Superlens Crafters
Lens allows optical microscopy down to 60 nanometers

Results: A team from the University of California, Berkeley, has devised a silver "superlens" that could increase the resolution of light microscopy by about a factor of six. The lens doesn't diffract light like conventional glass lenses. Instead, it uses evanescent waves, which are produced when light hits a lens at such an angle that it bounces off instead of passing through. Evanescent waves emerge on the other side of the lens and add optical information to normal "propagating" light waves, but they decay very quickly over short distances. By capturing and amplifying these weak waves, the researchers obtained images with 60-nanometer resolution.

Why it Matters: High-resolution imaging methods such as electron microscopy can't image living tissue. Light microscopy can. Its resolution, however, is limited by the wavelength of the light used. And 400 nanometers is the shortest wavelength that doesn't damage tissue. Evanescent waves allow researchers to get around this limitation. The technique could eventually allow researchers to watch, in real time, biological processes such as protein interactions in samples of living tissue -- events that can now be studied only indirectly.