Invention of a new kind of microscope inspired by a particular telescope and the scallop's eye

Amazing stuff! What will we be able to discover with this new microscope?

"... the scallop’s eye design resembled a kind of telescope invented nearly 100 years ago called the Schmidt telescope. The Kepler Space Telescope, which orbits Earth, uses a similar curved mirror design to magnify far-away light from exoplanets. ... that by shrinking the mirror, using lasers for light, and filling the space between the mirror and the detector with liquid to minimize light scattering, the design could be adapted to fit inside a microscope. ...
built a prototype based on those specs. Light enters from the top, passes through a curved plate that corrects for the mirror’s curvature, then bounces off a mirror to hit a sample and magnify it. The curved mirror can magnify the image much like a lens, ... It allows researchers to look at samples suspended in any kind of liquid, simplifying the process. .. the design could be particularly useful for researchers who study organs or even entire organisms, such as mice or embryos, that have been made completely transparent by artificially removing their pigment. ..."

From the abstract:

"Imaging large, cleared samples requires microscope objectives that combine a large field of view (FOV) with a long working distance (WD) and a high numerical aperture (NA). Ideally, such objectives should be compatible with a wide range of immersion media, which is challenging to achieve with conventional lens-based objective designs. Here we introduce the multi-immersion ‘Schmidt objective’ consisting of a spherical mirror and an aspherical correction plate as a solution to this problem. We demonstrate that a multi-photon variant of the Schmidt objective is compatible with all homogeneous immersion media and achieves an NA of 1.08 at a refractive index of 1.56, 1.1-mm FOV and 11-mm WD. We highlight its versatility by imaging cleared samples in various media ranging from air and water to benzyl alcohol/benzyl benzoate, dibenzyl ether and ethyl cinnamate and by imaging of neuronal activity in larval zebrafish in vivo. In principle, the concept can be extended to any imaging modality, including wide-field, confocal and light-sheet microscopy."

Inspired by the sea and the sky, a biologist invents a new kind of microscope | Science | AAAS The device can achieve clear images using samples suspended in any kind of liquid

Reflective multi-immersion microscope objectives inspired by the Schmidt telescope (open access)

Fig. 1: Concept of the multi-immersion Schmidt objective