Scientists at Bangor and Oxford universities have achieved a world first: using spider-silk as a superlens to increase the microscope's potential. Extending the limit of classical microscope's resolution has been the 'El Dorado' or 'Holy Grail' of microscopy for over a century. Physical laws of light make it impossible to view objects smaller than 200 nm - the smallest size of bacteria, using a normal microscope alone.

Nanobeads are all around us - and are, some might argue, used too frequently in everything from sun-screen to white paint, but a ground-breaking application is revealing hidden worlds. A paper in Science Advances provides proof of a concept, using solid 3D superlenses to break through the scale of things previously visible through a microscope.