It's always refreshing to read about two old techniques being combined in a novel way to yield new information. Osamu Ohtani and Yuko Ohtani recently accomplished this. Louis Ranvier probably introduced the use of silver nitrate as a histology stain over a century ago. Whereas Ranvier is best known for describing nodes along the nerve fiber, he also demonstrated that silver nitrate stained endothelial cells, allowing their borders to be clearly visualized. In the 1970's, Takuro Murakami first used the scanning electron microscope (SEM) to examine corrosion casts of the vasculature. Much of what we currently know about the microarchitecture of blood vessels has been discovered using this technique.