.”

From CNN.

“Teeth from an elderly man who lived around the time that the earliest pyramids were built have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt.

The remains are 4,800 to 4,500 years old, overlapping with a period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom or the Age of Pyramids. They harbour signs of ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as of people from the Middle East, researchers report today in Nature.”

From Nature.

“From 1 July, researchers funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be required to make their scientific papers available to read for free as soon as they are published in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s according to the agency’s latest public-access policy, aimed at making federally funded research accessible to taxpayers.”

“In a laboratory outside Cambridge sits a remarkable ‘biological computer’. Its 200,000 human brain cells, grown in the lab, lie on silicon circuitry that communicates their synchronised electrical activity on a screen to the outside world.

The CL1 device, about the size of two shoe boxes, was developed by Australian start-up Cortical Labs with the UK’s bit.bio, in a bid to create ‘synthetic biological intelligence’ — a new form of computing that could offer opportunities beyond conventional electronics and other developing technologies such as quantum…

Early applications of CL1 are in neuroscience and pharmaceutical research, discovering how different chemicals and drug candidates affect the brain cells’ information processing.”

From Nature.