Question: How does the microscope work, is there a particular thing that is especially fascinating to look at under the microscope?

Alexander Lorenz answered on 3 Jun 2021:

I personally like to look at cell nuclei and chromosomes under the microscope, but there is a lot of really fascinating microscopy done looking at cells and tissues (I really like to look at fluorescence microscopic images of the cytoskeleton, those are the structural parts of the cell which give it its shape; these are often very pretty). There are two main types of microscopy, light microscopy (which works with visible and infrared light) and electron microscopy (which uses electrons as a light source). If you want more details on how they work have a look at wikipedia. Light microscopes have undergone a lot of change in the last 10 years or so, and have been massively improved. Now we can make more discoveries with new types of light microscopy (some of them use lasers nowadays and can give us a better resolution than traditional light microscopes). We have also made great progress with looking at live cells over a prolonged period of time with light microscopes. Electron microscopes can give us very detailed images about cells and their content, but it’s only black and white images and we can’t look at live cells (that’s just how these microscopes work). Having said that, electron microscopy pictures can also be very beautiful.