Imaging of bee honey sugar crystals by second-harmonic generation microscopy.

Bee honey is an exceptionally nutritious food with unique chemical and mineral contents. This report introduces the use of the second-harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy for imaging honey sugar crystals' morphology as an alternative for its authentication process. The crystals and their boundaries are clearly observed with SHG compared with bright-field microscopy, where the liquid honey avoids the visualization of a sharp image.

Micrometric size measurement of biological samples using a simple and non-invasive transmission interferometric set up.

An interferometer with a minimum of optical hardware is employed to measure invasiveness the size of biological samples. Nowadays, there are several techniques in microscopy that render high quality resolved images. For instance, consider optical microscopy that has been around for over a century and has since developed in different configurations such as: bright and dark field, phase contrast, confocal, polarized, and so on.