For Immediate Release Contact: Greg Borzo (312) 665-7100 gborzo@fieldmuseum.org Promising new technique Up until now, it has not been possible to see movement inside living insects. This problem has been solved by using a synchrotron, which generates one of the strongest x-ray beams in the world, to obtain x-ray videos of living, breathing insects. “This is the first time anyone has applied this technology to study living insects,” says co-author Wah-Keat Lee, a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory. A synchrotron is a large, circular, particle accelerator. The one at Argonne, called the Advanced Photon Source, has a circumference of about one kilometer and accelerates electrons almost to the speed of light. Doing this generates radiation, including x-rays that are more than one billion times as intense as conventional x-ray source. With synchrotron radiation, structures that once baffled researchers can now be analyzed precisely. About two years ago, using a phase-enhanced imaging technique, Lee placed a dead ant in the path of the x-ray beam and was amazed to see incredibly detailed images of the ant’s internal organs. He searched the Internet for a biologist who might be interested, and he and Field Museum scientists have been working together ever since. One aspect of the technique that makes the videos so revealing is edge enhancement, which highlights the edges of some internal organs. This effect is due to the special properties of the x-ray beams at synchrotron facilities, such as the Advanced Photon Source. “It’s almost as if parts of the anatomy have been outlined in pencil, like a drawing in a coloring book,” Lee explains. This work opens up the possibility of developing a powerful new technique for studying how living animals function, he adds. Continue