Microscopes

Microscopes are a science invention created in the 17th century. They allow scientists to look at objects really really closely, which led to the discovery of cells in living cells. At science we have been looking at microscopes so we could hopefully see some cells in mostly plants. The microscope consists of around 10 major parts; the eye-piece lens, the neck, the stage clip, coarse focus knob, fine focus knob, base, switch, light source, stage and the objective lens. On the ones we used, we had a mirror attached instead of the light source and a separate light source. To set it up we plugged in the lamp thing and made it shine directly onto the mirror and had the mirror positioned at an angle of which it was shining directly under the stage. Our objective was to see the cells in a plant.

Equipment:

• Iodine, tweezers, coverslip, specimen (leaf sample) , slide

Method:

1. Place your specimen in the middle of a clean slide. Ensure that the specimen is laying flat and not folded over on itself.
2. Add 2-3 drops of the stain solution. Plane cells are commonly stained with iodine, where as animal sells are commonly stained with methylene blue. Both of these solutions stain the nucleus of each cell (and your fingers and clothes so be careful).
3. holding a cover slip by it's edges in your left hand, manoeuvre it so that the bottom edge of the cover slip makes contact with both the slide and the edge of the stain solution. With your right hand, support the top of the edge of the cover slip with a pair of tweezers,
4. Gently lower the cover slip with the tweezers ensuring that no air bubbles are trapped under the cover slip.
5. Place your slide on the microscope stage and examine it under low-power magnification.

When we tried to do with with both a leaf sample and an animal sample, we were unsuccessful. We weren't able to see anything cool down it, nothing more than really zoomed in dust that looked like air bubbles I guess and an unknown shape like a worm.

A plant cell has a cell that takes the shape of a more boxed shape or a fixed shape and an animal cell has an unfixed shape. Both have a cell membrane, cytoplasm and nucleus and only a plant cell has a large vacuole, a cell wall and a chloroplast.

Cells in general were first discovered with a microscope by the scientific Robert Hooke and looked like cellular or rooms that monks lived in.