Herve Hugonnet

Shine a flashlight through rough glass, and the wall lights up with a speckled pattern of bright and dark dots. Once dismissed as useless noise, this pattern now serves as the key to reconstructing 3D images. In the new system, light from an object passes through a specially designed plate with known irregularities.

Light passing through a stained cell loses some of its strength, like a flashlight beam cutting through a glass of tea. The denser the color, the more light is absorbed. But until now, a microscope could only show a flat shadow of this process, not its volume.