May The Force Be With You

MRI is a highly versatile non-invasive medical imaging technique. It’s commonly thought of as a method of detecting anatomical abnormalities in radiological diagnosis. However, it’s also a fantastic technique for studying dynamic changes in physiology and metabolism in both health and disease. MRI is very useful for experimental medicine studies, aiming to better understand and characterize disease and to investigate the mechanisms of different treatments. This talk will explain briefly how MRI works and explain how it can be used across of range of conditions from neurology to obstetrics.

In the late 1970s a scientist called Arthur Ashkin working at Bell laboratories in America demonstrated that a beam of light could exert a force. We now know that a tightly focused laser beam can generate a force on the pico-Newton scale capable of holding and manipulating individual cells. This technique is known as optical trapping or laser tweezers and has proven to be an immensely powerful tool in biology, used to understanding processes that happen on the micron-scale.

Dashboard and Headlamps: Both lights so not much difference. Yet swap them to drive at night there would be issues. The road would be dark, and you would be blinded! So not much difference matters. Once we know what our biology contains there are two problems: Where what is and what the what it is doing—Structure and Function.
A toy microscope can magnify a moving sample >400x. But how do we use them? What can they see? Is what they see true? Can we use the word ‘see’? I will go through these issues for light and electron microscopy and how we can combine them to get Structure and Function.