hey everyone it's ariel waldman from tested i'm about to share with you my favorite things from
2020. it has been an interesting year to say the very least it was an interesting year for
me personally though because i started the year off by giving a ted talk and my ted talk was all
about my antarctic expedition i spent five weeks in antarctica searching and looking for life
underneath the ice a lot of people when they think about antarctica they think of a place that's
barren and lifeless except for a few penguins but antarctica is actually full of life and that's
what my ted talk is all about and so my favorite things that i wanted to share with all of you this
year are all related around looking at invisible life everywhere not just in antarctica but in
your own backyard so the very first favorite thing that i want to share with you is this
now we're used to sharing our favorite new things but this is actually a pretty old thing
this is an american optical microscope series 160 from the 1960s these microscopes were actually
really used a lot in classrooms in the 1960s and what's cool about them is that because
they were so widely used there's a ton of them available online for purchase you
can get them professionally refurbished from microscope vendors or on ebay definitely look
for professionally refurbished models so that you know it's been taken care of over the years
but the reason why i like this is because they typically run between 100 to 300 and that really
makes it a really good first microscope or it's a really easy lightweight microscope that you can
take between home and work if you want to be geeky like that um they're just a lot of fun and what
i like about them is that they just have all the basic necessities that you need for a really good
microscope and it's really good quality so it love basics include the fact that it's got an iris
styrofoam diaphragm to control the amount of light or contrast that you see in the microscope it also
has a removable eyepiece which is really important because in a previous favorite things video that i
did for tested one of my favorite things was a lab cam and a lab cam is a thing that allows you to
attach your iphone to a microscope and so actually by using an ifixit kit which was also a previous
favorite thing of mine you can actually remove the eyepiece here in the microscope and place the lab
cam into it and by doing that then you can take photos and videos and you transform this 1960s
microscope into a really modern microscope which is just fun so a lot of basics about
it are that you know a lot of the ones that i've seen online have between two to four objectives
the objectives that i personally have on this one are 4 10 and 43 which is more than enough to see
a lot of really awesome microbes another important thing to note if you're looking for them online is
a lot of them have mechanical stages or stage clips the stage is the platform that holds the
slide if you get a mechanical stage it essentially means that you have these little dials on the side
that allow you to really finely tune the movement of the slide if you don't really care about that
that's okay you can just get the stage clip version a lot of times those ones are cheaper
and then you just move the slide around with your hands what i really love about microscopes
in general and why i think you should definitely consider getting a first microscope if you haven't
is because it's not only look for looking at really cool science stuff under the scope but
it's also for creating artwork a lot of victorian era people created artwork using microscopes you
can create artwork using microscopes they're not just for science they're also for art
so the next tool that's really important that's one of my favorite things is something that adam
savage had in one of his videos he did a video about favorite tools of his calipers
and one of those was around a 20 caliper and this is really important because i am not a model maker
i'm not usually measuring things to build things very often but when you get an old microscope you
quickly realize that maybe you want to soup it up you want to get some replacement parts
you want to replace the bulb you want to replace different parts of it and a lot of times you just
need very precise measurements to know what sorts of parts to replace it with this is definitely
advanced level in terms of you know leveling up in microscopy but you'll probably get there once you
get addicted to having a microscope so having a 20 caliper on hand is actually really useful
and so the final thing that is my favorite thing for 2020 which god knows we need favorite things
from 2020 because there's not a whole lot to pick from it's been a really tough year but one of my
favorite things that will hopefully delight you at the end of the year is this book life at the edge
of sight this is a really fantastic book because i never anticipated being a microscopist or being
into using microscopes a lot it was something that sort of came about when i was really obsessed with
going to antarctica but as i got into microscopy and as i got into looking at different microbes
underneath a microscope i really started looking at the world around me differently
every day when i go out of my apartment i walk around and i see moss in sidewalk cracks or in
parks and when i do that i smile because i realize that i'm surrounded by a whole zoo of tardigrades
tardigrades you can find them in antarctica they're famous for surviving the vacuum of space
but they also live all around us i actually did a video earlier this year for tested
on how to find harder grades in your own backyard or in sidewalk cracks and they're just i don't
know they're delightful things they're little gummy bears with claws i like to say
and they're so much fun but it's really fun to change your perspective and change your
perspective of the world that you walk by every day and so life at the edge of sight is a really
fantastic book that not only shows you a bunch of photos of microbes from slime molds to nemo
toads but it also showcases the context at which those microbes live in all the different weird
places in cities and on sidewalks where you see different colored stuff and in that stuff is a
whole world of amazing tiny animals tiny plants and tiny weird creatures and so life at the edge
of sight is a really fantastic book for getting into that and for really looking at the world
through a different lens so that's all my favorite things for 2020 i hope to see you all again soon