LED microscopes outshine white light.

We're always telling you that the most exciting advances arise when unrelated disciplines intersect, often by chance. When a biologist, a metallurgist and a mathematician walk into a bar, it's not always a joke; sometimes, it's magic.

We've also shown you how fluorescent tagging has become an essential tool in microbiology. Making a molecule glow when it undergoes a reaction cuts the time it takes to conduct all sorts of studies.

Now, Zeiss is replacing the bright white lights in microscopes with LEDs. The Light Emitting Diodes are available in a variety of colors, from UV to dark red, that can be matched to the glow of living things under the microscope. This helps make extremely high contrast images. It means that we can see reactions that were just too weak to be detected under white light. Moreover, Zeiss claims the light is Infinitely tunable for wavelength and intensity.

You don't need to turn a knob to switch colors; the entire process is opto-electronic. Of course, as we pointed out in our earlier piece, a big advantage of LEDs is that they generate almost no heat. In the microbiology world, this is a big deal, because heat affects chemical and biological processes. Pretty cool.

Look for our video on LiveScience, about what Zeiss calls "rapidly developing LED technology".