More microscope pictures

We have a picture accompanying today's story about a new, extremely-small microscope being developed at Caltech, which really shows just how small it is. It is, however, lodged in the fingers of the scientist who worked on it, and this picture gives a closer view.

This prototype, which as you can see is about the size of a dime, would be lodged inside an iPod-like device to allow researchers to see digital magnified pictures of whatever liquid sample they load into the device.

The liquid sample is loaded into a small chamber on the bottom of the device picture above and must be charged with electrical current to allow it to flow under the sensor that will create the picture of it.