I thought I would post something unusual today. I took this picture with a scanning electron microscope at a university in California. It is the eye and the base of the antenna of an ant magnified 100 times. Notice the ball and socket joint just like we have in our shoulders and hip joints. I rented time on the machine, and I was trained to use it. This is not like a biology microscope we used in 8th-grade science. It consists of a control panel with dozens of buttons and knobs, a vacuum chamber, and a built-in camera. Once the specimen is coated in a very thin layer of gold (in a vacuum chamber filled with argon gas, gold vaporizes), an electron beam strikes the ant and forms an image on a monitor. I added the color in Photoshop because all SEM images are black and white. One of the unique characteristics of this kind of imaging is the amazing amount of depth of field at great magnifications.
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