Amazing faces of invisible people and other unusual photographs of the microworld (20 photos)

The world's first images of the microscopic world were taken and drawn onto paper by hand by the great scientific revolutionary Robert Hooke and published in 1665 in his magnificent book Micrographia.

Everyone who has ever held this work in their hands, was surprised by the pictures with their own eyes, will never forget them, because they are beautiful. At least because Hooke was the first person to describe the cellular structure of living nature and saw the crystalline splendor of snowflakes. And that he was not only a great biologist, but also an excellent, diligent artist with a “camera eye.”

This is where all the micro-charm began:

The first photographic images of the invisible world were micrographs obtained using daguerreotype in 1840. And in 1863, the whole planet was horrified and made to think about hygiene by the following portrait of a human friend - a flea.

And the old photographic installations for micrography themselves looked like this:

Today, taking a photo of the microscopic world is as easy as shelling pears; just buy and attach a USB microscope to your computer. Something will work out. And the best, incredibly charming nanolandscapes and nanoportraits are obtained using such expensive devices as a scanning atomic force microscope. The working element in it is a needle, sharpened to atomic sizes. The magnification of an atomic microscope reaches one million.

Modern nanographs are capable of displacing great works of art from the walls of museums and private collections. Here, for example, is an image of an almost flawless gold crystal obtained by Violetta Navara at the University of Madrid, which recently acquired an atomic microscope, a feast for us and the scientists.

And this is a proton membrane in which cerium oxide particles are introduced into the nickel crystal lattice. The engines of intergalactic starships cannot operate without such membranes.

A sample of polymer coated with porous silicone looks like a forest near the banks of a Siberian (or Canadian?) river to a scientist from Texas.

Silicon oxide nanofibers look like sunflower flowers. Fertilizers for flowering were growth catalysts based on gold and the fusible metal gallium. The diameter of the golden fibers is only 10 nanometers, and the length is several microns.

The inclusions of magnetized iron (micro) on the surface of a magnesium arsenate crystal are similar to stained glass (macro).

This log, chewed by a stoned beaver, is nothing more than the split end of a human hair. This picture should be used in advertising shampoos and hairdressing services; you can also draw a beaver for intrigue.

And here’s what the tip of a very sharp tungsten needle looks like under a powerful microscope:

There are various nanodevices in the world that perform mechanical movement. They are assembled from microscopic gears, sliders and levers. Such machines can be controlled by such delicate creatures as ticks.

Real, not office, plankton can be found in a drop of sea water if you put it on the eye of a needle and photograph it under 20x magnification.

And here’s what the pollen of red slumber, a perennial plant that grows in damp places of Russian nature and blooms all summer to the delight of photographers, looks like under a microscope. So it’s not far from perfection, right?

Do you know what will happen if you sprinkle salt and pepper on the table at the same time? There will be a lot of rocks that germs won't want to climb on. And no one will quarrel with anyone.

Looking for good bass guitar strings? They usually look something like this:

Toilet paper - like this:

And so - a six-day human embryo. Ardent opponents of abortion consider him a full-fledged living being, subject to the commandments:

A month later the little man becomes like this, and now I feel sorry for him.