Synchrotron
April 2, 2008
I have driven past the synchrotron next to Monash University many times and have wondered what marvelous atom-smashing experiments are going on there. I have been half expecting to hear that someone has successfully collided matter and anti-matter and the whole thing has vanished in a puff of sub-atomic smoke. What I hadn’t imagined is the sort of thing which has been reported from ESRF, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble.
Malvina Lak and team from the University of Rennes and Paul Tafforeau of ESRF have been using the synchrotron to examine lumps of amber to reveal the fossils of 100 million year old insects and other tiny living things and then used micro-tomography to produce 3 dimensional models. Wonderful to look at and wonderful to consider that the familiar looking organisms we are seeing lived such a long time ago.
