Wednesday 10 March 2010

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'.

31 comments:

  1. hey victoria! great idea! the ant holding the microchip has put the whole thing in perspective for me... we must go pincho hopping one day:)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ooooh My Lord, unbelievable. Honestly, now I want more Science lessons! Lucky you to have a hubby that can explain all these interesting things to you. I would keep asking and asking and asking about his work....I think...No..I really would! ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. WOW, that is amazing!! Sooooo tiny.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Microscopic images is what one of my boys suggested, and while he was trying to get an image of snow for me, the light in the microscope blew out!

    ReplyDelete
  5. this was a fantastic science lesson :) seriously. very interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  6. so cool! i love how that turned out.

    ReplyDelete
  7. that ant with the micro chip pic is insane! i love that!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Very cool! And miniature indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  9. That picture could inspire some kind of science fiction movie: "Planet of the Ants"!lol
    Amazing pictures!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Wow!
    A great idea! I love the photo and the information you shared. Very different indeed!
    :)
    Andrea

    ReplyDelete
  11. ha! ant chip attack. well cool that pic. where's suze?
    does he take all your pics, then?

    ReplyDelete
  12. Wow! You'd be a great science teacher! Very good lesson, I understand almost all of it:)! x LZ

    ReplyDelete
  13. Wow this is realy a mini world. Unfortunately it is to big for my understanding!! hihi
    Thanks for sharing..and remind me of all the big small things!

    ReplyDelete
  14. That is cool! (I'm a nerd, too.)

    You are so good at picture posts!

    ReplyDelete
  15. very clever take on the theme!
    nicola
    http://whichname.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  16. Wow. And I thought everyone would come up with Legoland:)

    This is beyond awesome. Thank you so much for showing us the world that if not, we wouldn't have seen.

    ReplyDelete
  17. oh this was very interesting and an awesome take on this weeks CV.
    And the image of the ant and the microchip - well that's perspective!

    ReplyDelete
  18. W O W
    really great job!!!
    what a idea...

    ReplyDelete
  19. That's great photo! I may have guessed ant but I would never have guessed microchip.....they are amazingly small.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Hey, thanks for your comment! Yes, I am thinking to re-start doing miniatures. Pretty soon there will be posts about!!

    ReplyDelete
  21. Fascinating ! Thanks for this interesting an amazing CV !

    ReplyDelete
  22. The photo of the ant is brilliant.

    ReplyDelete
  23. very interesting!!! you must have the most educational conversations with your husband; that's amazing!

    ReplyDelete
  24. Thanks C Vers for all you lovely comments. That ant is pretty cool eh!

    la Ninja - Yep Huzz does take nearly all my pics. He has a great eye and I just love his photos. He's way to busy to do his own photographic blog, and I want to share his photos with the world and it seems to be working out with the stuff I blog about.

    Michelle - conversations in our house a hilarious when it comes to Huzz's work - I kind of look a bit blank! We are always laughing together and thats the best.

    Jane - whenever we organise a trip to Spain - you'll be the first to know.

    ReplyDelete
  25. ohhh! that is really tiny miniature!!!

    ReplyDelete
  26. AMAZING! Mind blowing really if you think about it! Fantastic idea!

    ReplyDelete
  27. oh that sort of gives me the creeps that ant. I do love miniature things though - have you seen that artist William Wigan who paints/sculpts on the top of pins?

    I have no idea really of what your husband does but it sounds fascinating.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for stopping by.

Related Posts with Thumbnails