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Dazzling Miniatures: View Highlights from BioScapes Photo Contest

Small worlds writ large under the microscope

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Stinkbug eggs:
thumb: Stinkbug eggs:

Stinkbug eggs:

Amateur photographer Haris S. Antonopoulos found these eggs on top of a mountain near Athens, Greece. He took a series of images of the 1.2-millimeter-diameter eggs and combined them with photo-editing software....[More]

Hoverfly leg:
thumb: Hoverfly leg:

Hoverfly leg:

A section of the leg of a female hoverfly, stretching several hundred microns across, bears two pulvilli, adhesive structures that enable the insect to stick to a surface....[More]

Prickly scorpion's tail:
thumb: Prickly scorpion's tail:

Prickly scorpion's tail:

This thin, twisted, five-centimeter-long pod resembles the tail of a scorpion, giving the plant that produced the pod its name. Viktor Sykora of Charles University’s First Faculty of Medicine in Prague does microphotography of plants as a hobby and has published a book on the topic. ...[More]

Slime molds:
thumb: Slime molds:

Slime molds:

Ultraviolet light causes the mushroomlike fruiting bodies of myxomycetes, or slime molds, to luminesce with a ghostly aura. Dalibor Matýsek, a mineralogist at the Technical University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic who images biological objects as a hobby, used “focus stacking,” combining more than 100 scanned images to form a three-dimensional picture of the 4.4-millimeter-tall Arcyria stipata....[More]

Rotifer:
thumb: Rotifer:

Rotifer:

Two lobes of the corona of the rotifer Floscularia ringens , spanning 300 microns, emerge from a protective tube. The cilia at the edge of the corona move in a fast, steady, wavelike motion called a metachronal wave, creating water currents that move food to the rotifer’s mouth....[More]

Immune cell:
thumb: Immune cell:

Immune cell:

A single mast cell has infiltrated the eye surface in response to a perceived invasion by a foreign substance. Mast cells, which contain vesicles of histamine ( red specks ), are among the immune system’s first responders, attracting other immune cells to the site of an infection....[More]

Bay scallop:
thumb: Bay scallop:

Bay scallop:

Kathryn R. Markey has a thing about scallop eyes. So she set about recruiting a spat bay scallop from the Luther H. Blount Shellfish Hatchery at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., to show the rest of the world their “majestic eyes”—the blueberrylike circles at the borders of the shell....[More]

Radiolarian skeleton:
thumb: Radiolarian skeleton:

Radiolarian skeleton:

Radiolaria, single-celled, amoebalike creatures that inhabit all the world’s oceans, sport radially arranged protrusions called axopodia that here resemble buttons....[More]

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3 Comments

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  1. 1. promytius 09:27 AM 11/14/11

    monkeys in rooms typing away madly CAN produce amazing treasures, as we can see. Isn't random selection great to look at? Who's a better artist than Mother Earth?

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  2. 2. Bruce Voigt 10:06 PM 11/21/11

    Wouldn't it be awesome to change the world for the better with just two sheets of rolled up paper!

    LETS DO IT! -- Take one sheet and role it up making a tube (just tiny pieces of tape to hold).
    At the center of the tube start marking small arrows away from you at an angle spiraling to the end (mark that end south.
    Go back to center and in the same direction start marking arrows to the other end (mark that end north.

    Do the same with the other sheet but make it a bit bigger so one will fit inside the other. You have just made two pretend bar magnets!

    Taking the two magnets insert the north pole into the other north pole. Note the arrows are clashing (repelling).
    Now insert the north pole into the south pole and the arrows are melding (attracting). This is where it gets real interesting! Looking at the north pole end, the arrows show the direction of magnetic force to be counter clock wise. Turning it around the south pole shows the arrows or force to be clock wise. Now "what is this" one direction has turned into two directions at the same time! yes but, yes but you say Its just how you look at it Two directions at the same time indeed.

    OK lets bend one around (horse shoe) and look at both ends at the same time. Don't miss any thing here because this is how the world works.
    Note that the forces meld into a figure eight and that is how every thing in this world is held together.

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  3. 3. Bruce Voigt 04:39 AM 11/22/11

    The cell has a nucleus with chips (nuclei) of itself in orbit.

    Horizontally to the nuclei orbit, chips are flung out to produce a pole on each side of the orbit.

    The cell Earth with one orbit, rock with two some minerals and all life with three and a new species (brain) with four.

    By chewing pollen the bee produces a glob of wax. Immediately after the placement, the saliva or water of the glob interacts in repelling the wax away from the glob's nucleus.

    The wax takes on the shape produced from the three nuclei orbits of the water nucleus. What is called evaporation leaves an empty six pole or six sided wax structure.

    What on earth would have ten poles? Ghost, spirit, bigfoot, ufo? hmmmmmmmm
    cbc.ca bruce voigt

    PS -- The Earth has its nucleus nuclei orbiting "equatorially" from West to East. Through centrifugal force nuclei spiral horizontally away from the orbit producing our North (counter clockwise) and South (clock wise) poles.

    The text book diagram showing the Earths Magnetic Field is perhaps "wrong"!

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