Through the Electronic Looking Glass

THROUGH THE electronic LOOKING GLASS AMONG THE MOST FASCINATING pictures you’ll ever see in 3-D are those produced by scanning electron microscopes, or "SEMs"! These instruments, which use electrons rather than light to create images, are capable of magnification and resolution far beyond that possible with optical (or "light") microscopes, and the images they produce give you entirely different, amazing, and often very surprising views of even the most ordinary everyday objects. The addition of the third dimension to SEM views makes them even more spectacular, since you can actually see the spatial relationships in the images that you could only imagine in "flat" 2-D images. Bugs and other scary things are included.  With many years of experience and a fine artist’s eye, Dee Breger, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, has used the SEM (her electronic "looking glass") to create stereo pairs of a wide variety of subjects, from the most common household item