The Hidden Beauty Of The Microscopic World

The videographer behind the Journey to the Microcosmos YouTube channel (386K subscribers) James Weiss presents a beginner's guide to the extremely small and utterly strange life that surrounds us. James Weiss was feeling lost in life when he first discovered his interest in the microscopic world. With his own microscope and a little homespun ingenuity, he began to capture thousands of hours of stunning footage of the creatures that he found around him: the local pond, at the beach, in a puddle. What he found astounded him, and it became his mission to reveal the beauty of the microcosmos to everyone. In his fun and accessible style, interspersed with otherworldly photographs, James presents this beginner's guide to the invisible life that surrounds us. From the most simple single-celled life, to complex micro-animals, James reveals the secrets of a world that we rarely consider. Navigating the births, feasts, tragedies, idiosyncracies and deaths of a cast of tiny characters, learn how these lifeforms work and what lessons they can teach us about our own existence. Mixing scientific detail with thoughtful musings that betray the fascination at the heart of his topic, James has created a way of looking at microorganisms in an empathetic and engaging style. You'll discover fascinating absurdities: that a cell can be both its own daughter and its own mother. That immortality really does exist, and it comes in the form of a teeny, tentacled medusa. And that seeing the wonder of nature from a new perspective can literally save your life.

This volume brings together images produced through the very latest techniques in microphotography. Most of the 203 full colour photographs have been taken using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), allowing us to see our world as never before. Each image is a close-up that reveals remarkable forms, shapes and colours.

"A celebration of the hidden beauty & variety of microscopic imagery."--Back cover.

"The appreciation of the imagery produced by disease is bittersweet; we simultaneously experience the beauty of the natural world and the pain of those living with these disease processes. Ultimately, this series of images from more than sixty medical science professionals will leave the viewer with an understanding and appreciation of visual beauty inherent within the field."--Jacket.

Explore the miracles of the microscopic world. Find out all about the unique and beautiful kingdoms of life at a microscopic scale and how every organism meets the challenges of survival no matter its size. The perfect book for people who enjoy photography, nature and biology. Inside the pages of this exciting educational nature book, you’ll find: • Microscopic life-forms (often neglected), and their life-forms in extreme close-ups, revealing details such as nerve cells and hair follicles. • Artworks support the beautiful images, providing a deeper insight into structure and function and building a picture of how living organisms work at a microscopic level. • Comprehensive coverage of the natural world, including all the main groups of living things. • Explores overlooked groups that have a huge role in the natural world: insects, which make up 80% of the world’s animal species, and bacteria — of which there are more in a human mouth than there are people in the world. • The book is organized according to the main functions of life: movement, reproduction, energy and feeding, sensing the surroundings, defense, etc. • Optional 80-page section containing a catalog of the major kingdoms of life. The beauty of nature under a microscope Explore the inhabitants of an invisible world in incredible detail with this book, which contains macro photography and spectacular microscope imagery. You'll have so much information about the hidden world of intricate structures beyond the naked eye. From the tiniest spiders and insects to even microscopic creatures like bacteria and viruses, this book contains it all! See the beauty of a pollen grain, a butterfly egg, the spore of a fungus and a human’s nerve cell in extreme close up. The amazing imagery in Micro Life contains focus-stacked macro photographs and micrographs (microscope images), including scanning electron micrographs. Illustrations in this book explain the science — from the workings of an insect’s eye to how a plant “breathes” through its leaves. Micro Life is an unexpectedly breathtaking look at the natural world. Find out how life works and how organisms solve the fundamental problems of movement, reproduction, energy, communication and defense. This book belongs on the bookshelves of schools, libraries and homes for those interested in photography, nature or biology.

Fascinating introduction to the world of single-celled organisms recounts the feeding, reproductive, and defensive strategies employed by an array of curious creatures: amoeba, paramecium, suctorian, hydra, others. Easy-to-understand language, 37 illustrations.

The hidden elegance in everyday objects and physical mechanisms, from crumpled paper to sandcastles. Hidden Wonders focuses on the objects that populate our everyday life--crumpled paper, woven fabric, a sand pile--but looks at them with a physicist's eye, revealing a hidden elegance in mundane physical mechanisms. In six chapters--Builders, Creating Shapes, Building with Threads, From Sand to Glass, Matter in Motion, and Fractures--the authors present brief stories, set in locales ranging from the Eiffel Tower to a sandcastle, that illustrate the little wonders hidden in the ordinary. A simple experiment that readers can perform at home concludes each story. More than 200 illustrations bring the stories to life.

Serves as a guide to be used for the identification of microorganisms and provides information about microlife forms and how they affect other life forms, including human.