Continuing progress on the class project to track productivity of my solar energy panels and day length:
Microscopes repaired!
Both microscopes in the elementary classroom broke last month. I finally tracked down replacement lighting (plus I jiggered with the eyepiece alignment, an area of mechanical engineering where I was definitely in over my head, but I escaped having done no harm and perhaps slight improvement).
The new light source is a big improvement: as you can see the colors are much more true than the old one that burned out.
There is an industrial process called Shot Peen, or, as I like to call it, "world's tiniest hammers". In order to work-harden the metal (of something you are manufacturing), it would be good to hammer it all over. But instead of using hammers, they use a huge quantity of tiny steel balls, shot through a sort of fire hose (something like sandblasting). These pelt the metal and effectively hammer the surface. I managed to acquire some of these, used, and brought them in.
In the microscope you can see the effect that the impact had on the steel balls.
In one group, there was a sudden mass desire to look at blood in the microscope. A diabetic student who has a glucose test kit kindly offered a drop of blood. If you do this at home, dilute the blood with salt water - - that way you can see the individual cells instead of just seeing a swirling mass of red.
The cells tumble slowly around so you can see some of them edge-on, or tilted, or face-on just looking like circles. It gives you a nice sense of the actual shape of the cells.
