About Us We started out as just two guys back in the uninformed days of the internet in 1995. We were shortly joined by a few discerning people interested in the world we live in, and the way it seems influenced by processes in the very small world at the microscopic scale. It is many years on from that humble start but this site has grown beyond all expectations. We are still two guys today, supported by a small band of extraordinary people who share their personal investigations - without financial reward - for the good of all. A lot of work is done to ensure 'enthusiast microscopy' effectively competes against corporates and internet dominance by parties better funded, but commercially aimed. Our pioneering work over the years, supported by our unpaid contributors, and our visitors, has triggered recognition of 'enthusiast microscopy' by web sites that previously failed to see this pursuit existed. Now the web is alive with resources catering for the enthusiast. You and us live in a world increasingly looking at profit margins, earnings, and investment, or the hard stuff we all have to live with and tolerate in a 'modern world'? So, here you can relax and feel certain that we are not doing it for corporate gain. We are doing it because it should be done. If you can afford to help a little financially, great! If not - no matter. We will probably get by and keep it all going, but the Internet increasingly becomes the new market of the world. A small donation, just $5.00, or a small voluntary subscription, helps us to break from our lives of bills and "must-do's" and keep this growing. Like to know more about us?

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First visit to us? If this is your first visit to us, it can be daunting to suddenly be presented with so much work all in one place. If you came via a web engine, maybe you are looking for information on a specific topic or subject. Try our top menu search to see if this helps!  If you would like a general idea of the usefulness and massive input into the suite of pages and contributions 'cap-badged' as Mic-UK... why not try Micscape Magazine: this is the strongest area of the site with massive commitment and input by knowledgable people prepared to share their learning with you. Ezines and sections Micscape Magazine -  for traditional perspectives and information on Microscopy -  is published monthly on the 13th. The editorial responsibility rests with Dave Walker, in the UK and co-founder of Micscape.  The Ezine takes most of our time to produce and constantly requires the editor's unpaid attention and input. Many contributors from many walks of life contribute to these publications freely, and so help to make the magazine successful.  Contributions from you for the magazine is encouraged and welcomed. Without them... there would be no magazine! Please forward your queries and comments to the editor   Other sections These are numerous but  - in the main - are less frequently updated. You may wish to consider each - one at a time - in subsequent visits to see which one might prove most useful to your needs. Contributions to other sections are welcome. All contributions remain the copyright of the contributor and we will do our best to ensure your work, licensed to us for publication, is not used elsewhere without your explicit permission.

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Book-marking our site It's a good idea to bookmark us straight away. Once you have done this, you will know that you can always find us again. If you have a major interest in microscopy, it is well worth establishing a regular visit to our site as it is updated constantly. Please try and bookmark our front page which is www.microscopy-uk.org.uk

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Getting human help There is someone here at the end of your emailed enquiries and we try to help as much as possible. We receive many emails looking for help. We often find though that a few people contact us for information already available on our site. We welcome your enquiry but it helps us if you have had a quick look around to see if your question can be answered by information maintained on the site first.  If you are not certain who to direct your email to, please send it here to the Coordinator.

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Contributing You may be inspired to contribute something yourself to our web site or magazine. This is highly encouraged and we will help you to achieve this. You keep copyright to all your work, we simply help you get it read by a world audience. Enquiries about contributing material for any of our sections should go to the Coordinator. Enquiries about contributing material solely for Micscape Magazine should go to the Editor.

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Players, Plug-ins, Helpers There are many extra add-ons you can obtain - most free - to enhance your browser and the way it delivers content to you from the internet. There are movie players, music and sound players, graphic players, and loads more. We have some sections and content where you will need to have some extra capability for your browser.  If you visit one of our pages that requires the use of a plug-in or helper, it is worth downloading the appropriate software as it will help you when you visit other sites. Some of the extra software required can be located by visiting our tools page.  Movies Videos and movies are increasingly being put on to Youtube. Great. The more microscopy videos on the net, the better for all. But, sadly, youtube is now a major commercial business owned by Google and these wonderful movies are often displaying advertising content layered over the video. So we started our very own youtube clone where you can upload your videos without advertising appearing on them. Just click on 'videos' in the top menu. AVI's & Mpegs See above. Wave files, Midi, MP3, Vivo, Real Wave file are sound files that can be listened to on PCs. They can be quite large files so we often convert them into formats that require less file size and download time. MP3 format offers good quality sound. We tend to use Vivo format sound files as their file-size is very small but the sound quality is still very good. Vivo is also used to produce lower quality movie files which download very fast. You need a free vivo player to listen to them. Please see our tools page for obtaining a player. An alternative to Vivo is the Realvideo or Realaudio format. We use these too. You need the Realplayer to see or hear these files. Please visit our tools page to find out how to obtain these players. Midi files are the smallest sound files you will find. Most modern browsers will play these without a plug-in.

