Through the Lens: Beyond the Imaginable

TheScienceShed is a science podcast run by Dr Nick Evans, who’s a biologist at the University of Southampton, and Dr Steven Lee, another academic and physical chemist from the University of Cambridge. Together they travel through the murky undergrowth of scientific endeavour, trying to amuse each other along the way.
Steve and Nick have a great time podcasting together and hope to engage the public in science a bit more by doing so.

There is a fundamental limit to how small we can see objects under a microscope. When that limit is reached, images become blurred. Because of that, current microscopes cannot show what happens at the nanoscale, inside bacteria for example. What do I mean by nanoscale? Well, just imagine that if the diameter of a marble was one nanometre, then the diameter of the Earth would be approximately one metre.
Yes, the nanoscale is small! This is where super-resolution microscopy comes in to help revealing small biological structures, possibly explaining working mechanisms left untold until now.

The existence of lipid rafts in the cellular plasma membrane remains mysterious. It is well understood that the plasma membrane is not just an envelope for protecting the cellular interior, but a multitude of important cellular functions are orchestrated by the heterogeneous organization of membrane-embedded molecules, featuring a variety of distinct subcompartments, often generally denoted lipid rafts. This generality has caused much confusion, and we here highlight the background and how modern technology are able to yield new insights, i.e. do lipid rafts really exist and do they matter?