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Under the Microscope: an account of setting up a new public engagement initiative
Luke Norman is the Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Nanoscale and Microscale Research Centre, University of Nottingham, UK. He translates materials characterisation research and capabilities into public and commercial engagement resources. He is also the curator of Under the Microscope, a public engagement initiative aimed at displaying to the public the wonders of electron microscopy.
When I first came up with the idea for a microscopy based public engagement initiative, I didn’t think I would end up in a wildlife park in Birmingham reaching over a fence trying to obtain a porcupine quill. The things we do for science!
My role as a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Nanoscale and Microscale Research Centre (nmRC) is to translate the techniques we use at the centre (including electron microscopy) and the science we carry out into engagement resources for a range of different audiences. This activity, enabled through UKRI’s Higher Education Innovation Funding aims to increase the awareness and visibility of our research, build trust and credibility with the wider community and crucially inspire the next generation of scientists. One of the ways I have done this is through our Under the Microscope public engagement initiative which asks a simple question to its audience “what would you like to see imaged using microscopy?”.
Back in January 2023, I was thinking of new ways I could engage the public with microscopy-based techniques, in particular electron microscopy that is certainly not encountered in day-to-day life for most. At this point, the nmRC was early on in its public engagement journey and we were imaging items related to popular social media marketing days such as Ice Cream for Breakfast Day (first Saturday in February in case you were wondering). However, critical to successful knowledge exchange and public engagement are openness, transparency and interactivity with your audience. We therefore decided to take the plunge and hand over the keys of the nmRC (metaphorically of course) to the public and ask them what they would like to see imaged each month at the centre, and with that, Under the Microscope was born. Electron microscopy is a perfect fit for public engagement activities as it is a very visual technique; you don’t have to understand the detailed optics of the column to appreciate the beauty of the images it can produce of the world around us.
At the time of writing this article, Under the Microscope has just completed its first year and we’ve imaged 12 items suggested to us by the public. The initiative hasn’t been without its challenges as with the setting up of all new things. However, there are three aspects of running Under the Microscope that I love the most. The first is getting to read the suggestions from the public and more specifically their reasons why they chose that object. We delivered Under the Microscope live as part of a science festival with local children and one of the items that was suggested by them was bread, and their reason… “I eat a lot of it”, this still makes me smile to this day. The second element is obtaining the items themselves – for the second month I came up with a shortlist of the items that had been suggested and put them to a vote with our team. The outright winner being a porcupine quill, which I since found out was selected because the team wanted to see how I would obtain one (Nottingham isn’t particularly known for wild porcupines). Hence why I subsequently ended up on a mission at a wildlife park in Birmingham! The third is that I’ve started to become a bit of an expert in very specific areas. For example , the 12th suggestion that was chosen was snails (don’t worry, no snails ended up in an electron microscope) and so I contacted the University’s resident snail aficionado Prof. Angus Davison (of 'Jeremy the lefthanded snail' fame) to see what we could image, and he suggested love darts because it was February and would tie in nicely with Valentine’s day. Love darts are what snails use to aid with mating, but a quirky thing about them is that they produce them during the first mating and then use them during the second courtship routine. This fairly random knowledge then ended up being very useful when it was brought to my attention that on an episode of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, specifically on a segment called pup quiz where a celebrity (in this case Arnold Schwarzenegger) has to answer questions to win puppies to cuddle, there was a question asking which animals produce love darts.
So what else has been suggested and imaged so far?
We launched the initiative with a local TV channel called NottsTV who asked if they could suggest the first idea which was a budgie feather belonging to one of their reporters. This didn’t end up being the last feather we would image as our seventh suggestion was a feather from a peregrine falcon (the fastest animal in the world). This was the first suggestion where the suggestor provided us with the object directly, as it turned out that they had a feather originating from a nest in Belper, Derbyshire. For the SEM imaging, we captured 150 images and stitched them together showcasing how to obtain a larger field of view image.
As mentioned earlier, we don’t always get lucky having objects sent to us, as was the case of the porcupine quill which still remains the hardest object to have found so far. However, we did find out that if you cut one in half and image the cross section, it has support segments (similar presentation to that of a lemon cut in half). This design from nature is to offer lightweight but strong defensive quills that in the wild will ward against potential predators without encumbering the porcupine!
We have ventured into the realms of food science by selecting shortbread biscuits in May 2023. Again this came at a time when our team were picking the winning suggestion from a shortlist and was chosen I think more because it meant biscuits would inevitably be brought into the centre. Pollen has always been a favourite item of mine to image as each variety is completely unique in structure (Daffodil pollen, for example, resembles honeycomb on its outer structure). Pine pollen was suggested to us because the grains bear a resemblance to Mickey Mouse with two large circular “ears” and a semi-circular face.
A lot of our suggestions from the public are of common everyday items, such as paper with ink or mushrooms, as they want to learn more about what’s around them. Sometimes the reasons are more to do with a fascination of a more specialist topic such as lizard scales which were suggested because “they are shiny and kind of cool”. For this idea, I knew there was only one person who could help, Dr Tom Hartman of the School of Life Sciences, as there isn’t much of the natural world that he hasn’t imaged. When I approached him to ask if he had ever imaged lizard scales, he replied that not only had he imaged the toes of a crested gecko, but also he had many more frozen specimens in storage if needed.
For the spooky season (October) we chose spider web and collaborated with another UoN Life Sciences academic, Professor Sara Goodacre, who provided us with some samples from her lab. The most striking element was that some of the thinnest threads imaged were just 100 nm in diameter, demonstrating the nanoscale engineering the spiders adopt to create webs.Admittedly, during this imaging session, myself and the operator Nicola Weston got distracted finding objects collected in the web including a wing and an aphid.
As part of my role, I actively try to engage as many people in electron microscopy as possible. Remarkably, this has included King Charles III who was “fascinated” about our use of focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy as part of a Coronation celebration project (the letter from Buckingham Place is pride of place in our display cabinet!). However, a big target on my wish list is the actor Timothy Chalamet, and so for December we imaged popping candy chocolate to coincide with the release of the film Wonka. Cracks had formed on the candy exterior surface upon release of the carbon dioxide which gives the sweet its characteristic crackling sound. Sadly despite tagging Timothy in the post on X, I still await his verdict on those images…
Up to this point, we had been primarily imaging objects using SEM but some suggestions align far better with transmission electron microscopy (TEM), such as the suggestion of car exhaust particles. Carbon emissions is a hot topic currently and the person who submitted the idea wanted to know more about what was being produced by their vehicle. TEM was perfect for this, as the soot particles could be deposited onto a TEM grid and imaged. This revealed their onion-like layered structure as well as the range of different sizes.
But what does the future hold for Under the Microscope? Well, we aim to keep the initiative going as long as the public remains interested in electron microscopy and we will look to obtain more ambitious objects that have been suggested. We also have plans to take this directly into schools, where the students will be able to suggest ideas and we image them live to them in the classroom. If you would like to submit an idea for us to image, please visit our website www.nottingham.ac.uk/nmrc to find out more.