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Donations We do everything for no pay. Our contributors, the real people who make this site and Micscape Magazine possible, allow us to publish their articles without receiving payment for their work. We pay the costs of running the site and these costs are ever-rising. We wish to keep all material freely available. To do this, we need your help by way of small donations. Please click here to consider this further! If you have problems opening a subscription, a small donation now and then will help.

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Explorer Browser We prove and test our pages using Microsoft Explorer Browser. Most pages should work on Explorer version 4.0 and above, and people using Explorer 3.0 should still be able to view a huge majority of the pages. Recent versions of the browser can be obtained from the Microsoft Corporation Web Site.

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Netscape Browsers We no longer test our pages with the Netscape Browser but everything should be accessible without any major problems with the more recent versions of this Browser. Some of the more fancy stuff (we don't use much of that) incorporating javascript coding may present Netscape Browsers with a few problems.

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Other Browsers We do not test our site to see how it works in other browsers. Opera is a good browser and we did run some one-off tests to see how it works with our pages. It worked okay except with the few sophisticated pages we carry which employ the use of the JAVA protocols. It appears there are several invocations of the JAVA language.

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Plug-ins Plug-ins are independent modules which are add ons to your browser. There are many but the current Microsoft Explorer Browser includes most of the commonly used plug-ins in its default package. If you are using an older version of a browser, you may need to obtain a plug-in to view some of our videos where they are presented in a streaming format.

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Java Java is a sophisticated programming language which provides enhanced effects and interactivity to web pages. The downside is that its use can add severely to the loading time required for each page. We don't use it.

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Flash Flash is the defacto programming methodology for providing enhanced media-rich pages on the web. Its slow! It makes page access very slow. We would like to use it, and may well do when bandwidth increases more commonly for everyone. Meanwhile, we might have the odd page or two which includes Flash encoding but 99.9% of our stuff is Flash-free.

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Javascript Javascript (not to be confused with Java) is a widely used programming methodology used to manage and control web navigation and to enhance normal html pages. It works well although there are separate versions for Explorer and Netscape Browsers. We use Microsoft's Javascript and Explorer users should be okay accessing all our pages with browsers version 3.0 and above.

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Cookies Cookies are small files created on your PC by the web site you visit. They are often used to automatically store password and access information on your PC to help you invisibly on you return to the web site. We don't use them!

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Linking to us A lot of web sites link to our site or to individual articles on our site. If you wish to link to our main index at www.microscopy-uk.net/index.html you do not need to ask so long as you make it clear that the link on your page is either to Micscape Magazine or Microscopy-UK. If you wish to link to one of the articles or pages on our site, you are welcome to if you host a non profit making site like our own but please ask permission if it is a commercial site. Where permission is given, clearly state on your page that it's an external resource. If your site uses frames ensure a new window is opened for links to us. See also permissions below! How do you know what the URL is of the page you wish to link to? We run a complex page and menu system. When reading any page or article, you can find its exact URL by clicking on the 'Link URL' hypertext link at the top of the screen to the right. This will open up a box from which you can cut and paste the specified URL.

Permissions We like to be asked if you wish to use anything from this site. The authors of any articles or pages should be contacted directly (via the email address in any given page) if you wish to use their work in any way. If you are commercial - we would be uncomfortable with you using any material from here without obtaining permissions first. Invariably we grant permissions of use for most of the work here, often for free, sometimes for a small donation. Asking us is is a good policy and far better than the consequences of us finding you are using material from here without permission. We do check!

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Non-profit We are a not-for-profit site. We receive some sponsorship from Brunel Microscopes who run the online shop. We are dependent upon sponsorship and donations from you to keep the site running. We deliberately keep the site as ad-free as possible and limit any advertising to our main index page or menu system, with the exception that we have included a single link in our Micscape pages to help readers access our online shop for trusted resources. We believe our visitors wish to see the content and not be constantly irritated by advertising and requests to click here or there to see this commodity or that. Refreshing isn't it?!

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Commercialism Maybe read the item above about non-profit! Note on commercial queries or those regarding our sponsor's shop: Please contact our sponsors Brunel Microscopes directly, the Microscopy-UK site is an educational one with no commercial aspects.

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Advertising with us With typically a million page accesses a month, our site is a prime target for commercial enterprises wishing to tap into our 250,000 visitors plus. With a small exception, we ensure they don't bother you through our pages. If a company wishes to advertise with us, they should contact the coordinator. Advertising is accepted on our front page only and a donation will be requested. Such advertising will be considered but permission may be refused if the advertising is considered inappropriate or simply not desired by us for any reason.

