Microscopes serve an important role in the field of forensics as well as science. In this case, the police look at evidence found at the scene of the crime and look at them under the forensic microscope to search for clues. Aside from fingerprints, things like fabric and hair can help in identifying the culprit as well. With the help of the forensic microscope, it is possible to make sure if the hair found in the crime scene is dyed or bleached, or if it’s just hair from someone’s pet. With this simple microscope activity, the student and child can become junior detectives as well understand better the structure of human hair as seen under the lens of a compound light microscope.
For this microscope activity, the student or child would need hair from family members, friends and even pets; a plastic bag for each hair sample; blank microscope slides and covers; water; an eyedropper; pen and paper (this is to label which sample comes from where); a pair of tweezers and some tissue paper.

First, take all the hair samples you have collected from people you know—you can take strands of hair from a brush or pluck hair out if they would let you—and place them in plastic bags labelled with their names. Then take one strand from each bag and cut about a fourth of an inch (about 0.6 cm) for the sample that you would mount on a blank microscope slide.

Hair is better viewed under a student microscope using a wet mount, so put a drop of water on your slide with your eyedropper before placing the hair sample on it. Gently place the slide cover on top, making sure not to trap air bubbles inside. Label each slide with the person’s name whom the hair sample belongs to.

Try looking at each slide under the optical microscope, using both the high and low power objectives. If you want to compare each hair sample, you could try writing down notes of what you have found out through the microscope lens and even sketch pictures of the hair sample as you have seen them magnified.

Now look closely at your hair sample mounted on the microscope stage. Hair is made up of three parts: the cuticle, which is the scaly, outer layer; the cortex, which is the keratin layer that strengthens every strand of hair and lastly, the medulla which is the inner core that contains the pigments for the person’s hair color. Less pigment is produced when one gets old, which is why older people have greying to white hair. On the other hand, hair thickness is also affected by the color of one’s hair. For example, blond hair is thinner than brown hair, but thicker than red hair. Hair color can also be changed by dyeing. If you have dyed hair samples, try to see if there are undyed parts near the root of the hair strand. Compare this to the part of the hair which has been dyed. Some hair dyes color only the surface of the hair shafts while others dye the color inside the hair shafts as well, which results to a permanent dye.

If you have taken hair sample from animals, you could see under the microscope that the size of the hair layers mentioned above are quite different from humans. In the case of most animals, the medulla is thicker compared to the cortex. Sheep, on the other hand, have no medulla at all.Looking at hair under a student microscope is not only a fun detective activity, but also educational one in relation to the student or child learning about the layers of the hair and its general structure.

The word ‘cell’ was coined by the English scientist, Robert Hooke, when he looked at a piece of cork under a microscope and saw the room-like partitions inside. Viewing a cork sample through the lens of your compound light microscope would be an interesting student activity to be able to understand cells better. Cork comes from the bark of an evergreen oak tree that grows only in the Mediterranean area. Sheets of the oak bark is taken from the tree, seasoned and boiled to become cork, which is especially useful as stopper to bottles and the like. With this simple microscope activity, the student or child can see the pores in the cork called lenticels and which way they are pointing. To start with, the student would need a cork from a bottle (cork can also be bought in bookstores and chemistry shops), a box cutter, an eyedropper, water, a blank microscope slide, a slide cover, a pair of tweezers, some tissue paper and petroleum jelly.

First, cut very thin slices from the cork that you have using your box cutter. Ask an adult to help you with this. Looking at thicker objects under the student microscope would result to a blurred image, since the compound light microscope allows only a two-dimensional view of the sample mounted on the microscope slide. Because of this, you have to cut the cork as thinly as you can to be able to see it better under the microscope lens.

Next, prepare a wet mount of your cork sample. Wet mounts are used so that there would be no extra refractions of the light coming from the microscope lamp, making the image being viewed clearer. To prepare a wet mount of your cork sample, place a drop of water on your blank microscope slide using an eyedropper. Then place the cork sample in the drop of water using the tweezers. Cover this gently with the slide cover, making sure that there will be no air bubbles trapped inside. If the water dries up while you’re still looking at it, see which side of the slide cover looks like it’s still wet and put some more water from that side using the eyedropper. You can also preserve the wet mount for a longer period of time by spreading a thin film of petroleum jelly around the slide cover. This is so you can observe your cork sample for the length of a few days without having to do another wet mount.

Now that you have your sample, you can look at the cork under the compound light microscope starting with a low power-objective. Do you see the small pockets of air in the cork that are surrounded by thin walls? Those are what Robert Hooke saw that reminded him of the cells in a monastery, which led to him calling those pockets cells. There is only air inside those pockets because all the living matter from the bark where cork is made from has already died.

Because there is only air inside, the cork stays buoyant over water or any other liquid. If used as a stopper for bottles, cork is cut at a slant that would keep the wine from leaking out through the holes inside.If you want to see living cells, looking at an onion sample under the compound microscope would be an interesting activity as well.