Corner View 'Miniature Worlds'

This week's CV idea 'Miniature Worlds' comes from Cate at Tribeca Yummy Mummy.

My Huzz's professional background is in materials science - a specialist in electron microscopy and the atomic characterisation of materials (yeah, that goes over my head too!).  When I placed my photographic request to him for this week's CV (I was thinking fun situations with my son's Lego guys, soldiers etc), he immediately came back with something that is one of the most miniature things in our world that you can take an image of.  Truely our world in miniature.

A Scanning Electron Microscope image of an ant holding a mircochip.

As all us bloggers will know, microchips are found most importantly in our laptops and telephones - there can be 100s of them inside various technologies.  Typically, microchips are manufactured on a base material of silicon - derived from sand.

A Transmission Electron Microscope image,

inside the silicon from which the microchip is made.

To put some sense of scale to the above image. A typical human hair varies in width (dependant on your native background) of between 50,000 and 100,000 nanometers.  If you were to measure between 5 of the dots on this image, this would be 1 nanometer.  Now that is miniature!

The dots that you see in this image are basically stacks of atoms, kind of like the view you would get if you placed a number of table tennis balls on top of each other and looked down on them.

These dots, atomic stacks, are the most miniature thing that you can currently image (if you have an electron microscope to hand that is).

Science lesson over for today.  Why not pop over to Spain Daily to find some more 'Miniature Worlds'.