All posts tagged: Blew

The world’s first fully 3D-printed microscope blew up in 2025

The world’s first fully 3D-printed microscope blew up in 2025

Published by skeptic

The 3D-printed microscope Dr Liam M. Rooney/University of Strathclyde At the beginning of 2025, a preprint of a paper about a new microscope caused an awful lot of excitement among researchers. It was the world’s first fully 3D-printed microscope, made in only a few hours and for a fraction of the typical cost. Liam Rooney at the University of Glasgow in the UK, who worked on the project, says that after New Scientist reported on the microscope, people reached out from all over the world, from biomedical researchers to community groups and even film-makers. “Community reception was incredible,” he says. The work has now also been published in the Journal of Microscopy. For the body of the microscope, his team used a design from OpenFlexure, which is a resource for 3D-printing scientific instruments that anyone can access. They also used a store-bought camera and a light source, while the control for all the microscope’s parts came from a Raspberry Pi computer. The real breakthrough, however, was that the team 3D-printed the microscope’s lens out of …

‘Three sheets to the wind’: how everyday phrases blew in from the sea | Language

‘Three sheets to the wind’: how everyday phrases blew in from the sea | Language

Published by Jenni Sidey

Some everyday expressions have an obvious nautical origin such as “all at sea” and “an even keel”. But plenty of others have slipped into the language unnoticed, including a number derived from how sailors talked about the wind. Surprisingly, “overbearing” was originally a nautical term, meaning having an advantage over another ship by carrying more canvas safely and so being able to sail faster. The expression came to be used metaphorically to describe an approaching storm or anything else that could not be outrun. Similarly to “bear down” on something was to approach forcefully with the wind behind. “Veering”, from the French “virer”, meaning to turn, was first applied to the change in direction of the wind. Specifically, it means a movement clockwise. A wind that shifts anticlockwise, say from north to west, is “backing” rather than veering. “By and large” originally referred to a ship alternately sailing as close to the wind as possible, known as sailing “by the wind”, and sailing in the direction the wind is blowing in. The expression came to …