On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote: Yeah, but I think all three are different, not that I claim to know the difference. http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/dic/index.html http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/confocal/reflectedconfocalintro.html http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/polarized/polarizedintro.html The reason I linked to the www.microscopyu.com article on confocal microscopy was because they mention 'Interference reflection microscopy'. To give a flavour of the different techniques and modes and instruments (I always get terribly confused when trying to work out what is meant by all these different terms), here are a few quotes: "Both the laser scanning confocal microscope (LSCM) and the Nipkow spinning disk microscope can be utilized in confocal reflection mode." "A traditional biological application of widefield reflected light imaging is for observing the interactions between cells growing in tissue culture on glass coverslips using a technique termed interference reflection microscopy." "Presented in Figure 2 are interference reflection digital images captured with confocal reflection microscopy techniques." "Recently, using a related technique, improved images of filopodia were collected from PC12 cells (rat pheochromocytoma) by growing the cells on a more reflecting substrate. The technique, termed backscatter-enhanced reflection confocal microscopy, produces images that resemble those collected using traditional differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopy." I gave up at that point... (actually, the site does explain things in a rather accessible way, so let that put anyone off). One of the applications of PLM is analysing rock samples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrographic_microscope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_mineralogy Those articles contain PLM images and talk about the technique, so I was right to think that there is something somewhere about this. Not quite sure why the redirect AGK pointed out (which was moderately valid) was deleted three years ago, but the editor is still here so it is possible to ask. I guess one reason would be that there is more to PLM that just the geological applications. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l