Microscopes have historically imaged organisms on a flat surface. You basically take some cells, put them under a coverslip, and image them. But cells in the wild don’t live like this; they move in 3D. The Gravity Machine from Manu Prakash’s lab is such a brilliant way to solve this problem. It came out a few years ago, in 2020, but it really emphasizes this idea that discoveries are easier to make when we design our instruments in a way suited to observing them. This is basically a microscope that can record (marine) organisms moving in three dimensions. It looks like a car tire, with a water-filled channel running around its rim. You put your organism in the water and place the microscope on the side. As the organism swims up or down, the wheel rotates to compensate, keeping it in view. The video below was taken with this Gravity Machine. It shows a single cell, Volvox aureus, swimming upwards. As it swims, the researchers flash a light, and you can see the cell rapidly shoot upwards. This is something we could never record with a normal microscope! What else in biology are we missing because of poor measurement tools? (Apparently, for example, there are marine organisms that float up or down an entire kilometer as they are dividing.) I’ve seen 3D images of plant roots, but only after all the bacteria attached to them have been killed off. What if we could image the gut microbiome or an entire cube of dirt across space and time, without killing the organisms first?