World's most powerful optical microscope: Microscope could 'solve the cause of viruses'

World's most powerful optical microscope: Microscope could 'solve the cause of viruses'
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team have created a microscope which shatters the record for the smallest object the eye can see, beating the diffraction limit of light.

Previously, the standard optical microscope can only see items around one micrometre -- 0.001 millimetres -- clearly.

But now, by combining an optical microscope with a transparent microsphere, dubbed the 'microsphere nanoscope', the Manchester researchers can see 20 times smaller -- 50 nanometres ((5 x 10-8m) -- under normal lights. This is beyond the theoretical limit of optical microscopy.