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Mirrored Sites A and B We only run site A now as it proved too complex keeping a mirror on another server. Help Index | Home Saving pages for offline use Microsoft Explorer: The 'File / Save As' command although theoretically able to cater for frames doesn't seem to work for our site. If saving pages is a feature you'd like to use regularly we suggest the following. Mozilla Firefox: A free, small, downloadable browser which is highly regarded and secure. This browser's 'File Save As' does work successfully with our site. Download Micscape zipped issue: we no longer maintain zipped versions of micscape as it proved very time-consuming! Printing: The site menu frame can hinder proper printing of articles. Here's a few hints. To PRINT OUT A PAGE FROM OUR SITE: click on URL in the top menu. When you het a browser message, answer 'allow'. Click on the URL button again and a box opens with the address of the content page you viewing. You can cut and paste the address into a new browser window and print the page out. Licencing Your Images Some of our contributors receive emails asking if their images can be licenced for book publication and other media. The same happens for their videos. i have sold the odd video sample to the BBC and received about £300 for 10 secs of video. We receive emails from some of you asking how much to charge. This is up to you really. If an image is to go inside a book, say for a large print run (10,000 or more) and your image is half a page or a whole page, I would suggest a fee of around £120.00. The critical thing is not to lose your copyrigt of your image or video. The way to do this is to ensure your licencing agreement includes something like the following clause: Image (video) licenced to [name of publisher] non-exclusive world rights to publish in [book or media program] for 1 print run (or 1 program showing) of [number of published books] for a fee of [amount]. Any reprints (or rerun programs - t.v etc.) will require additional licences. You may find companies wanting your video for T.V. find this unacceptable so you can change the licence (if you wish) to give unlimited number pf program runs... but then you should ask for a bit more money!

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FAQ I am unable to subscribe. What do I do? A few visitorsemail to say when they click on subscribe, it does not work. We are perplexed by this. Anyway, ifyou can donate now and then instead, that will help. Thanks. A publisher/writer wants to publish my images. What do I do? If the publication is internal, like a college thing and not for profit, you may wish to allow unpaid publishing. If the request is from a book publisher or professional writer, please don't give your images away for nothing. Instead, ask for a licence fee. See here. Your menu at the top is too small to see properly. What do I do? It used to be bigger but we are trying to present the menu bar more subtly. If you click on the magnifier icon, you wil see a larger menu. Why are the swap and videos utilities slow to load? We have content spread over several servers and IPs. Utilities like the videos and the swap shot are very processor intensive. If a lot of people are using them at the same time as you, then you may find the initial loading a bit slow. Be patient, these are powerful and useful resources. I have phoned you a few times, why don't you reply? I used to (mol) but we get so many marketing calls I tend to let the answering machine take the call. As we have a contact page here, I don't really understand why anyone rings instead of emailing. A lot of people ring up to say, "I just bought this microscope at a bootsale, how much is worth?". Which really annoys me as these people obviously have no real interest in Microscopy and are phoning me to give them free advice on how to make profit from their purchase. Often people have rang me with questions which are answered quickly by googling! My video fails to load in your videos area. Why? The most likely answer is that your video is largish, the site is a bit slow, and maybe you moved the browser to another page before the upload completed. When you upload a video, it is also converted into a .flv (flash video file) too so a lot is going on. If repeated attempts fail, you might wish trying to convert it to another format and attempt loading that. We don't have youtube finances to make it slicker so please be understaning of that. I have tried to email an author of one of your pages, but the email fails. What do I do? Contributors come and go. They change email addresses or simply do not include them as it increases the risk of spam. Try googling their name along with an associated key word, like desmids - if they wrote about Desmid. If that doesn't work, contact us to see if we have an email address for them. How do I submit articles to Micscape? Contact the editor via our contacts page and he will help you get started. Well done! I am unable to print out your pages. What do I do? Our pages are held in frames which makes printing difficult but we have included a menu item called URL to ebable you to print our pages easily. See here! How many of you manage this site? akes Although many people contribute articles, only 2 people manage most of the site (David Walker and me - Mol Smith) and 1 other person for a large and extremely valuable resource -(Wim van Egmond from Holland). Why don't you allow more advertising? What you mean like all the other sites carrying GOOGLE ads? We have received help and support from Brunel Microscopes in the UK since the beginning, so we carry ads only for them. This is very nominal advertising and they provide us with additional help and resources in return. We do not want contributors material plastered with ads, there is enough of that plagiung our lives already. Refreshing, isn't it? Do you receive wages? No. Why isn't your site more dynamic? The simpler the coding on the site, the easier it is to manage. It looks a bit old-fashioned but it works and carries thousands of pages of content. With only 2 of us here, it would be almost impossible to make it snazzier and keep it working well across a range of browsers.

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All material is © Microscopy-UK and their contributors and associates 1995 - present.